Switching from .png to a more compact file type for textures

[Shadow Wolf TJC]

Perhaps we could reduce the amount of data that Warzone 2100's textures take up by switching from .png to a more compact file type, like .jpeg? I doubt that we'd have much to lose, if any, as we don't seem to make any use of such fancy features like alpha values for textures and such.

Or we could just add support for being able to load different kinds of file types.

[Berg]

as we don't seem to make any use of such fancy features like alpha values for textures and such.

I think you should look into the use of alpha used in textures.

[cybersphinx]

http://sjbaker.org/steve/omniv/jpegs_are_evil_too.html

[Shadow Wolf TJC]

@cybersphinx: Would compressing .jpeg files in, say, a .zip or .rar degrade the quality even further?

[cybersphinx]

No. But it also wouldn't reduce the size any further.

[NoQ]

The same applies to png by the way.

[Emdek]

Shadow Wolf TJC, PNG is one of the best solutions currently available for free, going backwards doesn't make sense.
Also AFAIK data is already optimized using tools like pngcrush.

[aubergine]

You've got to remember that while jpeg might save on overall download size (not that download size really matters much these days) the images always get converted to some sort of bitmap format in RAM for use by the OpenGL engine so it won't save (and could actually use more) VRAM.

[Emdek]

aubergine, yeah, but user visible changes like potential quality loss would be probably more noticeable.

[Jorzi]

I am an artist and I require png
Seriously, it's probably the best format out there, fairly compact with all the needed features. I even save raw video data as .pngs.
Only format which is superior is .exr, which certainly isn't smaller

[Iluvalar]

I am an artist and I require png
Seriously, it's probably the best format out there, fairly compact with all the needed features. I even save raw video data as .pngs.
Only format which is superior is .exr, which certainly isn't smaller

SVG is better when SVG is applicable. A well built, handwritten SVG. Ahh !

Shadow wolf, the PNG files have a nice compression rate considering there is NO LOST in it. It's not rational to increase the texture size if we are about to compress it with JPEG.

However, I never tried yet, but is it possible to use smaller texture files (say 16x16) in a mod ?

[Jorzi]

I know a plugin for blender that allowed svg textures, pretty interesting stuff. Obviously, you can't feed it to the gpu though...
An interesting idea for toon style games would be to have textures saved as svg, rendering them on the fly to a predefined resolution when loading the game.