8 bit textures?

[Aloys]

Kind of a weird question:
I was jus thinking about ways to lower texture memory footprints, when my 8bits Myst wallpaper suddenly reminded me how firsts (late 90s) 3D game engines used 8bits textures.. Many (most?) textures can look just as good with a custom 8 bits palette and good dithering, and the difference in file size is huge. I've personally kept this habit of converting images to 8bit because of websites. Most of my pictures are 8bit and most people don't notice.. (although most people may not care either..)

These days all games use 24/32 bits texture formats, but is it still possible to use 8bits formats? Especially in Plasma? I've never heard of DXTC handling 8bit but I might have missed the info..

[Lontahv]

plMipmap has this enum in it (or at least libPlasma's plMipmap class):

Code: Select all

        kColor8Config = 0x0,
        kGray44Config = 0x1,
        kGray4Config = 0x2,
        kGray8Config = 0x8,
        kRGB16Config = 0x10,
        kRGB32Config = 0x18,
        kARGB32Config = 0x20

Looks like Plasma supports 8bit. If it actually works I have no idea.

[Trylon]

I guess we won't know until we see the source

[Tsar Hoikas]

I have a nagging suspicion that plBitmap has not been changed very much since realMyst...

You should note that you can have uncompressed mipmaps, which should allow for you to have 8-bit textures...

(I should write another line that ends in an ellipsis for emphasis's sake...)

[Lontahv]

Actually, I should've put more emphasis on "works". libPlasma is usually never different from Plasma.

[Aloys]

Interesting, that could make for some pretty sizeable texture memory savings.. But then why isn't it used in Uru?

[Lontahv]

Interesting, that could make for some pretty sizeable texture memory savings.. But then why isn't it used in Uru?

Because I think Cyan didn't want Uru to look like Riven... (ditherin' etc.)

[greendragoon]

My experience with dithering (mostly for web) has been that you can get away with it sometimes, but not always. It really depends on how varied the colors in your texture are and how closely it will be observed.