Re: [Flightgear-devel] Textures sizes, DDS
On Sunday 06 November 2011 21:08:22 Jacob Burbach wrote: On Sun, Nov 6, 2011 at 7:17 PM, Robert dogg...@googlemail.com wrote: I hope that all you guys involved in the dds transition use nvidia-texture-tools because: 1. It is Free/OpenSource and platform independent 2. The compression quality is much higher than with the dds-plugin for GIMP However, and correct me if I'm wrong, the nvidia tools do not let you use pre-defined mip maps do they? I prefer the nvidia tools if for no other reason than they are command line and I can easily script and automate batch jobs. But if you do need pre defined mip maps I don't believe you have a choice except the gimp plugin..on linux anyway. cheers There is the version of nvidia's dds utilities that can be found here http://developer.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/akamai/tools/files/DDS_Utilities_8.31.1127.1645.exe that can be installed under wine. stitch exe from that package allows you to use custom mipmaps. That's how I've created the forest and grass textures. I've converted each of the mipmaps with nvcompress (with the -nomips option), then I've used stitch.exe to put them together. I've found the gimp plugin to be very unreliable. -- RSA(R) Conference 2012 Save $700 by Nov 18 Register now http://p.sf.net/sfu/rsa-sfdev2dev1 ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Textures sizes, DDS
On Sunday 06 November 2011 13:35:11 Anders Gidenstam wrote: Now that we have per-aircraft repositories I plan to add my source material (blender, svg, datcom, octave, gerris etc files) below a dev directory in the aircraft's repository. Probably further structured in FDM, models, ... subdirectories. If we use a small set of names (I'd suggest dev, development or src) for the base directory of such files it shouldn't be too hard to make the aircraft packaging script(s) omit these files from the release .zip files. I do this now with a folder I call Resources/ in the root of the aircraft directory. I also make a Resources/Local which I add to .gitignore so I can keep non-gpl data with the aircraft on my hard-drive but out of the repository. Ron -- RSA(R) Conference 2012 Save $700 by Nov 18 Register now http://p.sf.net/sfu/rsa-sfdev2dev1 ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
[Flightgear-devel] Textures sizes, DDS
Hi all I just noticed today that the textures folder in scenery growed from 50 MB to ~200 MB. But I don’t see that many new textures ? I read once here that the benefit from getting DDS is also we get smaller file sizes for the textures. But now I see textures like crop (and cropA) DDS files that take ~20 MB. Is this for testing purposes only, or do we use the space we get by splitting aircrafts in near future for the textures ? ;-) Cheers, Yves -- RSA(R) Conference 2012 Save $700 by Nov 18 Register now http://p.sf.net/sfu/rsa-sfdev2dev1 ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Textures sizes, DDS
Hello, I just noticed today that the textures folder in scenery growed from 50 MB to ~200 MB. But I don’t see that many new textures ? I read once here that the benefit from getting DDS is also we get smaller file sizes for the textures. But now I see textures like crop (and cropA) DDS files that take ~20 MB. Is this for testing purposes only, or do we use the space we get by splitting aircrafts in near future for the textures ? ;-) No one said, that the benefit of .dds is smaller file size! The benefit of .dds is, that it can be loaded much, much faster into Video-Ram as mipmaps can be saved directly into the texture. With other formats it has be done seperatly and that's slow. So perfomance has even increased with. Quality compared with other compressed texture-formats like .png is btw. much higher. And Mipmaps also allow some interesting effects which you can see when you enable the use of .dds-scenery-texture in FGFS. Btw. the size of the texture-folder is compared with the aircraft-folder really, really small. Heiko still in work: http://www.hoerbird.net/galerie.html But already done: http://www.hoerbird.net/reisen.html -- RSA(R) Conference 2012 Save $700 by Nov 18 Register now http://p.sf.net/sfu/rsa-sfdev2dev1 ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Textures sizes, DDS
