Friday, June 11, 2010

Updates for 10th June 2010

Last set of updates for a few days here.

I've been finishing off the luma blend and the palette restructuring. One thing that happened and that you need to know about was that I ended up removing support for compressed textures. This means dropping a few FPS, but the harsh truth is that texture compression was turning out to be far too much trouble in other areas, and that the loss of quality from it had really started becoming noticeable (especially with Quake's low resolution textures). It was also slowing down loading times a bit too much, but that would have been acceptable if it wasn't for the quality loss.

The images here give a good explanation of the kind of thing that was happening. Not nice.

No need to worry too much about the lost framerate; 1.8.5 still has bags of spare speed in reserve, is still faster than 1.8.4 was in regular gameplay, and will still massively outperform anything else in the big complex scenes.

Additionally, there are some vertex buffer optimizations in the pipeline that should restore the lost frames; not certain if they're going to make it for 1.8.5 but they will come.

Update:

I've been able to work around some of this by selectively enabling/disabling compression based on texture types. A better result.

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