While we're on the subject of texture size, I'll expand a bit on the background issues:
First, there are a couple of technical limitations: power of two sizes, and a maximum texture size of 4096x4096. Getting the technical part out of the way we come to the tricky part. My opinion is that texture size depends very much on the amount of detail that one wishes to provide in the texture, and by the area covered by the texture (the "famous" <xsize> <ysize> tags). One aspect of this is how do the textures look up close. This one's easy to determine dividing the pixel size by the value in the tags. So let's say we have a texture 512x512px that we consider should map a 1024x1024 meters area. Right away we see that a pixel would end up covering a 2x2m area. It's not for me to decide if that's good or bad. This is not so important on textures with general wide features like grass, savanna etc, but it becomes a problem on textures that contain isolated features, for which we know the size from experience, like trees, houses, roads. If these features are present in textures, they'll give false visual cues if they're not scaled properly. Let's take a narrow road for example: it's about 7m wide, you spot one on the ground while flying your Cub and decide to land on it, you do so with some dificulty, and when landed you realize the road is as wide as a freeway. Or you need to do an emergency landing in a field, with no working instruments, and you take as reference that lonely house you noticed there, you land further than expected, in a ditch, as the house was scaled up twice in the texture, and gave you the impresion you're twice as low as you were. For these textures, I think there should be given as much consideration to their scaling, as for how they look and how big they are. To sum it all up: - size should be stricly a power of two. - maximum texture size is 4096x4096 px, though preferred maximum size would be 2048x2048. - size should depend on area covered and amount of detail wanted. - size assignment in materials*.xml should be done carefuly, with respect to real scale. - on-disk size depends on texture size, amount of colour variation in the texture and compression method. (a 4096x4096px texture can be as big as 10 to 30 MB if compressed as png, or ~20MB if compressed as dxt5 .dds, or ~10MB if compressed as dxt1 .dds, figures for .dds given with embedded mipmaps) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ All the data continuously generated in your IT infrastructure contains a definitive record of customers, application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity, and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. IT sense. And common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-novd2d _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
