Loads faster than anything else and it uses less vram (1/4 or 1/6).
The downside is that it’s lossy and not suited for every kind of image.
Aye, dxtn is great for texturing in a3d world, where you can get double texture resolution for the same memory. However for 2D where you want 1:1 pixel mappings dxtn just ends up reducing your image quality IMHO.
I beg to differ here. Everything I do is 2D, and I haven’t noticed any noticeable quality loss, nor have my users either. Of course, it depends in the nature of the images, but for what I’ve used so far, it’s done great. Usually, when I hear lossy, I think JPG, but this uses something completely different which seems to work out a lot better.
Take the following image, blown up to 100%. Is there a difference in the leaf? Yes, if you look hard enough. Would you notice it in game with all the action? Unlikely unless you linger around still for a long time. I leave you to decide which one is the original and which is the compressed.
For pixelart it’s certainly bad. But generally I’m rather impressed with the quality. Even vector stuff looks good for the most part. If you zoom in you’ll see lots of color errors at the antialiased edges, but at 100% it looks fine (even at 640x480 on a 19" CRT). The reason for that is that brightness is more important than color. ClearType for example exploits the same weakness of the human eye.
If DXTn is not suiteable, i suggest to use RLE compressed TGAs. Works really fine for me and saves much more space than PNG ^^
Ehm… RLE is inferior to Deflate.
Sure it is, but why not using all features when using tga? Most ppl will deflate it anyway, regardless to the original fileformat size.
I’m also evaluating OpenGL APIs for game development.
I got strange symptoms while running LWJGL demos from the site.
After WebStart loads my CPU load jumps up to 100% and stays there no matter how simple the scene is. I’ve tried running demos at different workstations - all shows the same effect. Am I missing something or 100% load is another “price for crosspatform”?
You can lower the cpu usage with throtteling. Without any throtteling even while(true); will result in 100% usage.
However, 100% usage isn’t really all that unusual for games.
Yup, what oNyx said. Where possible, one can throttle frames rendered to the monitor refresh rate; but if you’re just interested in getting fillrate/throughput performance figures, one runs without throttling to see what the maximum possible FPS is. Like most of the demos.
Cas 