Am 06.11.11 13:50, schrieb Heiko Schulz: Quality compared with other compressed texture-formats like .png is btw. much higher. Hi Heiko What I am thinking about at the moment is: Where are the GPL origins of the new textures ? In the textures folder too ? And btw. there have been only 4 or 5 replacements/additions for covers and now the textures folder is 3 times bigger than for 2.4.0 release ... and when I start to work with the textures, changing some details and send some commits, where is the history of this folder going ? Aren’t we running into the same with git and textures soon? Just a technical question: I know it is not a big deal to convert new textures to .dds format, but when I want to start to work on textures should I convert back to another format and convert to dds again ? Or should I start with origins and where are this origins going to ? Cheers, Yves -- RSA(R) Conference 2012 Save $700 by Nov 18 Register now http://p.sf.net/sfu/rsa-sfdev2dev1 ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Textures sizes, DDS
On Sun, Nov 6, 2011 at 9:10 AM, HB-GRAL flightg...@sablonier.ch wrote: Just a technical question: I know it is not a big deal to convert new textures to .dds format, but when I want to start to work on textures should I convert back to another format and convert to dds again ? Or should I start with origins and where are this origins going to ? DDS/DXT is lossy so in general you would want to use source textures of another (lossless) format and only convert to dds for final distribution. cheers -- RSA(R) Conference 2012 Save $700 by Nov 18 Register now http://p.sf.net/sfu/rsa-sfdev2dev1 ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Textures sizes, DDS
Am 06.11.11 15:22, schrieb Jacob Burbach: On Sun, Nov 6, 2011 at 9:10 AM, HB-GRALflightg...@sablonier.ch wrote: Just a technical question: I know it is not a big deal to convert new textures to .dds format, but when I want to start to work on textures should I convert back to another format and convert to dds again ? Or should I start with origins and where are this origins going to ? DDS/DXT is lossy so in general you would want to use source textures of another (lossless) format and only convert to dds for final distribution. cheers Hi Jacob Thanks, I will do so. And where do I find the lossless origins now in the repo ? Do the origins co-exist in the repo, as png, or as GIMP files ? Cheers, Yves -- RSA(R) Conference 2012 Save $700 by Nov 18 Register now http://p.sf.net/sfu/rsa-sfdev2dev1 ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Textures sizes, DDS
And btw. there have been only 4 or 5 replacements/additions for covers ... Thanks, I will do so. And where do I find the lossless origins now in the repo ? Do the origins co-exist in the repo, as png, or as GIMP files ? Ouch!! 1.) the whole .dds-texture are currently additional in 2.5.0 to the old .png-textures. When using FGFS you have to decide if you want to use .dds or .png via FGRun or comand line. 2.) there have been much, much more replacements/additions. The whole rwy-textures has been converted to .dds, and many other textures as well. 3.) this whole thing is part of current ongoing shader-effects and texture work, announced by Vivian and Emillian here on the list. This can bring us a improved translation shader, more realistic water-effects with ripples, foam etc. depending on wind and rain, a flutter-effect to flags, reflective rwys depending on rain In many cases the original files are the .png. And when new textures added as only .dds then take Gimp, add the .dds-plugin, open the file and see: this is the origin! ;-) Heiko still in work: http://www.hoerbird.net/galerie.html But already done: http://www.hoerbird.net/reisen.html -- RSA(R) Conference 2012 Save $700 by Nov 18 Register now http://p.sf.net/sfu/rsa-sfdev2dev1 ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Textures sizes, DDS
Am 06.11.11 16:32, schrieb Heiko Schulz: And btw. there have been only 4 or 5 replacements/additions for covers ... Thanks, I will do so. And where do I find the lossless origins now in the repo ? Do the origins co-exist in the repo, as png, or as GIMP files ? Ouch!! Ouch ? 1.) the whole .dds-texture are currently additional in 2.5.0 to the old .png-textures. When using FGFS you have to decide if you want to use .dds or .png via FGRun or comand line. 2.) there have been much, much more replacements/additions. The whole rwy-textures has been converted to .dds, and many other textures as well. 3.) this whole thing is part of current ongoing shader-effects and texture work, announced by Vivian and Emillian here on the list. This can bring us a improved translation shader, more realistic water-effects with ripples, foam etc. depending on wind and rain, a flutter-effect to flags, reflective rwys depending on rain I am aware of this, almost. In many cases the original files are the .png. And when new textures added as only .dds then take Gimp, add the .dds-plugin, open the file and see: this is the origin! ;-) Ehrm, this is not a origin I guess, doing this 10 times with a .dds file you will end up with a mystery game instead of flightgear scenery ;-) But maybe I am wrong. Cheers, Yves -- RSA(R) Conference 2012 Save $700 by Nov 18 Register now http://p.sf.net/sfu/rsa-sfdev2dev1 ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Textures sizes, DDS
