About DDS type supported by Spark engine

UncleCrunch

Hi,

I have a skybox ready.

The skybox images are dark... space is dark. The images are fine (rendered with Blender) but the DDS compression is a little destructive. That's fine for bright stuff or images with a lot of little details. But a little less fine when it comes to gradients and darkness.

Like this:

As images are in a "emissive shader", the eye catch all the bad gradient stuff made by too much degradation.

So i looked for other compression mode and found all these in paint.NET.

I tried "R8G8B8" but it doesn't seem to render in the editor. So the question is what are the supported compression algorithms in spark ? What should i use ?

Of course, I can go to a higher resolution on the images (1024x1024 to 2048x2048) but it probably won't do the trick. It will just be less visible.

I prefer to ask instead of trying all these. It's kind of a long process...

McGlaspie

Except in special cases you should always use DXT5(RGBA) format for any textures. For a skybox you'll want to use at least 1024x1024 resolution (minimum).
I don't recall offhand or not if Skyboxes are treated as "normal" (Have diffuse, emissive, specular, etc. layers) textures or not. Also, generally speaking Paint.NET does not have good DDS support. As you mention, it tends to over-compress the images. If possible, use Photoshop in conjunction with Nvidia's DDS Plugin. However, this is only applicable to saving the DDS files directly. Typically, you would want to let the Builder utility handle generating the DDS file, because it will run the PSD file through the nvcompress utility. The builder will automatically select the DDS-Type based on what folder your PSD file is saved to. Take a look at the builder_setup.xml file to see what texture generation options are associated with which directory.

GhoulofGSG9

I use mainly DXT1 (for non transperant stuff) and DXT3/DXT5 (for transperant stuff).

More abot DXT here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S3_Texture_Compression

All dds files using DXT work fine with spark

Another interesting fact is that depending on what you use textures get loaded faster ( atleast generally in OpenGL ).

time in seconds 512x512 textures drawn at 768x768 (linear filtering)

in seconds
4.496 rgba8
4.218 dxt3
4.216 dxt5
4.019 dxt1

Soul_Rider

I've gotten funny issues with DXT1 and 3 with transparencies, so I default to always using DXT5 for NS2 textures. I use Paint.net, so I save natively in .dds files, rather than having to use the builder.

DC_Darkling

Well like they said, use DXT5.
For complete info, ARGB8888 (so A8R8G8B8) will create a .dds file you can use ingame. I know, I used them before.. But compared to DXT5 they are HUGE.