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legacy-SilverL
10-15-2003, 06:47 AM
As a seasoned mapper, i have to admit that one of the main problems when making a map today, is to make it unique. Thus i have taken on the following idea.

I am a great fan of dark noirish films, especially the use of limited palettes. Animation, comic books and the like being excellent examples. After puzzling over how best to recreate such an atmosphere, i struck upon a great idea; a black and white level. Deviod of any but a few coloured areas (important areas of interest which would be coloured with pastel shades of deep blues, angry reds, and dirty greens.

The first thought that struck me after this was the following: a 32bit texture takes up more memory than a 16bit texture, however a limited palette or even grayscale texture would take up a much smaller amount of texture memory and as a result much more detailed level geometry and textures could be used (eg a standard size of 1024*1024).

Now this wouldnt be a thread without raising a few intelligent points, so here's the first question;

1) Am I talking out of my ass here, and will my texture idea never work (ie the game uses 32bit/16 bit colour already and a limited palette would have a small effect.

2) Assuming I used small amounts of coloured lighting, what sort of impact am I looking at?

Any creative input would be appreciated.

legacy-Mr Evil
10-15-2003, 09:13 AM
Your argument is sound, but it won't work like that because palettized textures are expanded to full 32bit in video memory, so in practice they actually take up more memory than DXT compressed textures.

legacy-Kirin RiotCrash
10-15-2003, 09:32 AM
Palletized graphics generally get upgraded to 24- or 32-bit so it wouldn't make much of a difference if the texture is palletized (P8) or a RGBA8 other than the filesize of the UTX file.

Certain compression methods so cause some odd things to the colours ... a bit like how JPEG compression works but there are three settings (DXT1, DXT3, DXT5) instead of a percentage slider. If you use textures with simple colours, you can try DXT5 instead of DXT3 or 1 to prevent the colours from having artifacts other noticable degradations.