As I am the first person to try new image formats for their mod's buildpics, I'm the one who's going to have to bear bad news and bug reports.
After some testing last night, I'm quite sure there's a problem with buildpic code. When I converted all my buildpics to DDS, regardless of DXT1, DXT3, DXT5, with or without mipmaps, I get a gray box for all my buildpics.
I've also done several test games. Identical versions of AA, except that one uses JPG for buildpics, the other uses PCX. PCX never crashes, JPG almost always crashes. There's no possibility of typos entering the buildpic name, or making a wrong tag, or anything of that sort either, since i've got the whole process automated.
PCX, on the other hand, works perfectly. But the compression is quite bad. Most buildpics in this format range between 25 and 30 KB.
BMP, as anyone whose used Paint knows, is about the worst image format on the planet. The filesizes BMP gives are positively massive. I've not bothered testing whether these actually work ingame for this reason.
25-30 kb per picture doesn't sound that outrageous, but let's compare:
40 KB per BMP
28 KB per PCX
4 KB per DDS
2 KB per JPG
The savings are clear. Whether I use JPG or DDS, as long as I use one of those two, AA shrinks in size by nearly 9 megabytes when compressed.
I'd really like to use JPG, or at the very least DDS (DDS is larger, but the difference when compressed is only half a megabyte combined) in Absolute Annihilation, but it appears that for the time being I'm stuck using PCX.
I don't know what could possibly be causing the crashing with JPG, I'm really at a loss. The crashes appear random but generally between the 10 and 20 minute mark, or sometimes not at all. I've had a full length game with JPG compression. Smokeynseinor reports he's finished 3 games and never had a crash - and with his connection, that's practically legendary.
Maybe you folks could find a flaw in my automated process. Here's the sequence of events:
#1 - Photoshop converts all buildpics to JPG with 85% compression, in batch mode.
#2 - I open all unit FBI files in UltraEdit (a powerful text editor with advanced macro features)
#3 - I instruct UE to do the following:
go down 3 lines (this places cursor at the point of the UNITNAME field)
highlight that line
copy that line to clipboard
go to end of that line
create new line
paste from clipboard
go to end of line
backspace one time
type ".jpg;"
go to beginning of line
go one tab over
delete 8 characters
type "buildpic"
save file
close file
repeat macro on next file (infinite loop until all files are closed)
The resulting file appears as so:
Code: Select all
[UNITINFO]
{
Name=Archer;
UnitName=ARMAAS;
Buildpic=ARMAAS.jpg;
..........
