![]() ![]() 24 or 32 bit) the palette will only contain as few as 4 colors per 4x4 block. Instead of saving the full palette of colors for each pixel (8 bit per channel/ color in tga, i.e. In short: DDS compression works by dividing images into 4x4 blocks and reducing the number of colors. I recommend reading this article about dds compression. If you don't care about all that, then read no further. The gimp plugin is fine for opening dds files though.įrom here on it get's a little technical and NWN doesn't support most of what I lay out here. So, first things forst: I'd like to advise people NOT to use the gimp dds plugin for compression. I read somewhere that it is best to use Preserve alpha test coverage anytime you use alpha, and now I know why.īecause dds is lossy anytime that you edit a dds and recompress it, the entire image will lose quality, so make sure you do all your editing and testing on a TGA in game, then when your texture is done and in its final finished state you compress into a dds, and keep your original TGA/PNG somewhere safe on your pc or on a usb drive, that way if you ever want to go back and edit it you can.Īlso as many people have already said nwn 1.69/diamond edition or anything before NWNEE, DOES NOT support normal dds textures, you have to use the nwndds tool to convert normal TGAs to nwndds or NWN Crunch for the older versions,Īnd so if you do make normal dds textures and export them from GIMP, they are not compatible and will not work with 1.69./diamond edition or anything before NWNEE. Without turning it on, the transparent part of the texture was rendered all black. Oh and on the one texture I have used that had a alpha I had to turn on Preserve Alpha Test Coverage and I kept the Alpha Test Threshold setting at 0.50. I have not played with the mipmap settings much yet, but from what I have read the best mipmap filter is in Kaisers favor, they say you have to test the wrap modes in your application to get the best results with it. I could not find a whole lot of information on the Use perceptual error metric setting, but I read somewhere that it is designed to increase visual quality in compressed dds images. ![]() You can look here: I do not know if it is this bad in every game, but me, I would stick with TGA for the normals for now unless you want all the performance you can get, then go BC1/DXT1. I saw a post on the internet that showed a 256x256 uncompressed looked better and had less artifacts than a 1024x1024 compressed into BC3/DXT5. Ok normal maps are a bit of a pickle right now as the only type of compression that will not mangle a normal map is BC3nm/DXT5nm which NWNEE does not support. If you are using the alpha to blend or anything else use BC3/DXT5, most of the time people will use BC3/DXT5 with a alpha, I just wanted to throw it out there that there are people that say BC2/DXT3 is better for masking. If you are using texture that will have a alpha channel and it will be used as a mask, meaning the pixels of the alpha are mostly all black or all white, which I do not think anything is in nwn, use BC2/DXT3. If you are using a bitmap/diffuse or specular map texture that will not make use of a alpha channel, remove the alpha channel and compress into a BC1/DXT1. So what type of compression should we use? I read around the internet and here is the general Consensus, for getting the best performance and file size without losing to much quality. You can also select "none" on the compression setting, if you do this you will have to select a format, I tested every format and I could not get any uncompressed dds to render properly in NWNEE. This link will tell you "everything" tech and spec wise about the dds format: Īnd here are two more links from people testing and explaining in more normal less tech minded detail here: Īnd here: Guide/Formats/TextureCompression.htmlĪs far as I can tell right now, after testing all the compression types, NWNEE will render BC1/DXT1,BC2/DXT3 and BC3/DXT5 textures with and without a alpha that are exported from the gimp plugin. ![]() So for everyone that does not know, there are several different compression types for dds, here are the ones that show up when you try to export from the GIMP dds plugin. So I did some testing on GIMPs dds import/export plugin to see what all will work in NWNEE, because "The game now supports normal DDS textures without having to mangle the header" was kind of vague, so here are some of the things that I have found out so far. ![]()
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