UGAC- Master Chamber- Rules

#21

So you’re actually implying that we can’t use any form of compression that has been used in games since the crack of dawn?

If so, there goes my entry.

#22

Compression is fine and dandy for your disk space, but since textures are uncompressed when they are processed by the video card you need to take that into consideration.

#23

It would appear that the ‘no compression’ slipped past me. So what exactly is a ‘non compressed’ file format? bmp? I dont think I have saved a bmp in over 10 years.

My knowledge of how graphics cards work is very limited.

I just wanted to make game art.

#24

This is my oilpicture , Pls give me instrction , thanks

#25

Aaaand, out of left field…

I think this is the wrong forum for oil painting critiques chenzi1981

Try posting that guy in: Art Techniques and Theories

Nice painting though :slight_smile:

#26

though it is a very nice oil chenzhi1981,good work.

#27

I got really confused, because in the pdf that was downloadable. it says 1,000 triangle limit, then on the main post it says 20,000 triangle limit. In either event here is my submition for the contest. 13,000 triangles!

If anyone finds anything wrong with the way i posted it, let me know!

#28

@broli4000

you have to open a thread for your submissions, which fits the critics mentioned in the starting post.

#29

ahhh ok thanks

#30

This is gold, Gold i tells ya.

ANyway, Im thinking of entering the contest. Im a bit lost when it comes to that uncompressed texture-space-thingy though.

#31

Rules on joint entry?

ie 2 people working on one project?

#32

An image is nothing more than an array (grid) of color values. Each color value (Red, Green, Blue, Alpha) is a byte (8 bits. this means 256 possible shades of each color).

When you compress an image you run it through an algorithm that cuts out information. To uncompress and display an image, you need to run it back through that algorithm. Since that takes processing power, it is faster to simply store the texture uncompressed on the card, so you aren’t wasting gpu cycles decompressing an image.

Hence, why you only get 10megs uncompressed. Because 10 megs compressed could be 100 megs on the card.

DXT5 compression is actually supported by modern (DX8 and up I believe?) video cards, and offers compression that you can put on the card, but since not all cards support that, and some consoles don’t, etc, DH decided to limit it to uncompressed texture space.

But you probably just want to know how to figure out how much space your uncompressed texture takes up.

TO FIND OUT HOW BIG YOUR UNCOMPRESSED TEXTURE FILE IS
SIMPLY SAVE IT AS A .BMP BITMAP FILE.

#33

So this means I could use only one 1024x1024 + normal map and one 512x512 + normal map texture?! In my opinion this is WAY too low for 20,000 tris.

Here’s the analysis of a room in Half-Life 2

  1. 512x512 diffuse map + 512x512 normal map = 2mb
  2. 512 dif + 512 nm = 2mb
  3. 512 dif = 1mb
  4. 256 dif = 256 kb
  5. 256 dif = 256 kb
  6. 512 dif = 1mb
  7. 256 dif = 256 kb
  8. 512 dif + 512 nm = 2mb
  9. 256 dif = 256 kb
  10. 512 dif = 1mb
  11. 512 dif = 1mb
  12. 256 dif = 256 kb
  13. 256 dif = 256 kb
  14. 256 dif = 256 kb

Total is more than 12mb (I didn’t count all the textures in the room and I didn’t count the specular, alpha and illumination maps)

Please note that this is a very small, boring and empty room, far from being a fancy “Master Chamber”. HL2 is almost 2 years old and compared to games like FEAR it’s more “last-gen” than “current-gen”.

I really hope you guys could give us a higher texture limit that makes more sense.

#34

trading poly count for texture space would be not a bad idea: 100 poly’s : 1 mb texture or something.
or triangles… whichever.

#35

I personally would like to see the texture space increased to 20 megs myself, but I think a lot can be done with 10 megs.

#36

or just allow us to use the same-ol texture formats we have been using for the last decade?

Really though, I thought that it was 10 MB of textures, not these mysterious ‘uncompressed’ textures I keep hearing about. I typically want to avoid a tech talk conversations at all cost, but are you guys sure video cards uncompress png, tga, jpg, etc files it is sent? It doesn’t seem logical to me that so much effort goes/has gone into optimizing textures if that all goes out the window anyway.

#37

i agree. 10 megs gets used up pretty quickly with uncompressed textures.

#38

Yes it uncompresses all of those formats. It will read/use compressed .dds files, and they don’t upsample paletted images, but a jpg has to be uncompressed before it’s dropped on the card.

#39

I’m holding out starting this untill we can hear for sure that the texture specs are set in stone.

180gee makes some good points about HL2,

Devilhacker…anychance of using more textures?
is 10mb uncompressed an average for a game environment like this?

when saving .bmp from Photoshop the only bit depths on offer are 16 & up,game engines can palletise them to 8 bit which I’m guessing would make them smaller
my questions is, how do I save a bmp in 8bit?..how do I know what the size of an 8bit tex is in mb?

#40

heh…this discussion must be fairly common in game development,texture artists pleading for more space…more mb…
…more,more,more!