> > You mean what format ? PPM is very popular in the Unix world, because it is
> > so simple. However as it is uncompressed, it takes up much space.
> Basicly no matter what format you use you have to be able to know the
> color of each individual pixel, so you have to uncompress the data at
> some point.
Yes - for those graphics that are currently in use, which is often only a
small percentage of the total available graphics of a game. Levels might
get boring otherwise :-).
> Also if you notice nearly ever game these days has 1 data file that is
> some sort of compressed (encrypted) structure.
Yes. However a generic compression is not adapted too well to image files.
Images are much more redundant than text files, and they are in a completely
different way. This is why stuff like JPEG compresses so astoundingly well
as compared to just (gzip -9)ing the ppm file.
> So your images will be compressed on disk.
Yes. But pretty inefficiently. Untreated image files that are not
computer-generated (drawn at best) will compress very badly.
> PNG files which are for the most part the smallest lossless image format
> just uses the zip lib to compress the data.
Yes. However - as said - simple 1d-based ecoders like LZH, LZW, LZSS, ...
are not quite adapted to image data, which tends to have 2d relationships
and eventually noise on top of the usable data, which hinders compression.
I am currently doing research on other ways to extremely compress images
(which allow for lossless modes), but that will take a while.
CU, ANdy
--
= Andreas Beck | Email : <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> =
