Quote:
Originally Posted by makman94
Previous posts
yes, but the largest background textures ingame without alpha are ONLY the three-four we mentioned ( CLog.tga , MOrderBgnd.tga , RadioMsg.tga and BackPap2.tga ) so only these three-four can be reduced to 24-bit as concerned the ingame big images. (do you know if there is a way that we can reduce a tga image to less than 24-bit without losing its quality ?).
I insist on the ingame big images becuase i have the sense that all the rest big background images (for the menu screens before entering the game) are not running when you play the game.Is this correct or they are running all the time ?
|
I'm afraid that all textures in the game are loaded into RAM, both from the menu and from the actual game. I think so because copies of these images are in the memory of VRAM, and this usually means that the originals are in RAM at the time of their first use. This probably means that large 2D textures occupy RAM memory even when they are not needed. However, I am not 100% sure about menu background images. However, all 2D simulator images are sure to be in the memory because during screen switching there are no disk operations or caches that could cause re-loading of images from files.
Quote:
Originally Posted by makman94
about the small images-items
can you explain this a little further ? as i get it ,you are saying that we can have an alpha channel without the image being at 32-bit.
|
Some small files working as alpha channel for background images without alpha channel e.g. night filter mask.
You can make even 7-bit gray texture with 1-bit alpha but SH3 engine cannot use that file. The game uses only simple truecolor images with an 8-bit alpha channel or without. You probably can not even apply bitmap compression in files, although I have not tried it. This could give about 25-50% savings for large background textures.
Quote:
Originally Posted by makman94
All of the items that you see at , for example , periscope station need alpha channel (buttons,clock...etc) so, can we have them without being at 32-bit ? Can you give an example of a specific small item that appearing on periscope station and doesn't need an alpha channel ?
|
No. You're right. All overlaid non-rectangular objects taken from textures require an alpha channel.
Quote:
Originally Posted by makman94
this is a very good idea , have you eliminate these crops at your setup ? if yes , what was the gain at ram usage when you are ingame ?
|
Yes, I removed unused texture parts or split to two files with remove crops in menu1024x768.ini. But I did it not for the memory savings because here it would be little or none.
Most savings result from multiple use of the same texture for different purposes and removal of all unnecessary parts of it. For example, a periscope correctly uses a quarter of texture properly rotated using the Crop command with the correct positioning of each quadrant instead of using one huge texture with a small area of transparency as in the older Conus GUI where a large unnecessary red_ws.tga mask with the entire screen size was used for the left upper quarters even without switching off the others. The syntax of menu1024x768.ini allows for a lot of manipulation and even memory savings.