Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-04-05 Thread Emilian Huminiuc
On Friday 25 March 2011 17:27:34 Rob Dosogne wrote: Just wanted to add that transparency is working with Alpha Exponent (DXT5) for me.. I'm using the latest Hudson build (Win7 x64) with fgdata cloned last night. I converted the F-16 liveries to DXT5, and used Alpha Exponent for the markings

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-25 Thread Rob Dosogne
Just wanted to add that transparency is working with Alpha Exponent (DXT5) for me.. I'm using the latest Hudson build (Win7 x64) with fgdata cloned last night. I converted the F-16 liveries to DXT5, and used Alpha Exponent for the markings (which are mostly transparent). It looks ugly in the dds

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-22 Thread Erik Hofman
On Mon, 2011-03-21 at 17:50 -0600, syd adams wrote: Interesting.I just did my own quick test ... converted 1 out of 3 livery (png) files to a dds with Gimp plugin .Had to flip the image vertically before converting. I changed liveries with the dialog , and the 2 png files took several seconds

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-22 Thread thorsten . i . renk
Well that's exactly what I was proposing you to test, split the big texture into 9 smaller ones, thus making 1texture/model. If the graphic engine is somehow being stupid and forgets that it has already loaded that texture we should see a dramatic improvement in performance and loading

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-22 Thread Emilian Huminiuc
On Tuesday 22 March 2011 10:33:19 thorsten.i.r...@jyu.fi wrote: Interesting.I just did my own quick test ... converted 1 out of 3 livery (png) files to a dds with Gimp plugin .Had to flip the image vertically before converting. I changed liveries with the dialog , and the 2 png files

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-22 Thread Erik Hofman
On Tue, 2011-03-22 at 10:33 +0200, thorsten.i.r...@jyu.fi wrote: these numbers hardly change - I go to 11 fps and my loading time is unchanged. Somewhat surprisingly, all the matrix operations inside the shader are apparently a non-issue here. From past experience I know that a range

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-22 Thread Emilian Huminiuc
I'd Certainly make a case at least for using .dds files with bc5 compression for normalmaps. We lose(?) the alpha channel in the normalmap, but the quality difference is huge. This needs a small tweak to the shader code: the normal extracted from the normalmap needs to be flipped. Maybe a

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-22 Thread Vivian Meazza
Emilian wrote On Tuesday 22 March 2011 00:57:07 Vivian Meazza wrote: Nope, doesn't work. But this does: Map the .png file onto the AC3D model as usual - convert the .png into .dds in XnView - load the .dds into AC3D No flipping of vertical required. Perhaps XnView flips

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-22 Thread thorsten . i . renk
Hmm, I'd say it's rather critical when in place of one highly detailed airplane you can have about four with the same level of detail in the texture ;)., or a texture with doubled dimensions, thus having more detail ;)(since, as Gary said .dds files get loaded compressed in video RAM).

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-22 Thread Emilian Huminiuc
On Tuesday 22 March 2011 11:29:04 Vivian Meazza wrote: Vivian, OK - here's what I have discovered: XnView converts to .dds, and doesn't require flipping, but AFAIKS it doesn't generate mipmaps either. The Gimp (with the dds plug-in) does require that the image is flipped vertically, but

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-22 Thread Emilian Huminiuc
On Tuesday 22 March 2011 11:43:06 thorsten.i.r...@jyu.fi wrote: Increasing aircraft texture size from 158 kb to 16 MB simply isn't viable - if that roughly scales, it means that FGData would go from 4 GB to 400 GB (!) - I barely have the harddisk to store that, having access to a university T3

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-22 Thread Emilian Huminiuc
On Tuesday 22 March 2011 14:12:45 Heiko Schulz wrote: Hi, I'd Certainly make a case at least for using .dds files with bc5 compression for normalmaps. We lose(?) the alpha channel in the normalmap, but the quality difference is huge. So much as I know is there a mode available,

