Re: [Dri-devel] Neverwinter Nights // Radeon (R100)?

[Sven L. <lu...@dp...>]

On Wed, Apr 09, 2003 at 01:23:48PM +0200, Roland Scheidegger wrote:
> Sven Luther wrote:
> >On Mon, Apr 07, 2003 at 04:09:44PM -0400, Adam K Kirchhoff wrote:
> >
> >>Something really needs to be done about this lack of S3TC in the DRI
> >>drivers.
> >
> >
> >What about tiping Bioware about the fact that S3TC is not supported and
> >has no chance of being supported by the free DRI drivers ? They have
> >intentions of doing well, and UT2003 also did it that way.
> >
> >We could even post an open letter to all linux game producer (there are
> >not that many of them) to aks them not to use S3TC. 
> 
> Do you mean they shouldn't use it at all? I guess this is not an option, 

Well, at least not in their linux version. There is no real point in
releasing a game most users have problem with, is there ?

> since the games of today simply require some form of texture compression 
> if you want high-resolution textures and don't want a slideshow (because 
> of the constant texture swapping). The memory savings are AFAIK very 
> substantial (factor of 4?).

I personnaly think that we could well implement a decode only S3TC
extension for hardware that support it, and have it just send the
textures straight to the hardware.

For boards not supporting S3TC in hardware, it is much easier for the
game producer to also do the uncompression since they will most probably
have a licence for using S3TC already, and compression is not all that
usefull in these cases anyway.

That said, are there no free compression methods they could use instead ? 

Also, it seems Sonic Blue is in liquidation right now, let's start a
donation box or something such, and try to buy the patent from them, so
there will be no such problems anyway.

> If you mean games shouldn't require it to run (after all, you can always 
> turn down texture detail) then I certainly agree (S3TC isn't a feature 
> of the core spec, so if a game is supposed to run with a OGL 1.3 driver 
> then it probably shouldn't need S3TC) - but both NWN and UT2k3 don't 
> need S3TC to run (UT2k3 required it but this was changed in a patch).

Well the idea was that the game producer are much more likely to get
heard by the eventual S3TC patent holder than we, if they tell them they
cannot use S3TC because it is not implemented in the free DRI driver,
maybe the patent holder, whoever it is, would be a bit more receptive to
our inquiries. 

Friendly,

Sven Luther
> 
> Roland
> 
> 
> 
> 
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