Direct Draw Surface (DDS)?

Agon · Post by **Agon** » 29 Jul 2007, 17:40

I don├é┬┤t know if this is supported. I don├é┬┤t know if it is usefully for us. Many commercial games are using .dds.

KDR_11k · Post by **KDR_11k** » 29 Jul 2007, 17:45

It is.

Agon · Post by **Agon** » 29 Jul 2007, 17:49

Thanks for answer and are mipimap supported? And all formates?
And why is no one using this? They uses .png and .tga and some .jpeg "shit".

Edit:
Found out that ca is using .dds for the buildpics and some over things. But not for all.

Peet · Post by **Peet** » 29 Jul 2007, 18:59

iirc Spring doesn't use the mipmaps...and some of the subformats (dx2 dx3 etc) don't work quite right.

Agon · Post by **Agon** » 29 Jul 2007, 19:09

Peet wrote:iirc Spring doesn't use the mipmaps...and some of the subformats (dx2 dx3 etc) don't work quite right.

This means .dds for Spring has no feature and .tga or .png are better for Spring?

Peet · Post by **Peet** » 29 Jul 2007, 19:36

.dds works fine for the most part, and has the advantage of remaining compressed in the vram.

rattle · Post by **rattle** » 29 Jul 2007, 22:58

I use DDS, some people just don't like it or that it's actually slower than using TGAs or some other format.

Personal preference, I guess.

smoth · Post by **smoth** » 29 Jul 2007, 23:14

I have not seen any evidence to steer me from png.

Argh · Post by **Argh** » 30 Jul 2007, 03:10

Actually Spring uses mipmaps. Sorry, that wasn't apparently ever made clear... as for what file format is best, DDS is the fastest, TGA is the most accurate, and PNG is a close match with TGA, but with a smaller initial filesize.

AF · Post by AF » 30 Jul 2007, 03:28

I'd argue png is also the easiest for the average joe to get their hands on and edit.

LOrDo · Post by **LOrDo** » 30 Jul 2007, 08:16

DDS is also used for skyboxes in maps.

KDR_11k · Post by **KDR_11k** » 30 Jul 2007, 08:21

Agon wrote:Thanks for answer and are mipimap supported? And all formates?
And why is no one using this? They uses .png and .tga and some .jpeg "shit".

Edit:
Found out that ca is using .dds for the buildpics and some over things. But not for all.

Good DDS exporters are rare.

Agon · Post by **Agon** » 30 Jul 2007, 14:13

I├é┬┤m using Gimp + a .dds exporter that I found in the Internet. But the plugin is not really good. Saving is available for all formates and auto generation of mipmaps. But loading does not work correctly in Gimp.
If someone knows a good .dds plugin for gimp, please let me know.

To make it clear, which formates and compression can I use in .dds?

LathanStanley · Post by **LathanStanley** » 30 Jul 2007, 15:39

I did a big test on this way back when, posted screenies and everything..

maybe it was shear luck, maybe it was my hardware, hell, maybe it was god... I dunno,

but I got about 3% more FPS with TGA textures mapped on >300 on screen features, than I did with the exact same map, and features, mapped with exactly same x,y sized maps that were .dds ....

frankly, I believe that the TGA maps are more efficient with spring, until someone in the coding part of the game, figure out what line they are missing to get the .dds to work right...

and the TGA has far superior clarity on graphics...

the PNG, meh, its really not much of a tradeoff in any direction from TGA.

all in all, the greatest difference was about 3% and well, thats basically negligable.. take your pick on whatever you decide to use...

Facet count, and overall texturesize are what kill the engine on spring, not the image format....

AF · Post by AF » 30 Jul 2007, 16:02

Facet count, and overall texturesize are what kill the engine on spring, not the image format....

DDS occupies far less memory than TGA, that is sort of the whole point of DDS, allowing you to fit more textures into the space that 1 single TGA texture would take up.

LathanStanley · Post by **LathanStanley** » 30 Jul 2007, 16:18

AF wrote:
Facet count, and overall texturesize are what kill the engine on spring, not the image format....
DDS occupies far less memory than TGA, that is sort of the whole point of DDS, allowing you to fit more textures into the space that 1 single TGA texture would take up.

I stuffed over 300 megs of textures into my videoram and it hardly made a dent in performance, and the dds was actually worse..

again, something with dds is broke, I have yet to find a difference using it... but I do understand your point, it "theoretically and mathematically", SHOULD work that way... I have no idea why it dosen't...

edit: I suppose I should peak the 512mb ram I have on the card, and see if it makes a difference then...

KDR_11k · Post by **KDR_11k** » 31 Jul 2007, 07:12

It's possible that, upon load, your card automatically compresses the image. Only way to find out is to load the DXT killer image (which has a different color for each pixel within a palette block). Also keep in mind that depending on the bandwidth of your graphics bus you may need to go some way over the limit, not just right over it.

Generally the difference between DXT and RGB is not visible unless you compress effect images like normal maps or use the wrong DXT on images with alpha. The memory footprint is 1/6th of an uncompressed image.

Argh · Post by **Argh** » 31 Jul 2007, 08:00

I think that the main point here is that I need to go look at the mipmap code stuff again, something is seriously wrong here if DDS is not out-performing all other file formats by a wide margin, frankly

Agon · Post by **Agon** » 31 Jul 2007, 11:28

Would be good to get a full support for .dds.

I did some compression tests and found out that the best compression has .dds with compression type ATI1 and DXT1.
I don├é┬┤t know what the format ATI* means maybe a compression type from ati.
Could not test DXT2 and 4 because there are not available.

Mipmaps: 10
Size: 512*512
Colors: RGBA

Name size
ATI1 170,8 kb
ATI2 341,5 kb
DXT1 170,8 kb
DXT3 341,5 kb
DXT5 341,5 kb

.png 348,0 kb
.tga 776,3 kb
.xcf 2,7MB

Texture used:

Copyrights goes to me! License: GPL v3.

rattle · Post by **rattle** » 31 Jul 2007, 15:51

Look at the right side, you probably see the hard border yourself.

If you want to use DDS I'd use the format with the least loss in color/alpha information (DXT3?).

Spring RTS Engine

Direct Draw Surface (DDS)?

Direct Draw Surface (DDS)?