compressing skins

[vasco12r]

Hi all

 

Dont know if anyone has talked about this before.. I was modifying a few skins for LO, and found that changing the BMPs to indexed colours instead or RGB makes the image around 3 times smaller file size, and LO reads it without problems. The loss in quality is barely noticeable. A 2048 skin goes from 12Mb to around 4MB (the same as a RGB 1024 skin).

 

In game, its noticeable the image runs smoother when using external views, especially if there is more than one airplane in the image. Its not a huge improvement but its noticeable. I imagine people on lower systems could benefit more from this change.

 

VascoS

[zaelu]

Yup, it is known. Mizzy is fan of this metod. Mizzy is using the "bright" tool from IL-2 series skin making pool.

 

Personaly I like to use more RAM on VGA and sytem :P . I like DDS compresion, is good quality and it makes mipmaps.

[christopher m]

mipmaps ?

 

Zaelu,

 

Could you explain the mipmaps again ?

 

I was wondering for LOMAC:

 

If I need to enable force mipmaps on my nv 6800GT card

 

to bilinier or trilinier ?

 

and what about the trilinier Optimization ? on or off ?

 

and the Anisotropic mip filter optomization ? on or off ?

 

Just questions about LOMAC really other wise I wouldn't bother to much.

 

Regards,

[zaelu]

Here is a nice guide about the settings of a GF6XXX card: http://www.tweakguides.com/NVFORCE_6.html lot of settings explained.

 

The setting "force mipmaps" has two values (if enabled) bacause the mipmaps can be made by two methods: with bilinear and trilinear filtering where trilinear is more complex and has better image quality. The thing is we don't know if Lock On engine lets the videocard build the mipmaps if they are not present in the texture since by default it uses textures with mipmaps (the dds files). It uses some TGA's but I dont think they are for skining things that require LODs and Mipmaps... I think they are used just for HUD, Numbering, etc.

 

 

The optimisations are some ex "black" corners cutting made by nVidia and now they are publicaly available to enable or disable. if you enable the "optimisations" you may get better FPS some times at some image quality cost. Is degustibus... I don't like them so I keep them disabled... those that I know :D ... who knows what other tricks the VGA manufactures are pulling anyway.

[christopher m]

grafix

 

zaelu,

 

Thanks,