In many cases the original files are the .png. And when new textures added as only .dds then take Gimp, add the .dds-plugin, open the file and see: this is the origin! ;-) If your using dxt compression, which is why most people use dds, then it is NOT equal to the original image. Amount of degradation will depend on the image, resolution, type of dxt used, etc..but will never be the same or better quality. cheers -- RSA(R) Conference 2012 Save $700 by Nov 18 Register now http://p.sf.net/sfu/rsa-sfdev2dev1 ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
[Flightgear-devel] Textures sizes, DDS
If your using dxt compression, which is why most people use dds, then it is NOT equal to the original image. Amount of degradation will depend on the image, resolution, type of dxt used, etc..but will never be the same or better quality. This applies to every texture file which use compression. So it belongs to .png, .rgb and .jpg as well. I never heard that anyone asked for the source here There is always a degradation, the question is, is it visible to human eyes? -- RSA(R) Conference 2012 Save $700 by Nov 18 Register now http://p.sf.net/sfu/rsa-sfdev2dev1 ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Textures sizes, DDS
Hello, Ouch ? This was regarding about your statement about the 4-5replacements/additionals and maybe I'm wrong, but I think I can read something between your lines. You are not happy with the conversion to .dds-files, right, though you didn't spoke out yet ? With .dds editing and reediting we will indeed have problems, as the qualitity will decrease each time, like you and Jacob said. That means we would need the original raw-texture-file in FGdata as well, which will increase file-size. I guess, that is what you want to say here, right? still in work: http://www.hoerbird.net/galerie.html But already done: http://www.hoerbird.net/reisen.html -- RSA(R) Conference 2012 Save $700 by Nov 18 Register now http://p.sf.net/sfu/rsa-sfdev2dev1 ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Textures sizes, DDS
One could argue that things like dds do not belong in the 'source' data distribution at all, but be generated automatically by some tool when building the 'release' data. For example content devs only work with, and check in/out source imagery, and then run the tool to generate the final dds imagery when needed, ie for testing or release. Many projects work this way, each in their own way, but of course require some set up and tools to make it work. If this would this be a good path for fgfs to try though, I cannot say. Maybe something to think about though. cheers --Jacob -- RSA(R) Conference 2012 Save $700 by Nov 18 Register now http://p.sf.net/sfu/rsa-sfdev2dev1 ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Textures sizes, DDS
On Sun, Nov 6, 2011 at 11:23 AM, Heiko Schulz aeitsch...@yahoo.de wrote: If your using dxt compression, which is why most people use dds, then it is NOT equal to the original image. Amount of degradation will depend on the image, resolution, type of dxt used, etc..but will never be the same or better quality. This applies to every texture file which use compression. So it belongs to .png, .rgb and .jpg as well. I never heard that anyone asked for the source here There is always a degradation, the question is, is it visible to human eyes? Well, not quite-- PNG and SGI/RGB use non-lossy algorithms for compression-- when uncompressed you get back exactly what you put in. They don't degrade the data, so archiving in these formats is fine. Formats like JPG and DDS/DXT use the source data to generate a compressed version, but the new version can't be restored to the exact original data. (Try a comparison between original and compressed versions examined on the pixel level-- it's interesting and revealing.) This means these are not good formats for archiving source material that might be edited later. With lossy formats using high-quality, low-compression settings, you might not visually notice degradation on the first edit, but you will eventually see substantial differences on subsequent edits. Each time you edit from an new lossy-compression source, you lose information, but you do not with the algorithms used by PNG and SGI/RGB. On a personal note, I had a lot of trouble getting co-workers to stop archiving their source images as JPG files. It took a lot of explaining and re-explaining. ;) -Gary -- RSA(R) Conference 2012 Save $700 by Nov 18 Register now http://p.sf.net/sfu/rsa-sfdev2dev1 ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Textures sizes, DDS
