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 - here loading times can be reduced at (un?)-reasonable cost of file size. For my particular problem involving transparent textures, rgb seems to work best, so I keep it. The decision what format to use is not a 'one fits all' but must be made according to situation.
2) Texture cache: It seems clear, both by experiment and by Lauri's investigation that such a thing doesn't exist for models loaded from Nasal, possibly also other situations. If we had it, it would speed part of my code by factors O(100). So I'd seriously like to have it... However, since I can't do it myself, the alternative is to live with 'each model reloads the texture'. In this case, splitting multi-model texture sheets into one sheet for each model would possibly gain a factor 3 in speed - which is much less than a factor 100, but much better than 1. Thus, I'd like to know if somebody would be working on a general texture cache system in the future - if not, then I split texture sheets, that's messy but at least a bit faster. 3) xml: Somehow, xml wrappers are extremely bad. However, due to the need to make clouds immaterial and give them a dedicated shader, it's not an option to load the bare ac file. If anyone comes up with a faster way of passing this information, then I'll gladly use it - but for the time being I guess I am stuck with xml wrappers even if that means reduced performance. Using multi-layered models might help here, as then there's only a single xml wrapper to be parsed for 2 or more texture sheets, so maybe a factor 2 is possible here. So, all in all, one can come up with a number of ugly workarounds which would help a bit, although a texture cache for models loaded from Nasal would be the 'big thing' needed here. * Thorsten ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Enable your software for Intel(R) Active Management Technology to meet the growing manageability and security demands of your customers. Businesses are taking advantage of Intel(R) vPro (TM) technology - will your software be a part of the solution? Download the Intel(R) Manageability Checker today! http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-dev2devmar _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
