DDS Textures

[L'aigle]

Hi, i was wondering how you save your dds files, I work with gimp on uncompressed files, then i try to save them with gimp DXT5 without mipmap and i notice no loss of quality in the game on the units, j got a big machine and i was wondering if it will fall much performance for other users with a less powerful machine.

You can see screenshots on the link to my mod in my signature, they are taken from a decompress files dds (64 Mo) and after compression (16 MB) no mipmap, i obtain the same image quality.
In all cases i have no slowdown, even with 40 units in the game.

If i compress with mipmap image is degraded.

My pc - Quad core, 4 Go DDR3, Raid0 disk 2x500Go, Ati 5870.

Your opinion?


Sorry for my bad English

[The Hedge Knight]

Well consider that the game loads 4x the atlas(gloss,normal, colour mask, diffuse) and that has to sit in the ram so normally each atlas (has to be an atlas for every single prefix in the battle, in vanilla ca have done their best to keep this at 2 90% of the time by giving all units in a faction the same atlas) takes up 80mb of ram...

Your version means each takes up 240mb of ram or 480mb if you edited both atlas' which will kill low end machines.

Also you have to save with mip maps or many people will get texture issues as the game tries to load the mipmaps but cannot as they are not there (the units are simply textures in various shades of brown, not good).

Hope this makes sense.

[L'aigle]

Thank you for your quick response, you're on it because i start the game with 7 atlas (7x4) for France over the faction's army in front of an original atlas (1x4), all without mipmap compress to 16 mo, very very good quality , and they are very fluid. (1920x1080,aa 4x, an 16x,ssao, shaders 3, and all ultra high)
Apparently the file color mask is not loaded directly into memory.
So you think :
7x4 = 28 x 16 mo = 448 Mo + 1x4 = 4x 16mo = 64 finally 512 mo load in memory ?
My graphics card has 1GB. So i still have things to do, but i understand for small machines, it's really not cool for people who have small machines, the quality is very degraded with mipmap.
Then surely it is best that i make 2 versions high and low

[Dee Jay]

Thanks for making this post, it helped me. But when you did save it is a DXT5 with gimp, did you save it as ; BC3/DXT5, Alpha Exponent (DXT5), YCoCg (DXT5) or a YCoCg scaled (DXT5)? Because i wasnt sure?