On Sun, Nov 6, 2011 at 7:50 AM, Heiko Schulz aeitsch...@yahoo.de wrote: Hello, I just noticed today that the textures folder in scenery growed from 50 MB to ~200 MB. But I don’t see that many new textures ? I read once here that the benefit from getting DDS is also we get smaller file sizes for the textures. But now I see textures like crop (and cropA) DDS files that take ~20 MB. Is this for testing purposes only, or do we use the space we get by splitting aircrafts in near future for the textures ? ;-) No one said, that the benefit of .dds is smaller file size! The benefit of .dds is, that it can be loaded much, much faster into Video-Ram as mipmaps can be saved directly into the texture. With other formats it has be done seperatly and that's slow. So perfomance has even increased with. Quality compared with other compressed texture-formats like .png is btw. much higher. And Mipmaps also allow some interesting effects which you can see when you enable the use of .dds-scenery-texture in FGFS. Btw. the size of the texture-folder is compared with the aircraft-folder really, really small. Heiko Adding to what Heiko mentioned: The main win for DDS, at least from a game design point of view, is the ability to maintain a kind of compression while loaded into the graphics memory. This is (as far as I know) unique to DDS/DXT. It uses an interesting technique where data is loaded as tiny unique blocks that are indexed and mapped to locations within the image as needed. The bottom line is that game designers can pack many more textures into large but still limited memory resources. DDS is relatively fast because it is natively supported by video cards. But if I remember right, for pure speed of loading it's hard to beat good-ol' RGB. -Gary -- RSA(R) Conference 2012 Save $700 by Nov 18 Register now http://p.sf.net/sfu/rsa-sfdev2dev1 ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Textures sizes, DDS
This topic raises a point about distribution of non-critical files. For example, my 1049H Constellation has a number of large files that aren't necessary for flying the plane. I have source PSDs for livery-makers, and Yakko's terrific How-to for flying the 1049H. Both are directly beneficial to interested Flightgear users, but not essential, and both sets are large files (10MB or so each) that would bloat the plane's base distribution. Currently these are maintained and available at my home site. Provided that all materials are GPL, it would be nice to attach them somehow to the plane as a kind of optional secondary download, a sort of 'developers kit'. Does this concept make any sense? Would it be too seldom-used to be worth it? Is it even possible? Or are others already way ahead of me on this kind of idea? I'll stop cluttering up the bandwidth now. :) -Gary -- RSA(R) Conference 2012 Save $700 by Nov 18 Register now http://p.sf.net/sfu/rsa-sfdev2dev1 ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Textures sizes, DDS
On Sun, 6 Nov 2011, Gary Neely wrote: This topic raises a point about distribution of non-critical files. For example, my 1049H Constellation has a number of large files that aren't necessary for flying the plane. I have source PSDs for livery-makers, and Yakko's terrific How-to for flying the 1049H. Both are directly beneficial to interested Flightgear users, but not essential, and both sets are large files (10MB or so each) that would bloat the plane's base distribution. Currently these are maintained and available at my home site. Provided that all materials are GPL, it would be nice to attach them somehow to the plane as a kind of optional secondary download, a sort of 'developers kit'. Does this concept make any sense? Would it be too seldom-used to be worth it? Is it even possible? Or are others already way ahead of me on this kind of idea? Now that we have per-aircraft repositories I plan to add my source material (blender, svg, datcom, octave, gerris etc files) below a dev directory in the aircraft's repository. Probably further structured in FDM, models, ... subdirectories. If we use a small set of names (I'd suggest dev, development or src) for the base directory of such files it shouldn't be too hard to make the aircraft packaging script(s) omit these files from the release .zip files. Cheers, Anders -- --- Anders Gidenstam WWW: http://gitorious.org/anders-hangar http://www.gidenstam.org/FlightGear/ -- RSA(R) Conference 2012 Save $700 by Nov 18 Register now http://p.sf.net/sfu/rsa-sfdev2dev1 ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Textures sizes, DDS