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-22 Thread Heiko Schulz
Hi, Heiko There is bc3n, but so far I haven't managed to make it behave... :( With Gimp there is Alpha exponent (DXT5) available. The file opened in Gimp shows that transparency is perectly kept, but in FGFS it is not. Maybe just an issue with .dds by OSG? Where are our OSG/ Graphic

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-22 Thread Emilian Huminiuc
On Tuesday 22 March 2011 14:36:12 Heiko Schulz wrote: Where are our OSG/ Graphic specialists when we need them? Probably scared of the coup we're trying to stage here :P... .. whoops, I've revealed our supa' sikrit plan :D

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-22 Thread Martin Spott
Heiko Schulz wrote: Where are our OSG/ Graphic specialists when we need them? Hehe, that's a matter of 'housekeeping': If you're in need of specialists, make sure to care for them, don't scare them away ;-) Have fun, Martin. -- Unix _IS_ user friendly - it's just selective about who

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-22 Thread HB-GRAL
Am 22.03.11 13:36, schrieb Heiko Schulz: Where are our OSG/ Graphic specialists when we need them? Just found: http://www.mail-archive.com/osg-submissions@lists.openscenegraph.org/msg06199.html Cheers, gral -- Enable

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-22 Thread thorsten . i . renk
Okay, to summarize what I take from the discussion and all the tests: 1) Texture types: png seems to be best for load-once, then-keep problems because it has the smallest filesize, but takes a lot of time to load. dds seems to work well for some problems, possibly those involving opaque textures

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-22 Thread Curtis Olson
I think there are a couple more points to consider with .dds format: a) you can pregenerate the lower mip-map levels using a higher quality algorithm than the simple box-filter OSG provides when it generates them on the fly. This can often lead to noticeably better looking models. b) The

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-21 Thread Erik Hofman
On Mon, 2011-03-21 at 13:15 +0200, thorsten.i.r...@jyu.fi wrote: ... and the winner is: The rgb format. To be honest I was expecting this but didn't have proof for it. Remember that the RGB format was developed by Silicon Graphics to be used for OpenGL and it probably resembled at least the

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-21 Thread James Turner
On 21 Mar 2011, at 11:15, thorsten.i.r...@jyu.fi wrote: rgb: filesize 1.7 MB, time to appear 12 s, framerate for rendering 32 fps png: filesize 0.8 MB, time to appear 135 s (!), framerate for rendering 21 fps dds: filesize 1.1 MB, time to appear 13 s, framerate for rendering 20 fps I have

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-21 Thread Emilian Huminiuc
I've been doing some tests with dds textures too, only in the airplane models, and there's an increase in both performance and quality. Take the IAR-80 for example, changing liveries with .png textures takes ~6 seconds, while with the dds texture it takes ~2seconds. The increase in file size is

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-21 Thread Emilian Huminiuc
woops sorry, link was to the last post instead of the right one: http://flightgear.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=118547#p118547 -- Colocation vs. Managed Hosting A question and answer guide to determining the best fit for

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-21 Thread thorsten . i . renk
Maybe you already did this, but this needs a 'average of 3' (or 5) tests, because I would be very surprised if the input file format changes the final frame-rate after loading - it's all uncompressed to the same format in GPU memory, as far as I know. Yes, I checked it (I couldn't believe

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-21 Thread Curtis Olson
Here is one thing to consider when dealing with texture files, OpenGL, and scene graphs (like OSG or PLIB.) OpenGL has a concept called mip-mapping. When a texture is loaded, successively smaller versions are generated automatically using a simple box filter. So if you start with a 256x256

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-21 Thread Heiko Schulz
Hello, Where this can lead to problems is with textures that have transparency (i.e. an alpha channel.)  The box filter scheme of generating successively smaller versions of the texture doesn't work well with the alpha layer.  The transition from fully opaque to fully transparent gets wider

