Author Topic: Change pictures format  (Read 10670 times)

Obani

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Posts: 4
    • View Profile
Change pictures format
« on: July 12, 2015, 10:08:13 pm »
Actual pictures are stored with the format Bitmap (.bmp). If it was some compressed format as .png files, it would lose more than 120 Mo of weight (133 Mo to >= 10 Mo ).

Maybe should we change the engine for it accepts .png formats ?

Qon

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Posts: 112
    • View Profile
Re: Change pictures format
« Reply #1 on: July 13, 2015, 01:11:42 am »
What is "Mo of weight"?
What is "Mo to"?

Obani

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Posts: 4
    • View Profile
Re: Change pictures format
« Reply #2 on: July 13, 2015, 08:38:32 am »
Sry : Mo = MegaOctet, the french for MegaBit. So change Mo into Mb ^^

Qon

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Posts: 112
    • View Profile
Re: Change pictures format
« Reply #3 on: July 13, 2015, 01:35:21 pm »
Don't you mean byte instead of bit, and Mb instead of MB? One byte is 8 bits on modern computers...
And I doubt a single screenshot can be 133 MB even if it's a .bmp. Is that a whole folder of screenshots or is your screen resolution over 10 000 x 10 000?
Is "to >=" supposed to be "=>" an arrow? Or do you mean that 133 MB is larger or equal to 10 MB?

Obani

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Posts: 4
    • View Profile
Re: Change pictures format
« Reply #4 on: July 13, 2015, 03:12:04 pm »
Qon : you didn't understand : the texture folder (that contains all the textures) has actually a weight of 140 Mb. One picture actually weighs about 1 Mb.
Bitmap is an uncompressed picture format.
With a compressed format, pictures would lose more than ten times of their actual weight.

Enigma

  • Administrator
  • Jr. Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 68
    • View Profile
Re: Change pictures format
« Reply #5 on: July 13, 2015, 06:58:43 pm »
Hi, Obani

And welcome to the forum  :D

The choice of an uncompressed format was made when we created the Blackvoxel engine some years ago.

In order to display a 3D world, textures must be loaded into the video card memory before the game can be launched.

This mean that all textures must be loaded at game start in memory and send to the GPU in a fully uncompressed format.

Storing textures in a compressed format on the disk means we'll had to decompress them all at game launch, which mean adding some time to the startup delay.

Each game engine could make it's own choice about texture formats depending on a lot of parameters.

As most choices in Blackvoxel engine is focused on speed, we naturally made the choice to trade disk space in exchange of more speed.

Even in uncompressed format, the disk space required by Blackvoxel stay very low. Blackvoxel is taking 180MB on disk when a game like Max payne 3 is taking... 35GB  :o.

That said, it's possible we'll add another texture format for a low footprint version in order to get into USB key game compilation.

The Blackvoxel Team