Spring RTS Engine

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.

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

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

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

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

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...

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

yeah 40 MB is small peanuts IMO

Good tiling goes unnoticed!!!

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

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.

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"...

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

and spacemaps are all abaut picture quality anyway :)

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

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.

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.

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.

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"

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

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

the shit will fly

post a screenie.