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-21 Thread Curtis Olson
On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 9:52 AM, Heiko Schulz wrote: So this is the explanantion of decreasing fps with textures with transparency? Comparing with other games/sims I'm surprised that it is so much noticeable in FGFS. No, this is another issue I believe. When the opengl system draws a

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-21 Thread Gary Neely
Just to add to the fun, .dds has an added benefit that I didn't see mentioned here-- unlike other formats, .dds has the ability to store textures compressed in memory, not just on disk. This can result in a considerable savings of graphic card RAM. Most .dds formats are lossy though, which

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-21 Thread Emilian Huminiuc
Regarding mipmaps, all the pictures in the post on the forum are done without mipmaps in the dds (-nomips option in nvcompress). Just done a couple more tests, this time with pregenerated mipmaps, and texture loading time when switching liveries is 1s, with instant swithcing in subsequent runs

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-21 Thread Heiko Schulz
Hi, So much of the texture loading time is in fact spent by the gpu (or cpu?) in genertaing mipmaps from the texture.. time we can spend just once when creating the texture. (This is done with a big 4096x4096 texture ;) ) Yep, texture size is higher at the end, but perfomance is better.

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-21 Thread thorsten . i . renk
With the clouds issue, I have this feeling that something is amiss with the way clouds are generated, but i can't put my finger on it.. :(. Thorsten, have you done the same test with individual textures instead of a big one ? Huh? Not sure what you mean, I don't think I have a single

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-21 Thread Emilian Huminiuc
On Monday 21 March 2011 19:53:36 thorsten.i.r...@jyu.fi wrote: With the clouds issue, I have this feeling that something is amiss with the way clouds are generated, but i can't put my finger on it.. :(. Thorsten, have you done the same test with individual textures instead of a big one

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-21 Thread Heiko Schulz
Hello, I don't know what that has to do with xml - it seems generic that if I increase the number of objects to render, the framerate drops. I can see the same thing with trees (which to my knowledge are not xml-wrapped models) - if I increase tree density by a factor 10, I see my

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-21 Thread thorsten . i . renk
Hmm... I did not have found time for a detailed table of fps comparement, but it seems to me that some of your clouds are decreasing fps more than the default 3d-clouds. It looked different to me at the beginning, but making some videos showed me this. If you use default settings, you're

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-21 Thread Vivian Meazza
Heiko wrote, I don't know what that has to do with xml - it seems generic that if I increase the number of objects to render, the framerate drops. I can see the same thing with trees (which to my knowledge are not xml-wrapped models) - if I increase tree density by a factor

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-21 Thread Heiko Schulz
Vivian, I'm right in the middle of texturing a new model. .dds is not an option because it looks as if the loader has some co-ordinate issues. It looks OK in AC3D, but when loaded in FG it's wrong. Should I revert to .rgb rather than use .png? Vivian You have to flip the .dds-texture

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-21 Thread Vivian Meazza
Heiko, -Original Message- From: Schulz [mailto:aeitsch...@yahoo.de] Sent: 21 March 2011 20:35 To: vivian.mea...@lineone.net; FlightGear developers discussions Subject: Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds Vivian, I'm right in the middle of texturing a new model. .dds

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-21 Thread Emilian Huminiuc
On Monday 21 March 2011 23:02:18 Vivian Meazza wrote: A simple vertical flip doesn't seem to work - it looks a bit more like a scaling issue here. Perhaps I need some tool? Use nvcompress from the nvidia-texture-tools: i.e. nvcompress -bc3 -repeat your-flipped-texture.png your-texture.dds If

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-21 Thread Heiko Schulz
A simple vertical flip doesn't seem to work - it looks a bit more like a scaling issue here. Perhaps I need some tool? Vivian Maybe this helps you: http://www.flightgear.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=4t=7225start=135#p118570

