Texture and other 2d artwork format

[Tribulex]

Can someone please tell me what type of DDS spring supports? For example is it RGBA8 or RGBA4? I am using the gimp DDS export plugin at the moment, and my textures for my units are not exporting correctly.

[Neddie]

Personally, I do all my work in TGA, which is supported. However, this may be the information you're looking for... I know that SpikedHelmet, among others, does everything in DDS.

http://springrts.com/wiki/Units:Textures

[Tribulex]

Thank you very much this was very informative. I apologize for not finding this myself.

[Neddie]

It has been unintentionally hidden, I don't manage the internals of the site, but given that it isn't clear that we even have a wiki, I hardly see how you might have been expected to find it on your own. Anyway, good luck.

[Tribulex]

On this note, does anyone know a quick way of flipping all the faces in 3dsmax or upspring? All my faces got inverted somehow.

[bobthedinosaur]

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[Tribulex]

Never mind when I said the faces were flipped I meant the normals were flipped. I fixed it all no worries. Thank you.

[Tribulex]

Okay I have a new problem. First of all, the dds export plugin for photoshoop doesnt seem to work. Also what do I do with this file: http://www.wolfegames.com/TA_Section/St ... ettings.7z . Apparently its Argh's settings for dds. Secondly, is there a good tool for creating dds? Thirdly, is it really worth the bother? It will be for a texture of a unit that will be spammed a ton. I am guessing there will around 200 of the unit at the high point of any given game. Also, the unit is fairly detailed, its just a small crappy texture (we think. So far its untextured ).

Thank you for all the help!

[Argh]

1. The settings should be loaded into the DDS plugin. Bring up Save As --> DDS, to look at the plugin interface, and down in the lower-right, it has an interface for loading settings.

2. Photoshop is a great tool for creating DDS, but there are tons of other choices, such as ATi's Compressionator. There is even a DDS plugin for GIMP. I prefer to build DDS as part of my Photoshop workflow, but there are certainly lots of other choices available.

3. Yes, it's always worth the bother, because texture throughput is a big deal with something you'll see a lot of, and letting the CPU build mipmaps generally creates bad results, in terms of quality. At the very least, it creates uncertain results, because then it's going to be using the GPU to decide how to filter, etc., and not everybody keeps their graphics card set on "high quality".

4. Generally speaking, it is more important to keep polycount low and the number of Pieces low than it is to keep texture sizes to a minimum, but that really depends on what you're doing.

If it's going to be spammed, bear in mind that all geometry is being passed through the display process multiple times. Geometry costs get really high, really fast, due to this. A large horde of high-poly Units will generally slow rendering efficiency quite a lot, especially once they're moving, because then the CPU time needed to orient the display lists is having to be shared with pathfinding costs and other expenses.

So, in general, it is better to develop with a low polycount target, low Piece numbers, and not to be so worried about texturemap sizes, than to develop with high polycount targets and huge numbers of Pieces.

That said, there are no perfect solutions to every situation, and you will just have to eat cost somewhere, if you want hordes. But if you're planning to make a game where 50-100 units with polycounts of 3000 triangles are on the screen... be warned now that performance will be pretty bad, for everybody using GPUs that aren't the current state of the art.

[Hoi]

4. Generally speaking, it is more important to keep polycount low and the number of Pieces low than it is to keep texture sizes to a minimum, but that really depends on what you're doing.

No argh, not generally speaking. It depends, for spring it's usually true, because if you make a unit and then build 50 of the same unit they will all have polygons for themselves, but they will all share the same texture.

If you're working on other things like fps games the texture size will matter more, as you will probably not have as much units sharing the same texture.

[Argh]

You're entirely right, Hoi- different game engines need different strategies. I kinda assume that people here are mainly interested in developing their art for RTS games, where the problem is mainly keeping the CPU load down.

[SpikedHelmet]

nVidia released "DDS Utilities" which quite awesomely converts stuff to .DDS images. You just pop the .png or .bmp or whatever in the folder, run the batch file and presto, it's a .DDS.

Actually texture creation in Spring is a PITA, hard to learn (and harder to explain) but when you do learn it it becomes like clockwork.