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Author
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Topic: Making textures better?
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Robert
Pilot
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posted 10-11- 01:46 PM
   
Will this do anything good to how SDOE performs graphic-wise:The tiffs that are used for texturing of planes are currently in RGB-mode. Most of them are about 200 kB (a normal template).Some planes use one template, others two for texturing the exterior of the plane.
If we instead make these tiffs in Indexed colors instead of RGB they end up at a size of around 70 kB.
My question is; will this help SDOE run smoother? Will textures load faster? Sometimes when you look at an plane for the first time the game freezes for a split second until the textures "unfuzz"(at least for me). Maybe that will work faster with smaller texturesizes?
I have tried this and checked FPS, no change there, which I was hoping...But maybe it helps in some other way?
Visually there is no difference between the RGB-tiff and the Indexed tiff, if someone is wondering. And if you want to alter your template and use colours that are not in there already, you just change it to RGB, make your changes, then change it to Indexed again before saving it. Another question; when a plane appears onscreen, are all the textures in the texture folder for that plane loaded? I´m wondering because right now I have several tiffs in the texture folder for my J21 that are not needed. Will removing them from the folder improve game-performance? Hope someone can answer all my questions.. 
/Robert IP: Logged |
Mighty
General
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posted 10-11- 02:57 PM
When loading textures, we convert them to whatever the card wants. That's what the texture cache is. So it doesn't matter what you start with.We only load textures that are referenced by the plane. If it's not referenced, we don't load it. IP: Logged |
Zurawski
Pilot
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posted 10-11- 03:19 PM
...Mighty,So in the event where a user-made-plane's .sm references textures (even if they don't show on the actual aircraft).. they are arbitrarily loaded all the same? If that is the case I know about 10 planes that are loading textures into memory that are not even used! (my Sabre being included) IP: Logged |
Sv
Pilot
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posted 10-11- 03:48 PM
Great point Zur,My planes all have many texture references that are no longer used. If they are loading, then we better remove these. -Sv IP: Logged |
ArgonV
Pilot
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posted 10-11- 04:22 PM
The Beaufighters are REAL texture hogs. I wish someone would fix this so everytime I hit the Scharhorst with a torpedo, I dont see a large black pixel where the smoke and fire should be.IP: Logged |
Robert
Pilot
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posted 10-11- 04:57 PM
When you say that a texture is referenced what do you mean? That it shows in the texture list in OPS? In the asc.-file? If I for example import a part that has a texture (which only that part uses) and delete that part, is the texture still referenced? IP: Logged |
Zurawski
Pilot
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posted 10-11- 05:21 PM
...Robert,As I'm understanding it ... "yes". IP: Logged |
Nat
Pilot
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posted 10-11- 05:46 PM
What I've been doing with the A10 is simply deleteing the reference in the textures part in OPS, there is still a ref there, but no texture is called, so my understaning is that SDOE wont load anything from a blank ref, if I knew more about asc files etc I could remove them from there, but just deleting the ref in OPS seems to do the trick, maybe this will help you out Zur (and others) with all those damn refs.~Nat~ Also.. Mighty, am I to understand then, that if I built a texture thats 1024*1024 and used that to texture an aircraft, it would make no difference to SDOE since it would be resized down? No bad FPS from big textures? I'm just thinking it would be easier to map a whole aircraft with a single large high detail texture and let SDOE shrink it. IP: Logged |
Bishop
Pilot
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posted 10-12- 01:50 AM
ArgonV,Yes, the beaufighters have MANY unused texture references (part of the learning process). When I tried to delete them using the .ol file and rebuild to .sm I ended up with crashes (in other words I deleted something I needed but didn't know about). Until now, I thought there would be no problem because 90% of the textures aren't used.... I guess I was wrong. Hopefully, this is something I can fix (ahem...during a slow day...ahem) at work. Let me look into it. -Bishop IP: Logged |
wakeup tailgunner
Pilot
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posted 10-12- 03:43 AM
When you delete the texture reference in the .OL file, you have to re-number them. They must run in sequence. You must also, then, change every reference to those teexture numbers to reflect the new structure. It's a tedious job, especially if you have lots of textures (70+ on a B17) and people haven't been doing it simply because of that. Also, if you get it wrong...crash goes OLC! I certainly didn't realise the effect it would have! Time to start cleaning up textures....Only, if Nat's method is just as good, that would be a lot quicker! IP: Logged |
Mighty
General
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posted 10-12- 05:04 PM
Zur, probably. I haven't looked at that code specifically. But if we're told about a texture in the .sm file I'm pretty sure we're going to load it. In general, we assume that if the artist told us about the texture then he probably needs it. We don't go verifying to make sure it's used by any parts.Nat, yes, we'll shrink at 1024x1024 to 256x256. But you'll be losing a lot of detail. It'll almost certainly look worse than if you had just drawn on a 256x256 to begin with. IP: Logged |
Nat
Pilot
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posted 10-12- 06:56 PM
Thanks Mighty, was a thought thoughIP: Logged |
Bishop
Pilot
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posted 10-27- 03:10 AM
After working with ArgonV we have confirmed that Nat's method (replacing the texture reference with a blank space) works well.Since I have difficulty getting OPS to rename textures for me, I used Hippie's tools (OLC and SMD). After using the .html file to zip through all the LODS I was able to identify which textures were being used and which ones were not.(Reference: SV's tutorial on the analysis of a LOD) I then edited the .ol file, replacing the unused textures such as:
./aircraft/Ju88a/textures/ju88a.tif
with:
./ I then bundled everything back up and it worked! ArgonV no longer had the problems he mentioned above with the Beaufighters. -Bishop [This message has been edited by Bishop (edited 10-27-2000).] IP: Logged |
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