jpg texture files

[Blade 353]

Guys,

 

I may have stumbled upon another method of saving disk space and memory.

Has anyone else noticed that jpg files can be used as aircraft (and, possibly, ground object) textures? I just did a quick test by converting the texture bitmaps to jpg files and hex editing the texture name entries in the aircraft's lod file, and it seems to work.

I assume that it only works in case of the 2nd gen series, because I successfully tested this in SF2E, but no joy in WoE.

The aircraft lod I edited was the 1st gen stock F-104G. I have no software that can properly hex edit the new format SF2 lods, so that's yet to be checked.

[Wrench 9,848]

did you check the box in you hexeditor that says "open unicode", or words to that effect

 

and dds format skins take up even less space

 

wrench

kevin stein

[Fubar512 1,350]

In SF2, JPEGs appear to have issues with bump mapping, when used terrain tiles and object textures. They also have clipping issues as terrain tiles, though admittedly, I've only experimented once with them.

[+Julhelm 266]

Why use jpg when dds is far superior?

[eraser_tr 29]

Indeed, .dds has essentially become a standard for games now and they do basically everything other formats can.

[+Major Lee 18]

Does DDS have a transparency layer?

[+Julhelm 266]

Of course.

[Wrench 9,848]

it works on terrains, but just not as well. We've had issues with the TOD objects (mostly buildings) appearing as black, untextured squares and such

 

It could be a 'great leap forward' in terrain tiling, as a 200 meg tile download (I'm NOT kidding!), drops to around 35 megs; just some issues to be worked out.

 

Seems to work pretty good for aircraft skins, though

 

wrench

kevin stein

[+gerwin 451]

Why use jpg when dds is far superior?

 

Why would that be?

I agree .dds is interesting because it has so many subtypes. one of them (8.8.8) basically replacing .bmp

But AFAIK both .jpg and .tga still have their strongpoints.

 

.dds is poorly documented, here is some good info though:

http://www.poopinmym.../dds_types.html

 

Edit: looking at the link I gave, I don't trust the filesizes he writes down. my .dds files are slightly smaller.

So contrary to what it says there I think .dds can do the same as .tga and .bmp with the same filesize.

Edited August 8, 2010 by gerwin

[+Julhelm 266]

The only advantage tga has over dds is that since it's uncompressed there are no artefacs in the image. However this advantage is completely negated by the fact that tga is about 4x the size of an equivalent dds texture. This is why games like COD usually have their normalmaps as 24-bit tga textures and everything else as dds.