D3DFMT_A1R3G3B3 (color depth for texture)

[Pocus]

Hi all!

Does this format exists?

I would like to reduce to the minimum the depth color, but while retaining an alpha channel. I use for now A1R5G5B5 (16 bits) for bitmaps and it looks ok. I would like to goes down, what are the possibilities?
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[Clootie]

Use DXT1 for 4bit per texel, or DXT2-5 for 8bit per texel. DXT1 is 1-bit alpha format.

[czar]

Hey Pocus,

How are things going with Birth of America?

You working on a new project now?

Be keen to hear how the commercial reality is going. How are you promoting the game etc?

[Pocus]

Use DXT1 for 4bit per texel, or DXT2-5 for 8bit per texel. DXT1 is 1-bit alpha format.

thanks, tried the DXT2. Microsoft says its a compressed texture format, but how exactly are spread the RGB pixels in it? Is it 2/3 pixels for each color?

Anyway it slightly reduce my memory usage (the app going from 270 to 250 Mb of max memory usage) but at the expense of a far bigger texturing time (to the point that my cache system is too slow.

I will keep the A1R5B5G5 format, with bmp the texturing is rather fast.

How can I keep reading from the disk the image files? Does a possibility exists to keep the images in memory but untextured and in a very compressed state.

[Pocus]

Hey Pocus,

How are things going with Birth of America?

Hi Czar! Delphisanctuary is still down. Whats going on for you?

Things are going well for BoA. We are nearing the 1000th player. Not a big number when compared to says Gal Civ2 (150 k players minimum) but our break point is very low.

You working on a new project now?

yes, but I can't disclose it

Be keen to hear how the commercial reality is going. How are you promoting the game etc?

the players went to buy our game because of word of mouth and because the team was rather well known from french player (I write articles in several french mags for example). The game was very stable and with a good AI in 1.00 and this helped much. We got some reviews, but not much, as we are still rather unknown and review sites will only publish on games from established companies (at least for the like of gamespot...).

If you sell from small online publishers like Shrapnelgames, battlefront or matrixgames, you should get more coverage, but they will eat 50% of your margin...

Anyway, the most important news is that as our lead designer was already known in the industry (Philippe Thibaut), he contacted successfully big publishers... And one of them will distribute the game in retail! This is a very good news, as we will get a lot more of exposure.

[Clootie]

Use DXT1 for 4bit per texel, or DXT2-5 for 8bit per texel. DXT1 is 1-bit alpha format.

thanks, tried the DXT2. Microsoft says its a compressed texture format, but how exactly are spread the RGB pixels in it? Is it 2/3 pixels for each color?

Anyway it slightly reduce my memory usage (the app going from 270 to 250 Mb of max memory usage) but at the expense of a far bigger texturing time (to the point that my cache system is too slow.

MS has a description on MSDN.
Actually DXT2 & DXT4 formats are [almost] not used now. And it's really strange that you are seeing slowdown with DXTx texture formats - they should be faster to texture from (due to their size). That video card are you using? Maybe slowdown is because you are compresing textures at application run-time? Compressing is actually slow procedure and should be taken offline.

How can I keep reading from the disk the image files? Does a possibility exists to keep the images in memory but untextured and in a very compressed state.

Question doesn't sound right. Can you refrase it?
You can load files containing textures just in any allocated by you memory. And after this (for example) create D3D textures by D3DXCreateTextureFromFileInMemmory()

[Pocus]

Is this not handled by the video card? I mean if the video memory is full and you still add textures to be loaded (from the disk), they goes to the standard memory it seems (as for example I can have 400 mb of textures in memory at a given time, and I have 1 GB of RAM and a 256 Mb in video ram).

[Clootie]

Let's say it's handled by DirectX runtime and/or video card driver. And some of your textures will be probably located in 'AGP' part of system memory.