My map is HUGE

Caydr · Post by **Caydr** » 07 Jan 2006, 20:34

Working on a map project right now. Comes out of standard mapconv at 40 megabytes even with 1.5 compression. Any ideas? It's 20x20.

genblood · Post by **genblood** » 07 Jan 2006, 20:58

You might try changing your texture map to a jpg format, instead
of a 24bit bmp. That should reduce the overall size ...

aGorm · Post by **aGorm** » 07 Jan 2006, 21:13

No, No,No, and again.... No. It wont change a thing. All mapconv does it takes teh hpg , turns it into raw image data, and then compresses teh already ossy jpg into dds files. If fiel size drops its because its made the dds's compress smaller, but they wilol also look a darn site craper.

You can actully get away with alot more thant 1.5 and still have it look good, if you carfully replace certain areas of the map with tiles aswell, that serverly reduces the file size.

For instance If you have a grassy area with is just random motteled greens, replace most of that with a repeating texture, and fade taht texture to teh moteld green, where there terrain changes (so IE, dont replace the grass next to the transition to say rock, but just fill in the areas that are bulk.

Best way i find is use the selection tool to grab right up to the edge, shrik selection by say 25 and then feather teh selection by 10, and then just fill in new texture on a new layer. Also, weirdly, sometimes it looks cooler if you do dithered blending between teh layers, rather than teh normal alpha ones.

hope you can make sence of all that!

aGorm

Forboding Angel · Post by **Forboding Angel** » 07 Jan 2006, 22:01

caydr, do this

tile your flat grounds with a 32x32 texture and put Full grass on it (assuming its a grassy area).

THe grass will hide the fact of the texture being so small.

Grass tends to cover a lot of mistakes :D

Guessmyname · Post by **Guessmyname** » 07 Jan 2006, 23:00

Replace "grass" with "stars" if this map is for what I think its for

Caydr · Post by **Caydr** » 07 Jan 2006, 23:08

Ugh...... I don't want to tile this. It looks too good. I guess I'll try shrinking it to 16x16 and using an even higher compression

This really sucks...

Masse · Post by **Masse** » 07 Jan 2006, 23:20

i dont care what the size is ! KEEP THE QUALITY !

Min3mat · Post by **Min3mat** » 07 Jan 2006, 23:39

yeah 40 MB is small peanuts IMO

NOiZE · Post by **NOiZE** » 08 Jan 2006, 00:02

Good tiling goes unnoticed!!!

Masse · Post by **Masse** » 08 Jan 2006, 00:04

NOiZE wrote:Good tiling goes unnoticed!!!

NOT IN SPACEMAPS ! they are not supposed to be only stars everywhere !
it needs to be all kinds of funky colourful gas "clouds" everywhere... NO BORING AND PLAIN REPETIVE STARS EVERYWHERE... and blood !

actually we dont know for sure what kinda map caydr is doing

FizWizz · Post by **FizWizz** » 08 Jan 2006, 00:09

Not everyone has inexhaustible (for all practical Spring-related purposes) system resources and badnwidth, Min3Mat. I seriously doubt that a 40mb map will enjoy wide circulation, regardless of its quality, although with Caydr's... let's say past trends, it may be wildly popular anyways. Hopefully he will come to some solution to remedy the current problem anyways.

Felix the Cat · Post by **Felix the Cat** » 08 Jan 2006, 00:41

Masse wrote:
NOiZE wrote:Good tiling goes unnoticed!!!
NOT IN SPACEMAPS ! they are not supposed to be only stars everywhere !
it needs to be all kinds of funky colourful gas "clouds" everywhere... NO BORING AND PLAIN REPETIVE STARS EVERYWHERE... and blood !

actually we dont know for sure what kinda map caydr is doing

Y'know, you're allowed to use more than one tile, so you can put "funky colourful gas "clouds"" on as tiles as well... or tile everything that isn't "funky colourful gas clouds"...

Masse · Post by **Masse** » 08 Jan 2006, 00:54

when i think of a space map... theres VERY little tiling

and spacemaps are all abaut picture quality anyway :)

NOiZE · Post by **NOiZE** » 08 Jan 2006, 01:17

when i think of space there will also be a lot of blackness which can be tiled easily

IMSabbel · Post by **IMSabbel** » 08 Jan 2006, 01:26

Well, as DDS uses a fixed compression factor algorithm, those resulting 40Mbyte files COULD be compressed quite a bit by the sd7 packing.

I just checked some other texture files i had lying around that had little detail, and they were packable to 1/3 of the original dxt-compressed size.

SwiftSpear · Post by **SwiftSpear** » 08 Jan 2006, 01:45

Tile where you can get away with it. You don't have to tile your whole map into 5-6 tiles to signifigantly decrease file size. Even if you can tile all the starscape into 15 seperate tiles you are saving a massive ammount of space compared to the whole map being random feild generated.

Like noize said, blackness can be tiled easily.

Caydr · Post by **Caydr** » 08 Jan 2006, 02:06

It's not a space map... I'd use a cubemap for that sort of thing.

It's actually just an exceptionally high quality Terragen render... took 18.5 hours with a 720 megabyte cache on my 3 ghz system... and I rendered it at half-size.

Masse · Post by **Masse** » 08 Jan 2006, 02:17

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/space/imag ... _large.jpg
how much black is there

well doesnt it compress all the black pixels allready ? "automatically"

Neuralize · Post by **Neuralize** » 08 Jan 2006, 04:25

Give us some screenshots, then we can evaluate whether it would be worth the 40

Forboding Angel · Post by **Forboding Angel** » 08 Jan 2006, 05:09

ehh set swapsize to 4 gigs and make sure you have 1.5 gigs of ddr

the shit will fly

post a screenie.

Spring RTS Engine

My map is HUGE

My map is HUGE