Official forums for BZFlag.org

Current CVS builds that use the SDL_image
library can use the following image formats:

PNG
GIF
BMP
PCX
TGA
JPG
GIF
TIF
XPM
PPM
PGM
PBM

*NOTES*
Recognize that most clients will not support file
formats other then PNG. Also, not all file formats
have been tested; and to my knowledge, it has
yet to be tried in a WIndows build.

However, I have a texture I am working on right now, which I will most likely have to scrap (and maybe the model that goes with it). I played with the compression settings in Gimp, which apparently defaults to maximum compression (i.e. 9). The texture file is a UV map which I am not yet even done with, 1024x1024, and it is exactly 1mb in size. If I downsize it to 512x512, which creates an acceptable drop in quality, it is 316.5kb. Not as crisp as 1024x, but not too bad. At 128x, the quality goes totally out the window, but the file size is okay, a mere 25 kb. So basically I don't dare put more than one or two large textures in a map. It would be very easy to have 10mb worth of textures in a map file that comes in at less than 1mb. I don't know how well such a map would even run. Are the textures stored in memory during game time? Uncompressed? Is it even worth it to bother UV mapping anything? Or should one just go with small, repeatable, square textures that come in at around 40kb in size? (I seem to recall that was a figure mentioned in another thread sometime ago). Do more textures cause the game engine to take a performance hit?

The problem I run into with the small square textures is that controlling where they appear is a major pain at best and almost impossible at worst. Would it work better to up one's poly count and basically apply the desired textures to specific faces and control things (more or less) that way?

I apologize if I seem ungrateful. I shouldn't complain. Don't think I fail to appreciate what you have done, because I do. The game is a good one and it IS free. And you guys have done a heck of a job with what you have done so far. The fault is probably mine, I lack the imagination and/or necessary skills needed to work within the available limits. You guys know what you are doing and I am not a programmer and do not have any understanding of what goes into doing what you do. I also know that you must work within limitations as well, precisely because the game IS free and you aren't being compensated in any way for what you are doing.

.....So please take everything I have said previously with a large bag of rock salt...

clients have a max texture size of 512x512 by default. Any texture will be rescaled to that size.

textures are downloaded once and chaced, so it is not too bad if they are not super small.

as trepan said, there is a build option to use SDL_image. I would not count on windows users having that. Since windows builds dont' use SDL.

Jpegs do not have alpha. Jpegs also use lossy compression, they loose quality. In 3d games the textures will allways be scaled by the 3d view, you want the best input quality. PNG is lossless.

there are tools that can compress picures more then the imaging apps can and do. Gimp and photoshop are not the pinacle of image compression.