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-21 Thread Vivian Meazza
Heiko, Vivian, I'm right in the middle of texturing a new model. .dds is not an option because it looks as if the loader has some co-ordinate issues. It looks OK in AC3D, but when loaded in FG it's wrong. Should I revert to .rgb rather than use .png? Vivian You have to

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-21 Thread Emilian Huminiuc
On Monday 21 March 2011 23:47:51 Vivian Meazza wrote: Here's the AC3D version: ftp://abbeytheatre2.org.uk:2121/flightgear/Tempest/TempestV_AC3D.png And here's what I see in FG: ftp://abbeytheatre2.org.uk:2121/flightgear/Tempest/TempestV_FlightGear.png Vivian That's exactly what me

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-21 Thread Vivian Meazza
-Original Message- From: Emilian Huminiuc [mailto:emili...@gmail.com] Sent: 21 March 2011 22:00 To: vivian.mea...@lineone.net; FlightGear developers discussions Subject: Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds On Monday 21 March 2011 23:47:51 Vivian Meazza wrote: Here's

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-21 Thread Heiko Schulz
That's exactly what me and Heiko were saying, you need to flip the texture vertically, BEFORE converting it to a .dds. I meant BEFOR but did say after... My fault. Oops! -- Enable your software for Intel(R)

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-21 Thread Emilian Huminiuc
On Monday 21 March 2011 23:47:51 Vivian Meazza wrote: Vivian, Here's the AC3D version: ftp://abbeytheatre2.org.uk:2121/flightgear/Tempest/TempestV_AC3D.png And here's what I see in FG: ftp://abbeytheatre2.org.uk:2121/flightgear/Tempest/TempestV_FlightGear.png Vivian The workflow

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-21 Thread Vivian Meazza
I wrote: -Original Message- From: Emilian Huminiuc [mailto:emili...@gmail.com] Sent: 21 March 2011 22:00 To: vivian.mea...@lineone.net; FlightGear developers discussions Subject: Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds On Monday 21 March 2011 23:47:51 Vivian Meazza wrote

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-21 Thread Heiko Schulz
The workflow would be like this, you map the model onto a .png texture. You finish drawing the texture, and before loading it into flightgear these two steps should be the last ones: You flip that texture verticaly (in gimp for example), then you convert the flipped texture to .dds.

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-21 Thread Vivian Meazza
Emilian, On Monday 21 March 2011 23:47:51 Vivian Meazza wrote: Vivian, Here's the AC3D version: ftp://abbeytheatre2.org.uk:2121/flightgear/Tempest/TempestV_AC3D.png And here's what I see in FG: ftp://abbeytheatre2.org.uk:2121/flightgear/Tempest/TempestV_FlightGear.png

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-21 Thread Heiko Schulz
Hi, Makes no difference flipping before conversion or after - Looks OK in AC3D, but not in FG. So it doesn't look like .dds is a proper option without further work. Vivian You must doing something wrong. here for Gimp, assumed that you have the plugin needed already: 1.) UVmap

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-21 Thread Vivian Meazza
Heiko, -Original Message- From: Schulz [mailto:aeitsch...@yahoo.de] Sent: 21 March 2011 22:32 To: vivian.mea...@lineone.net; FlightGear developers discussions Subject: Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds Hi, Makes no difference flipping before conversion or after

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-21 Thread Emilian Huminiuc
On Tuesday 22 March 2011 00:57:07 Vivian Meazza wrote: Nope, doesn't work. But this does: Map the .png file onto the AC3D model as usual - convert the .png into .dds in XnView - load the .dds into AC3D No flipping of vertical required. Perhaps XnView flips it for us? Vivian

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Adventures in dds

2011-03-21 Thread syd adams
Interesting.I just did my own quick test ... converted 1 out of 3 livery (png) files to a dds with Gimp plugin .Had to flip the image vertically before converting. I changed liveries with the dialog , and the 2 png files took several seconds to change , the dds changed instantly.I saw no