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Hello Mr. Team Daidalos and everyone else.
I'm intrigued by the following dilemma. The custom skin system in IL-2 only allows for 8-bit, 256 indexed colours in the skins. This poses serious limitations to the types of skins that can look good when they are indexed - specifically, all types of gradients are harshly treated by any imaginable indexing methods; either you get hard lines between colours, banding of variable degree, or dithering. None of this is really ideal, so that means custom skins have to have rather simple colour schemes and even then, the quality is always decreased in comparison to true colour, 24-bit depth that pretty much every image editor uses by default and which is usually used for editing the skins (indexing is what I do at the very end of the process, and it always breaks my heart a little). After familiarizing myself a bit with IL-2's internal workings, I discovered to my puzzlement that the game itself has no problems using 24-bit (or rather, 32-bit) textures. In fact, every default skin seems to be a 24-bit colour TGA file with 8-bit alpha masking for damage holes and canopy transparency. The game even goes so far as to make a 32-bit, cached TGA versions of the custom skins that you select, and then it uses them for the graphics. The way I assume it does this is that the game engine reads the bitmap data from the 8-bit skins, converts it to 24-bit and slaps on the alpha channel appropriate for that plane. Now, I understand that there has been a lot of effort into improving the default skins in the game by both TD and modders alike, but these only really improve the default skins shown by the game. Custom skins are left with the, frankly, inadequate option of 256 colours, and since the graphics engine itself has no problems dealing with textures of higher colour depth, this somewhat frustrates me. So, with that background I come to thee with these questions three: Are there, or has there been any plans of expanding skin support to allow for 24-bit textures? If not, is there some technical obstacle for it (such as not being able to do engine modifications on that level)? If it were possible to do, would it be doable for the 4.11 patch? Allowing for TGA or even PNG textures would be a great boon for skinners everywhere. However, I understand completely if no such modification is planned, or if it's impossible; I merely wished to express my interest in the topic and ask if anyone has considered this kind of thing. If it's not in your list of priorities, or is impossible for you to do, then so be it. On a related topic, if you're able to upgrade the graphics system, support for Direct Draw Surface format with DXT compression could reduce video memory usage by a factor of six for RGB, DXT1 textures, and by factor of four for RGBA textures that require an alpha mask. I know the game supports S3TC compression which is technically the same as or very close to DXT compression; however as it's done on the fly, the compression quality is typically by far inferior to the compression done by dedicated utility such as nvDXT. Of course, video memory is rarely the bottleneck for IL-2 1946, but regardless it could be a nice option to have, say, a compressed texture pack around somewhere that could be installed on older PC's with something like 128-256 MB of dedicated video card memory... or even PC's with integrated graphics cards where every piece of VRAM saved can increase performance... Thank you for your time. |
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