Compressed Textures Uploaded

[SneaksieDave]

In the hopes of one day getting the texture issues worked out and moving forward, I've gone ahead and used 10% standard compression with PSPro to convert the textures to JPG. They are on the FTP in the textures folder as darkmod_textures_compressed.zip and darkmod_modeltextures_compressed.zip. The archives do not contain the redundant texture folders which still sit in the huge bloated repository (gotta move forward some day - yes it may break some old maps, but are we going to delay and hold off forever?) If we could get the parallel CVS repositories going, it's sure a heck of a lot easier to sync up to 24 Mb than 302 Mb.

 

Hope the effort was worth it, and if not, well better that hoping it gets done by itself.

[New Horizon]

I agree. We really need to get those old textures out of the repository and ditch the old maps. I think we must have enough new ones in there to justify doing that.

 

Wow, 24 megs from 300? That's a huge difference. Finger, you mentioned a lossless compression for tga. If that would at least cut the size in half, I think it would be worth doing. As it stands, it took me around 7 hours to download the entire mod after my files were corrupted by the bad stick of ram. Lets say we work out a plan to each take some of the existing textures and convert them with the lossless TGA compression. That way, it's broken into smaller chunks and won't be a burden on one person.

[SneaksieDave]

Indeed, as it was on this person. Either way, I wouldn't hold your breath...

 

Even if a lossless TGA repository is made some day, I'd still like the JPGs to be used at least for an "ultra lite" repository, for those on dialup. Or for me, if no one else gives a fuck.

[Renzatic]

I can do it for you sometime next week..maybe Monday or Tuesday.

 

What I'll do is make the diffuse and speculars JPG's, but keep the normals as TGA so as not to compromise too much on quality.

[SneaksieDave]

If we're doing more than one parallel CVS download, I'd still like to get the ones I spent nearly two hours converting and uploading (on someone else's cable) into one of their own as well. While I'm at home, trying to get inspired to make anything for this project, I couldn't give a care less about quality loss - I'd rather download a 220kb normal map with stepping (I'm playing at 640X480 as it is, so it happens anyway) than have to download 4Mb after 4Mb normal maps, to 'prevent loss.'

 

Again, an option for ultra-lite, ultra-fast downloads on dialup. People who don't care or are concerned about loss can be bothered with the bloated archives till their heart's content, but I can't. Especially not if we ever see textures come in at faster than the current rate.

[New Horizon]

If we're doing more than one parallel CVS download, I'd still like to get the ones I spent nearly two hours converting and uploading (on someone else's cable) into one of their own as well.  While I'm at home, trying to get inspired to make anything for this project, I couldn't give a care less about quality loss - I'd rather download a 220kb normal map with stepping (I'm playing at 640X480 as it is, so it happens anyway) than have to download 4Mb after 4Mb normal maps, to 'prevent loss.'

 

Again, an option for ultra-lite, ultra-fast downloads on dialup.  People who don't care or are concerned about loss can be bothered with the bloated archives till their heart's content, but I can't.  Especially not if we ever see textures come in at faster than the current rate.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

I'm on DSL and I'm pretty annoyed with the bloated archive myself.

 

@Renz:

 

I've been playing around with jpg and RLE compressed TGA's. There is absolutely no difference in quality that is discernable to the human eye. Saving a 1024x1024 TGA as a 512x512 TGA with RLE, 16 bit yields a 500kb texture.

 

That same texture, left at 1024x1024 set at quality level 10 in Adobe Photoshop will yield a 500kb texture that looks damn near as good as the 3mb version. You get to keep it at 1024 but the filesize is the same as a lossless 512 RLE TGA. I'm sure there is a tiny bit of loss but honestly, it's not visible to the human eye..I can't see it..and if someone is sitting there scaling it up to infinity to see the loss, then that's just silly.

 

I can't justify not saving our textures as JPG after this. As long as we keep a high quality backup on the ftp, I truly believe we should use jpgs.

 

What say you? I'll upload the comparissions if you want to see them?

[New Horizon]

I know the images are too large, do forgive.

 

This is a side by side of the original uncompressed 1024x1024, 3mb pagan floor and a jpg compressed 1024x1024, 500 kb pagan floor.

 

Zoomed to 100%

 

Zoomed to 200%

 

I honestly believe the difference is not worth the savings in download time and repository size. This is something I've wanted to get done for some time. If there are no objections, I would like to remove the old repository this week and also replace the current textures with their jpg equivalents. If we could divide the work into teams, this would be best.

 

Sneaksie, did you change the texture sizes...1024 to 512 or leave them as is? If so, we could pop your versions right in there.

[SneaksieDave]

I left them exactly as is (even the directory structure, restored by hand, each folder... ugh - let me know if there are any errors), so that no one would have to spend more than a minute doing anything more than just unzipping them. The intent was to do it, since it was not getting done.

 

 

Edit: To add, here was the comparison I listed before. The first JPG link seems broken for some reason I don't care to look into, but the second (rugs) work fine. Using Firefox's tabbed browsing, and the CTRL-PGUP and -PGDN hotkeys, I defy anyone to find any appreciable difference at all.

