On Wednesday, September 18, 2013 21:06:48 Renk Thorsten wrote: > > - a baseline texture set that is of adequate, but not high quality > > > > (e.g. max 1024x1024 size for landcover, or something else agreed to be > > good enough) to be included by default in the installers > > > > (this would also be friendly to people on older hardware with limited > > > > VRAM) > > > > - high res (and even, ultra-high res) sets, plus a DDS set for those > > > > who want it, which can be downloaded + updated later via terra-sync. > > > > (of course we can have discussions about if the default set should be > > > > really low quality or quite high - but the point is to have levels we > > can switch between centrally ) > > > On the other hand, if ALS is not supposed to be default, I wouldn't save > harddisk space by reducing the visual quality - we want to make a good > first impression for the user. So I would get rid of redundant lowres > textures which have a hires equivalent then. > > I suppose dds can be factored out in any case, as there seems to be a > strong sentiment that dds cannot be default as it doesn't run on Linux > systems with non-proprietary drivers. > > In general, I would definitely like to keep as many textures as possible in > the devel version - when designing regional textures, I find that I really > need material to work with, and many textures can be applied to a > different purpose after a color transformation. Also, it's going to be > rather difficult to package regional textures region by region as many of > them are shared across different regions. > > Hm, I guess in the end I work too much with terrain textures to be really > comfortable with a major change in the way we distribute them - I can see > the redundant lowres bits go, and I can see that the dds set is easily > separable, but I don't really see a grand design beyond. May be just my > personal bias. > > * Thorsten
Hi Stuart, Thorsten, Since I'm the author of most of the high-res PNG textures, I'd like to explain why the texture resolution is not the same for every texture type, and to share my opinion on this subject. When I first started to make textures, I looked for the highest resolution aerial photos which could be used with GPL. Unfortunately, not all ortho imagery had the same quality. Some sets were really good, with high resolution, while others had color balance issues or lower resolutions. For some types of terrain, like wooded areas, crop fields, towns, mixed wood- crop, I have found good images, but in some cases I was not able to extract all textures at the same resolution due to visible artefacts or items which would repeat visibly in an unpleasant way. Rock is a special case since I used my own photos which had a high enough resolution to extract a quality texture. So in the end, we end up with texture sizes ranging from 512px to 2048 px. Of course, ideally we would have all high-res textures the same size, and all low-res textures just scaled versions of the high-res ones. Unfortunately, that was just not possible. Finally, I opted for keeping 2048px textures at this resolution, while other textures had 1024 or even 512px resolution, according to their source. I think that today, with every modern game shipping on full-size DVD's, there should be no problem keeping the high res textures at their original, intended size. The size increase is not dramatically large. At the same time, I'd like to state my opinion that PNG counterparts of all DDS textures should be available in the git repo for development purposes. Even if this increases the size of the repo, I think it's a must since DDS is not an open format easily and losslessly convertible to PNG. My 2c on this matter, Adrian ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ LIMITED TIME SALE - Full Year of Microsoft Training For Just $49.99! 1,500+ hours of tutorials including VisualStudio 2012, Windows 8, SharePoint 2013, SQL 2012, MVC 4, more. BEST VALUE: New Multi-Library Power Pack includes Mobile, Cloud, Java, and UX Design. Lowest price ever! Ends 9/20/13. http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=58041151&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
