Loading DX Textures in an imagelist - which is the fastest?

[Sly]

I tried it as you said, and the transparency worked fine. If you could send me a non-working sample, I'll try to find out what is going on.

I think my initial problem was that my transparency colour might have been a little incorrect. Using a sample of black as transparent worked fine.

[Firlefanz]

Hi Sly,

very sorry about the late reply, but I was too busy last weeks and had no time for nothing, sorry! I'll try to make a sample when I am home again, thanks!

I am also using Alpha Channel in one Imagelist now, would that also work? I'll try it.

Firle

[Sly]

It should all work. At least, all the images I have tried worked. I have not specifically tried one with an alpha channel, but since it saves the image as a PNG internally, and PNG supports alpha channel, it should simply work.

[Firlefanz]

I am so busy now, too bad. :x

I made some adds to my Imagelisteditor, it can now Export all imagelists to your format (and lots of other things of course). If you are interested, I can post it. I still need to create a sample, I hope I can do it soon, this weekend I'll have some time.

Thanks again and sorry for not testing it much, but I soon will.

Firle

[Firlefanz]

Hello Sly,

at least I did it and made a sample, which should also calculate the loading time. The result was interesting, but I don't know perhaps I did something wrong. It seems you are loading 2-3 times faster, this would be great. Have to test it with other stuff also.

First my Imagelisteditor (not looking very good now because added some stuff somewhere without care ) It has a button on the right Save filedata, with it you can load an Imagelist and then save it to your new format. I used it to convert a huge imagelist with starships.

http://www.ericbehme.de/download/imagelisteditor.zip

Works very well. Then my sample to load imagelists both ways and calculte the time. It is also very interesting the transparency error I had first is not there anymore, I'll examine further. The file is very big because of the huge imagelists to test...

And please don't anybody use my starship images, most of them are for our next game. Just a sample and I needed a huge imagelist to test.

Perhaps anybody can take a look and say if my results are correct? Would be great.

http://www.ericbehme.de/download/OmegaImageTest.zip

Firle

[Sly]

I'll give it a test when I get home tonight.

[Sly]

I gave it a test. I got ~6.8 seconds for loading the old format and ~2.8 seconds for loading my format. Seems like a decent speed increase if I say so myself.

[Firlefanz]

I had the same. Looks like a very good speed increase to me, thanks Sly.
Did you see that little spaceship at the mouse cursor both times and was it transparent, no black square around it?

Do you think the way of calculating the time was correct (in the source)?

Thanks a lot,
Firle

[Sly]

The time calculation was pretty much right, I think. I didn't look at it too closely, but it looks ok.

Yes, the spaceship was nicely transparent around the edges.

As a side note, I also tried using some other file formats that D3DX can use, such as DDS and TGA. The file with the images saved as DDS was ~60MB, but read in about the same time as the PNG version. The TGA version was around 43MB and once again, read in approximately the same time. So I think we have a winner with what we have.

[Firlefanz]

Woah! We absolutely have a winner.

That DDS stuff I wanted to try, too. But I wouldn't use it either because I am having images that don't have power of 2 in height and width.

But an interesting point. Now I'll translate all my imagelists and see how the loading time is, then I'll try alphachannel and include it into my game and also ask Bobby to include your changes into the CVS. I already made a new topic at DelphiSanctuary butt all were to busy to do some testing, but I am sure they'll be glad if they see the results now.

Very good job done! Thanks again.
I am having two problem with the Omega headers still, both with the SpriteEngine. One is ordering by Z values the other is a custom Collision detection I made myself, both are not running without errors.
Are you also into that stuff? :shock: I worked myself on it and need someone to take a look why it is not working perfect...

But thanks again, this is a very good step ahead for the imagelists!

Firle