A huge increase in frame rate??

[Gryzor]

Isn't there a program that can extract all files at once?

It's literally thousands of textures... and it would be a huge amount of work to extract them one by one...

All the cdds' weighs in on 858 MB.

 

extracttextures.exe

 

located into main directory of lock on; you can extract to another directore archives named *.cdds, there ary few cdds to extract;

Once extracted, convert textures with bright to an 8 bit pixel format (256 colours)

 

My problem is opposite to yours; i need to recompress to cdds the textures moded before

[fred_123]

tutorial ?

 

extracttextures.exe

 

located into main directory of lock on; you can extract to another directore archives named *.cdds, there ary few cdds to extract;

Once extracted, convert textures with bright to an 8 bit pixel format (256 colours)

 

My problem is opposite to yours; i need to recompress to cdds the textures moded before

 

hi all !

i was just wondering if any of u could make a brief tutorial: how to do this, the entire prosess of converting these files...:confused:

please :rolleyes:

[Starlight]

The Mig 23 is my new heavy weather skin embossed. Anyone interested in it please let me know.

Mizzy

 

really great skin man ;)

the weathering and the detail are wonderful.

 

And the first screen is also amazing, it looks real!

[Yellonet]

extracttextures.exe

 

located into main directory of lock on; you can extract to another directore archives named *.cdds, there ary few cdds to extract;

Once extracted, convert textures with bright to an 8 bit pixel format (256 colours)

 

My problem is opposite to yours; i need to recompress to cdds the textures moded before

Thanks... yeah, too bad ED didn't supply such a nice tool for getting the files back in as they did for getting them out ;)

[Yellonet]

really great skin man ;)

the weathering and the detail are wonderful.

 

And the first screen is also amazing, it looks real!

Edit your post before she sees it ;)

[Yellonet]

hi all !

i was just wondering if any of u could make a brief tutorial: how to do this, the entire prosess of converting these files...:confused:

please :rolleyes:

Will do as soon as we know how to get them back into the cdds files :p

[Gryzor]

Thanks... yeah, too bad ED didn't supply such a nice tool for getting the files back in as they did for getting them out ;)

 

I made an experiment two hours before:

 

Once all bmp´s in 256 colours are in temptextures, if you delete (BACKUP PREVIOSLY!!!) cdds files of bmp´s extracter before, the sim work as usual. cdds archives are bypassed.

 

I will try to conver 256bmp´s to dds format at get into temptextures, maybe with this way we may have dds texture files withot the need of cdds entering format. I will try

[Yellonet]

Hmm... so you just place the converted files directly in temptextures?

[Gryzor]

Hmm... so you just place the converted files directly in temptextures?

 

yes, directly i put the bmp´s (256 col) to that directory, deleted the refered cdds file (IF YOU DO MAKE BACKUP!!) and works perfectly.

 

The program makes first priority to look into temptextures over other things.

[Mizzy]

I will do, but i need to reconver to dds into cdds manually and there are about 1400 bms´s 256colurs files, and..... uffff, for today the "extraction" process from cdds is sufficient, and the testing stage of these bmp´s too, , hehe, i´m soo tired now...

 

What a wonderful person you are :)

 

Mizzy

[Mizzy]

really great skin man ;)

the weathering and the detail are wonderful.

 

And the first screen is also amazing, it looks real!

 

Oh thank you very much but I have to admit I get help from my Partner who understands photoshop much better than I but alas, he has no interest in flight sims whatsoever..shame :(

 

I will upload it to Thomas et. al. this weekend if they can kindly host my Mig 23 skin.

 

Mizzy

 

PS Btw its in 256 colour converted using Bright LOL ;)

[Gryzor]

Hehe, thanks ;)

 

Your initiative to convert to 256 is great, for me improves performance a lot especially regarded to stuttering issue.

 

Now I will try to conver TGA´s cdds to 8 bit TGA´s (256 colours palette), but the TGA´s issue is with its alpha channel, BRIGHT program seems not respect the tga´s transparency for original files. With BMS´s transparency there´s all ok.

 

Good idea the palette conversion is great and the descent of original quality at max texture size is total inperceptible (sorry for my english)

 

I salute you

[Weta43]

Mizzy, meant to say ages ago - nice skin - sounds like the change is worth doing & the reduction in stuttering due to accessing smaller files a boon, but Gryzor, I'm not convinced. I think the fact that no-one is mentioning big FPS increases is that it doesn't make any difference to the GPU as it works at the bits per pixel for colour set at the settings screen. If you unload the RAM & CPU through this you'll get a FPS increase (LO tends to be CPU limited) - esp round cities, when it's busy etc., but I doubt it's through decreased GPU load.

[Yellonet]

yes, directly i put the bmp´s (256 col) to that directory, deleted the refered cdds file (IF YOU DO MAKE BACKUP!!) and works perfectly.

