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First post, by Gambit37

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I've noticed a strange problem with the texture pack creation. I've created a new title graphic, and have put the necessary bitmaps in their correct folders.

Although the title is displayed, the top left corner of each segment (about four pixels) is displayed black. This really makes the picture look silly as it means my nice new Lara has a black spot on her nose! Also, the two smaller segments on the right hand side don't quite line up even though they have been cropped out correctly.

I've tested this at 640x480 and 1024x768 and it's the same on both resolutions. Any ideas anyone?

Also, are there any limitations I should be aware of when creating new textures? I'm aiming to make all 64x64 tiles now at 256x256, but this obviously means that the increase in data is massive. Other tiles will be x2 or x3 depending on the threshold of staying within the 256x256 limit. Are there texture memory limits to stay within?

Finally, is it possible to reduce the number of repeated textures? It seems that every level has duplicated data which needs to be replaced every time - (Lara, Weapons, Text, Passport, etc.). This is going to make the whole texture resource massive! Can this be improved in any way? Or is it a limitation of the original game?

Reply 2 of 35, by Glidos

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Is it that the textures contain the magic transparency color (a sort of muddy brown)?

If you upload the pack to the smartgroup, I'll take a look.

Sorry I'm not getting to monitor vogons very often.

Reply 3 of 35, by Gambit37

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It's not the 'muddy brown' problem, but something else. I've posted a sample screenshot here:

http://www.resonantedge.com/trx/temp/test_ingame.jpg

The first two are quite subtle, but the other four are quite obvious.

Any comment on the repeated textures issue?

Reply 4 of 35, by Gambit37

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Something else I've noticed about TR under Glidos -- it seems to use a 16-bit display mode, regardless of what the Windows desktop is doing.

Due to limitations of colour matching between 8bit, 16-bit and 24bit displays, this makes it really difficult to match spot colours, such as Lara's skin. Is there any way around this?

Reply 5 of 35, by Glidos

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Gambit37 wrote:
It's not the 'muddy brown' problem, but something else. I've posted a sample screenshot here: […]
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It's not the 'muddy brown' problem, but something else. I've posted a sample screenshot here:

http://www.resonantedge.com/trx/temp/test_ingame.jpg

The first two are quite subtle, but the other four are quite obvious.

Any comment on the repeated textures issue?

Looks like my bmp reading code is broken. I'll see if I can fix it.

Reply 6 of 35, by Glidos

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Gambit37 wrote:

Something else I've noticed about TR under Glidos -- it seems to use a 16-bit display mode, regardless of what the Windows desktop is doing.

Due to limitations of colour matching between 8bit, 16-bit and 24bit displays, this makes it really difficult to match spot colours, such as Lara's skin. Is there any way around this?

This is a restriction in Glide. I may be able to remove this restriction by implementing in some Glide extensions in OpenGlide, but it may take a while.

Reply 7 of 35, by Gambit37

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Another thought I had -- is it possible to get Glidos to use 8-bit external textures, albeit each with a custom palette? Or maybe a different, compressed format such as JPG?

I ask because I'm about 5/8 of the way through the caves level and already it's about 9Mb!!!! -- and that's in a compressed RAR file!!! It would be significantly smaller if I could create each tile with it's own custom 8-bit pallete, or use a compressed format, as it would drastically reduce the file size. There's the added problem that a huge amount of textures have to be repeated for every level (Lara, icons, sprites, passport, etc.). Is there any way that can be improved?

Basically, there is no way I can afford to host this project if it ends up around the estimated size of (9Mb x 15 levels) = 135Mb!!! I thought it would be about 40-50Mb maximum.

It would also help in the load times, as it's now taking ages for Glidos to load the external textures, which means there is a white screen for several seconds between selecting 'Load game' and actually seeing anything....

Any thoughts you have on this would be much appreciated.

Reply 8 of 35, by Glidos

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I've been thinking about this. I could make 8-bit work, but its fiddley, and I'd have thought it would lose quality, but maybe not - you would know more about that sort of thing.