 

http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showt...indpost&p=34309

[New Horizon]

I left them exactly as is (even the directory structure, restored by hand, each folder... ugh - let me know if there are any errors), so that no one would have to spend more than a minute doing anything more than just unzipping them.  The intent was to do it, since it was not getting done.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

I'll go through them and check'em out. Thanks for doing it by the way. Once I've gone through them and confirmed a few things with Renz, I can get to work purging the old repository off of CVS. I'll get renz to make the high quality backup for the FTP. Given the results of testing, I see no need to bother setting up a separate repository. It's just extra work to keep both updated.

[SneaksieDave]

Are we able to? If so, I probably would've just did the CVS commits from my cable-ready friend's house. But I assumed we had to wait on this:

 

http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showt...indpost&p=35777

 

Hopefully just posting this doesn't grind things to a halt.

[New Horizon]

Are we able to?  If so, I probably would've just did the CVS commits from my cable-ready friend's house.  But I assumed we had to wait on this:

 

http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showt...indpost&p=35777

 

Hopefully just posting this doesn't grind things to a halt.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

I think that was under the assumption that some of us would still use the uber hi-res textures but given the quality of the compressed versions, I really don't see a reason to do this. It also has the benefit of being less taxing on our own system resources.

 

Realistically, it's really not that much harder to keep the hi-res versions on the FTP. All of the textures are created hi-res first anyway...it's just a matter of throwing the hi-res version on the ftp and then compressing it for CVS. When the mod is finished, we just zip the FTP repository up and offer it as a separate download for people with high end systems.

 

I really want to push for this as I could likely get the bulk of it finished by Sunday night and then we could move onward.

[Renzatic]

I can easily keep a high res backup on my comp or the FTP...it isn't much trouble to deal with. My biggest concern is how the compressed textures will respond to antialiasing/anisotropic filtering. I dunno if compression artifacts will rear their ugly head and cause weird anamolies when filtered in certain ways. After all, very few if any games have been released that have used jpeg textures exclusively, and I'm wondering if there's a reason for that beyond clarity and crispness.

[New Horizon]

I can easily keep a high res backup on my comp or the FTP...it isn't much trouble to deal with. My biggest concern is how the compressed textures will respond to antialiasing/anisotropic filtering. I dunno if compression artifacts will rear their ugly head and cause weird anamolies when filtered in certain ways. After all, very few if any games have been released that have used jpeg textures exclusively, and I'm wondering if there's a reason for that beyond clarity and crispness.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Well, lets give it a go and see what happens. The textures SneaksieDave posted look just fine when compared to the originals. I can't see any difference, even when I scale them up two or three hundred percent in photoshop. They used some pretty grubby and badly compressed textures in T3. Ours don't look anything like they do.

 

If it's cool by you Renz, I'm going to remove the old texture repository today. Just to get a start on things and I'll remove any broken maps as well.

[New Horizon]

Doing some tests with the jpg textures. Might be some problems with the difuse textures. Hmm.

 

 

edit:

After some further testing...I found it was the normals, which makes sense since they provide the 3d info. They're very touchy.

 

RLE works very nicely on the normals.

[Schatten]

Just a quick note on how the RLE compression works. See here.

 

Obviously, the more "planar" the normal-map is, the better RLE will compress it. So if you create a normal-map that has lots of same colored spaces, you might consider going for a 1024² normal.

 

Brick walls come to mind here.

[New Horizon]

Renz, I think I have come up with the best sollution for this situation. I'll send you a PM about it and we can perhaps work together to see it through.

[SneaksieDave]

Would you be able to post a shot of what the problem looks like? Like I was mentioning before, I already see banding in my D3, because I run at medium settings and 640X480, so it'll probably look like mine. But, if worse, then I guess more complex measures could be in order.

[New Horizon]

Would you be able to post a shot of what the problem looks like?  Like I was mentioning before, I already see banding in my D3, because I run at medium settings and 640X480, so it'll probably look like mine.    But, if worse, then I guess more complex measures could be in order.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

This is what's happening with the normal maps that have been jpegged. From the reading I did on Dworld, doom doesn't like jpegs that much. Especially on the normal maps...but I think I've come up with a solution that will reduce the sizes but keep things simple as it would be a lot more messy to have to create separate formats for normals and diffuse. It won't get the files down to jpeg size...but it should get them well below a meg each.

 

I"m going to run it by renz and see what he thinks.

[Springheel]

Should we be messing with the model skins? I thought this was just for brush textures.

[SneaksieDave]

It's almost half of the bulk, so I converted them as well. It seems a texture is a texture... unless it's a normal map.

[New Horizon]

Should we be messing with the model skins?  I thought this was just for brush textures.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Nope, this is for everything. I'm going to post and pin a topic for a new baseline standard that Renz and I have agreed on to keep the quality relatively high but also increase performance. A nice compromise. I've tested this out on the models/props/textures folder and decreased the size from 70mb to 30mb.

 

Post coming a bit later.

[New Horizon]

Nope, this is for everything.  I'm going to post and pin a topic for a new baseline standard that Renz and I have agreed on to keep the quality relatively high but also increase performance.  A nice compromise.  I've tested this out on the models/props/textures folder and decreased the size from 70mb to 30mb.  We will keep all the original copies on the ftp as a separate download for after the mod is released.

 

Post coming a bit later.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>