 

The program makes first priority to look into temptextures over other things.

What about the season textures? They all have the same names... just in different cdds files.

And there are some other textures with duplicate names too... what to do with those?

[Yellonet]

Confirmed, this is a huge increase in frame rate.

 

My system:

XP2800+@3200+

1 GB RAM

Radeon 9800 Pro 128 MB

 

I extracted and converted all bmp files from the cdds archives and put them all in the temptextures folder.

I am now seeing doubled frame rate on the same settings as before.

However there seems to be some loading issues, perhaps because some textures are taken from temptextures and some from the tga cdds', I will investigate further.

And it may still only be that max fps is increased and min is not...

[Pilotasso]

Confirmed, this is a huge increase in frame rate.

 

My system:

XP2800+@3200+

1 GB RAM

Radeon 9800 Pro 128 MB

 

I extracted and converted all bmp files from the cdds archives and put them all in the temptextures folder.

I am now seeing doubled frame rate on the same settings as before.

However there seems to be some loading issues, perhaps because some textures are taken from temptextures and some from the tga cdds', I will investigate further.

And it may still only be that max fps is increased and min is not...

 

You got basicaly the same system as I do. I am very interested, but how do I do it? there is no detailed explanation about this, just a few loose coments.

[Yellonet]

This is how it is now... the max fps is way higher than before 2-3 times higher, but the average fps is maybe even lower as the game seems to struggle with loading the textures from the temptextures folder which brings the frame rate to its knees... and it's practically loading all the time unless you're looking into the sky.

I'm thinking that the temptextures folder isn't "optimised" for having large number of textures.

But if we can somehow (fast) get the files back into the cdds archives everything should be alright.

 

If you want to try anyway this is how you do it.

And only do it with cdds files which has bmps in them.

1) Do a search for cdds files in the lockon directory so that you can see their names and paths

2) Start the commandprompt. Run -> cmd [enter]

3) Go to the LockOn directory. cd lockonpath [enter]

4) Run the textureextractor. extracttextures bazar\path_and_name_of_cdds_file path_to_where_you_want_the_files [enter]

5) Go to the directory where you extracted the files: cd extracted_file_path [enter]

6) Run Bright. bright -bmp -8 -o *.bmp [enter]

7) Move the converted files into the temptextures folder. move *.bmp lockonpath\bazar\temptextures [enter]

[JACN]

Just a question...:

 

Are ED people aware of "this"?. I think it would be GREAT if ED, officially, takes care of these new findings in order to improve the overall fps performance. Specially thinking of the next (more CPU/GPU demanding) Black Shark.

[Force_Feedback]

You got basicaly the same system as I do. I am very interested, but how do I do it? there is no detailed explanation about this, just a few loose coments.

 

I agree with Pilotasso, we need a step-by-step n00b guide, for the more retarded/lazy members, like me.

 

EDIT: was too slow, thx for teh guide.

[Pilotasso]

This is how it is now... the max fps is way higher than before 2-3 times higher, but the average fps is maybe even lower as the game seems to struggle with loading the textures from the temptextures folder which brings the frame rate to its knees... and it's practically loading all the time unless you're looking into the sky.

I'm thinking that the temptextures folder isn't "optimised" for having large number of textures.

But if we can somehow (fast) get the files back into the cdds archives everything should be alright.

 

Just a question...:

 

Are ED people aware of "this"?. I think it would be GREAT if ED, officially, takes care of these new findings in order to improve the overall fps performance. Specially thinking of the next (more CPU/GPU demanding) Black Shark.

 

Yes it would be great if ED included a 256 texture pakage on the 1.12 patch and add a menu option for swiching to these as a detail setting.

 

I will try this later in the afternoon, in adition I have an utility wich converts hundreds of 2D and 3D formats. I bought it back when I belonged to the babylon5+Wing commander freespace 2 MOD teams.

[Prophet_169th]

Conversion is easy. Its importing back into CDDS file.

 

You have a utility that will do this?

[Pilotasso]

ah crap...my tool imports cdds but doent export it. Petty because it features batch conversion.

 

I own deep exploration program but I still have to see if there are any CDDS plugg ins for it.

[Yellonet]

Conversion is easy. Its importing back into CDDS file.

...that's difficult?

 

Yeah. We need something that can put the files back in, and not one at a time... there's nearly 2000 bmp's.

And then we need some nice program that can optimize tga's without taking away the alpha-channel in the process.

[Pilotasso]

Can someone generate a MODman LMA file? Im converting the whole lot!

[Gryzor]

What about the season textures? They all have the same names... just in different cdds files.

And there are some other textures with duplicate names too... what to do with those?

 

Exactly, these textures are same named, they had to replace manually (if not, you will be flying the same season...) for now, these textures I don´t put in temptextures directory