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[OrbWeaver]

If you precreate the DDS files, do you still need the TGAs? Perhaps a "low bandwidth" version could be made with just DDS, rather than going TGA -> JPG -> TGA -> DDS which as Fingernail points out will look atrocious.

 

If this isn't an option, how about a downscaled version with textures 256x256 and lower?

[sparhawk]

We can provide a smaller download with JPGs later on when we release. Currently this is not really a worry, is it?

[oDDity]

Yes, dds can get you slightly smaller than JPG before hitting a loss.

a 512 texture saved as a TGA with RLE compression is around 800kb, converted to a DTX1 DDS it is 120kb, converted to a high quaiity JPG with no loss it is 150 kb.

Compressing it again into a winrar file you can almost half that to 80kb.

IT would be quite simple to convert them all back to TGA files though, using a batch script in photoshop, or I'm sure GIMP can do the same thng. There is obviously some difference in quailty between DDs and TGA, or doom wouldn't ship wth dds and tga versions of all the textures.

Anyway, we can get 3gb of textures down to 300mb using DDS and winrar. I see no reason whatever to ship TGA files at all, though, I suppose we can put all the TGA's in a separate rar file for those who want them.

Then of course, there's still all the voices and sounds etc, so it's still goign to be well over 1Gb even with compressed textures.

[OrbWeaver]

DDS works well for a lot of things, but for certain images it produces very nasty artifacts, particularly if you have diagonal lines or smooth gradients in the texture. With normal maps this can be particularly obvious, which is why Doom 3 in High Quality compresses diffusemaps but not normalmaps.

 

You can see what a DDS-only game looks like if you play TDS - all of the textures are DXT1 and some of them look ghastly, particularly when light hits them at a sharp angle.