Re: [Flightgear-devel] DDS texures (Was: Improving random trees &

[Emilian H. <emi...@gm...>]

On Sunday 15 January 2012 12:34:43 Mathias Fröhlich wrote:

> Well, I hope that we can get rid of the compression.
> Can somebody with the apropriate tools convert the compressed textures to
> non compressed ones? That could still be dds, but dds without these
> compressions that produce the warning. So no problem with cubemaps in dds
> as long as the compression is not there.
> Then *everybody* is again able to use this stuff.

There are a couple of isue with that though. Biggest one is it will increase  
disk/RAM usage by at least 4 times, if not 8 depending on texture/compression 
method used. That basicaly negates all the advantages of the dds format, 
except for the embeded mipmaps.

Is that acceptable? I remember some complaints about base package size 
increase, and also repository size increase.

btw: Tools for dealing with any of the dds compression formats, and access to 
them is freely available under the MIT licence.
http://code.google.com/p/nvidia-texture-tools/

> 
> So, I am not entirly against moving this to an other log level, but at first
> I think it is good to tell that this will only work for a few people. And I
> think it's good to see this *immediately*.
> 
> Mathias
> 

I believe the numbers are a bit reversed here, and the vast majority of users 
has no issues with displaying these textures. But I agree there's an issue 
with (un)available support for these extensions in the OSS drivers (be they 
nvidia/intel/ati).

Regards,
Emilian