JPEG is lossy, so I'd have thought that was a bad choice. How about PNG?

Reply 9 of 35, by ChaosFish

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Originally posted by Glidos
JPEG is lossy, so I'd have thought that was a bad choice. How about PNG?

PNG would be way better than JPEG.
But I've been thinking... how about JPEG2000? it is a new format that is quality lossless, and has really good compression.

Reply 11 of 35, by Kaminari

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Hi Paul,

I just noticed that in some very specific situations (a big room, a large angle of view, a number of baddies in sight), the framerate is dropping dramatically when the TextureOverride option is activated (be it on Yes or Capture). Even if the Texture folder is actually empty, activating this option puts a noticeable CPU load on my system. And I'm talking about 15 fps lost here.

I provide you below with a savestate of such a situation (in Shadow of the Cat). Load it, don't move Lara and just look at the fps display (F2). I manage to get 25 fps out of 30 (max allowed by TR) from GlideWrapper, whereas OpenGlide will drop down as low as 15 fps. Deactivating this option, I return to a steady 30 fps with both wrappers.

Perhaps it's a normal behaviour of Glidos, perhaps my system is at fault, but I just wanted to be sure. It seems odd to me that the framerate would drop that much, even when there's no texture to load at all.

Configuration: Win2K SP4 + P3 667 + GeForce 2 Ti.

Attachments

  • Filename
    saveub.zip
    File size
    1.27 KiB
    Downloads
    211 downloads
    File license
    Fair use/fair dealing exception

Reply 13 of 35, by Glidos

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I get a solid 30fps, but then that's on a 1800+ Athlon, so that doesn't tell me a lot.

Very interesting that swapping the Glide2x.dll file makes a difference. It must mean that I'm sending more graphics commands, but I don't see why. Or maybe I'm loading textures in different places and causing the texture cache to thrash. Must be something nasty going on here.

I was using the new title screen texture pack; didn't try empty.

Reply 15 of 35, by Glidos

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Hey, I think I've fixed this problem, although I think it suggets that slower systems are going to have problems with texture packs that actually have content.

Not quite ready to release the fix, but soon I hope.

Thanks for the very short and accurate bug report. Particularly knowing that the effect was less with a different Glide wrapper helped enormously.

Reply 16 of 35, by Gambit37

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If it helps at all, while I've been testing my Caves texture pack there is a lot of disk thrashing when the level is first loaded and a white screen for several seconds. It doesn't seem to slow down once in the game though. I have an AMD Athlon 1900 XP with a Geforce 4 Ti 4600.

Reply 17 of 35, by Glidos

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The disk thrashing doesn't surprise me; probably unavoidable. Encouraging that the game doesn't slow down once you are passed the thrashing stage.

Ooh! I can't wait to play with that Caves pack.

BTW, I'm intending to find a way to deal with the different TR versions within Glidos somehow. Not quite sure how, but I think it shouldn't be too hard.

Reply 18 of 35, by Kaminari

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That's good news, Paul!

Gambit, I can't wait to test your package either. Your graphic skills are simply amazing! I can only dream of reaching such a level.

One picky thing I spotted on your screenshots is that your Lara doesn't cast any shadow on the floor. Is it the result of the screenshot editing (ie, you had to edit it out to paste your screenshots together) or is it like that on your system? If the latter, you can get your shadow back by deleting your settings.dat file (just so you know) 😀

sample_caves_03.jpg

Reply 19 of 35, by Gambit37

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Thanks Kaminari -- I'm very flattered by your comments. It's not as hard as it looks though -- bear in mind that I use photgraphic sources for a lot of the work, so the calendar disc in the screenshot comes from a real photo of an actual calendar. I just manipulate it in PhotoShop.

I haven't done anything with the shadow -- I didn't even notice it was missing! I'll check it out. I don't really want to delete the settings file 'cos then I'll have to set up the game again!