On Sun, Nov 6, 2011 at 3:03 PM, Gary Neely grne...@gmail.com wrote: The main win for DDS, at least from a game design point of view, is the ability to maintain a kind of compression while loaded into the graphics memory. This is (as far as I know) unique to DDS/DXT. There is a texture compression extension that is used to allow storing textures compressed in video memory. I don't know the details of compression used (could be vendor specific), or how it compares to dxt compression which gives you 4x or 8x compression levels though. With dds the artist has control of which compression type to use as well as specifying custom mip maps, which makes it the winner in my book. I see the real benefit of dds as the ability to use a much higher resolution for the same (usually less) memory cost, have user defined mip map images, and faster loading in many cases. Even though it is lossy format, it still allows for a much higher overall quality level with better resource usage in most cases. DDS is relatively fast because it is natively supported by video cards. But if I remember right, for pure speed of loading it's hard to beat good-ol' RGB. Loading dds from disk is usually quite quick due to not needing to decompress it into main memory, generate mip maps, etc. I can personally testify that osg/fgfs can load dds textures several magnitudes faster than the png counterpart...not sure about rgb. cheers --Jacob -- RSA(R) Conference 2012 Save $700 by Nov 18 Register now http://p.sf.net/sfu/rsa-sfdev2dev1 ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Textures sizes, DDS
Am 06.11.11 17:56, schrieb Heiko Schulz: Hello, Ouch ? This was regarding about your statement about the 4-5replacements/additionals and maybe I'm wrong, but I think I can read something between your lines. You are not happy with the conversion to .dds-files, right, though you didn't spoke out yet ? To be clear, I am really happy with .dds and all the new possibilities we get for a better graphics for models and the scenery. A-n-y-t-i-m-e ! ;-) But I didn’t spoke out what Gary, Jacob and Anders write here. This is exactly what I meant and it was no vote against every improvement of the old shaders where I contributed too. Me and myself would be very happy when we get a directory structure with origins (maybe still png’s, state: before compressing) and with deployed .dds files. For models, aircrafts and scenery textures. And when I think that i.e. in one HANGAR you can have only ONE src/dev directory for all your origins, but I will stop now ... I made a small test, taking the crop.dds (20.3 MB here): - crop.xcf (51.2 MB) - crop.xcf.zip (24.6 MB) - crop.png (14.5 MB) Cheers, Yves -- RSA(R) Conference 2012 Save $700 by Nov 18 Register now http://p.sf.net/sfu/rsa-sfdev2dev1 ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Textures sizes, DDS
I hope that all you guys involved in the dds transition use nvidia-texture-tools because: 1. It is Free/OpenSource and platform independent 2. The compression quality is much higher than with the dds-plugin for GIMP Also keep in mind that maybe there are users out there who use OpenSource graphics drivers that don't support S3TC yet because of patent issues. This is one more reason to keep uncompressed/lossless textures alongside with dds textures. Cheers -- RSA(R) Conference 2012 Save $700 by Nov 18 Register now http://p.sf.net/sfu/rsa-sfdev2dev1___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Textures sizes, DDS
On Sun, Nov 6, 2011 at 7:17 PM, Robert dogg...@googlemail.com wrote: I hope that all you guys involved in the dds transition use nvidia-texture-tools because: 1. It is Free/OpenSource and platform independent 2. The compression quality is much higher than with the dds-plugin for GIMP However, and correct me if I'm wrong, the nvidia tools do not let you use pre-defined mip maps do they? I prefer the nvidia tools if for no other reason than they are command line and I can easily script and automate batch jobs. But if you do need pre defined mip maps I don't believe you have a choice except the gimp plugin..on linux anyway. cheers -- RSA(R) Conference 2012 Save $700 by Nov 18 Register now http://p.sf.net/sfu/rsa-sfdev2dev1 ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
