The fact that every single video game out there uses texture compression (it would be literally insane not too) is not the issue. This is a contest where everyones work needs to be compared side by side using the same amount of polygons and texture resolution. There are lots of different compression formats, so going uncompressed is the only way to make sure everyone gets the same amount of pixels. And you will be suprised how far 10 megs of texture resolution gets you. Thats 40 256x256 textures, which is more then enough for 20k polys. In fact, the poly limit really what is going to make this difficult. If I had to budget this out for a game I was working on then I would definately drop my texture memory to make room for a little extra geometry.
UGAC- Master Chamber- Rules
anyone feel like telling me how the I/O system of a graphics card works?
We discussed all this beforehand and the general opinion was 5mb optimized…? I doubled it in my suggestion to DH because I thought it would be cool to see a comp that didn’t really have restrictions other than to stop people from getting in too deep and not finish. I have NO IDEA where the uncompressed part came from. I PM’d Devilhacker about it Friday but as many of us know he has been busy.
If I had it my way:
For the most part the judges in the past are smart and know when you waste texture, have uneven textures, waste polies and so on. A rock solid, well designed PSP model can kick ass compared to a poorly designed hacked out high-def model. More specs doesn’t make your design any better. Do you really need to be assigned limits, or can you manage on your own and put faith into the judges to determine weather you were smart about your usage or not?
hey all this talk about textures, im very new when it comes to creating game-anything, so i normaly save my textures out as targa, just wondering what you have to save your textures out in?
The FAQ says [i]
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The specs it looks like we are shooting at are high end current gen, mid-end next gen (xbox 360, PS3)
256x256 textures were common in games maybe 5 years ago.
The "texture-poly ratio" just isn't realistic. The HL2 room I showed above has less than 5000 triangles and next-gen games are even more likely to have an higher amount of textures per poly because modern stuff like physics and stencil shadows can be very budget consuming if the poly count is high.
I would recommend a texture limit around 80mb (uncompressed) if you guys want to stick to the (mid-end) next-gen specs. That equals about ten 1024x1024 diffuse + normalmap textures. I know this sounds ridiculously high at first, but it's quite normal for games nowadays.…what do i bloody save my as? tiff,jpg what? they are all types of compresstion god answer the question damit.
ASW
so could we save out one texture as a .bmp to show the size of the texture then save out another file as a jpeg or what not and use those in the level and just keep track of out bmp until they add up to 10mb. Would this way work?
ASWDesign, you might be awsome at CG but you won’t make friends here with that attitude. Have you tried reading through the 3 pages yet? Keep track of your uncompressed texture space by saving at bmp. It couldn’t have been said any clearer than this:
TO FIND OUT HOW BIG YOUR UNCOMPRESSED TEXTURE FILE IS
[b][i]SIMPLY SAVE IT AS A .BMP BITMAP FILE.
[/i][/b][left]Titan,
You could do that, although I’m not really sure why. Would it increase render time? I don’t know, but if not I would just suggest sticking with the .bmps. It will just minimize your work flow and save some time.
BTW I know I’m doing a lot of talking here and have no thread yet. I got friends visiting me tomorrow and will be staying for about 10 days. Maybe I will begin this challenge when they leave. I’ll be checking out all the WIPs though.
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I dont think there’s any point in doing that,if we have to save as .bmp to see the file size then you may aswell use the .bmp in the level
here’s a brief test to see what kind of limits we have
saved as 16 bit .bmp from photoshop
still wondering how to make them 8bit though as that should also take the file size down
cool, thanks guys, yea, i will just use the bmp then. And thank you Stefan-Morrell for the list as well, that will be very helpfull when i start figuring up my textures.
You know, I was needing an interior for my first video game anyway. This is a great chance to to try and show off some skills while serving a purpose. And who knows? I may actually win. Doubtful, but still.
Also, does it HAVE to be bitmap? I tend to have a preference for .rgb. Just because I’m not sure bitmap does hold alpha.
yea,I just tried saving a greyscale & 8-bit became available as an option when saving,along with 4-bit,but I’ve read in a couple game texturing books that game engines can palettise a 24 bit image to 8bit(256 colors)
here’s a quote from one of the books “The Dark side of Game texturing” by David Franson
BMP
This is the windows file format,capable of supporting 8-,16-,or 24-bit images.
Some games,such as Half-Life,use this format in 8-bit mode,which is based on a 256 color palette.typically,you create an image in 24-bit color mode;when you save it as a .BMP file,the colors in the image are palettized to 8-bit.
Basically,in a game having 256-bit images is overkill,so having your images converted to 8-bit displays enough colors for the player not to notice–at least for now
although,that book is a couple years old & they arent talking half life2…maybe 16 or 24-bit is the norm these days?
& on that note…what bit depth should a normal map be?
btw,180gee,where did you find that info about the half life2 specs?
I’m guessing before reading the files that textures are to be in a power of two?
and besides, even though i doubt i’ll have the time to do this (as well as the other projects i’m working on atm) that many textures wouldn’t be too hard… a lot of textures can be reused bricks, cement, wallpaper, etc… and they don’t have to be big, you could probably get away with a 256x256 texture with a normal map if the tiling pattern is the right size.
personally, i don’t think this is overly restrictive nessessarily… i mean, they did it for games back in the day when Quake was king, and some of those levels were really fun and absolutely beautiful. if they can do it, certainly we all can as well. (even factoring in Spec, Normal and Self-Illum.
8 bit colour BMPs
are palleted 256 colours.
I can only talk for corelphotopaint,
do your stuff for your textures and export as BMP
re-open BMP, then select image>mode>Palleted(8bit)
another box will open giving you a choice of choosing the new pallet
I usually use optimize, it will depend on how involved the texture is.
test textures have yeilded 258K for a 512x512 tex.
photoshop should have a similar option somewhere.
Sorry for the rude post but it said to check out your texture file sizes in Bitmap so i wasn’t quite sure to use bitmaps or not! got quite fustrated.
another question i see alot of people are using blocked out skel characters in there Env why is this? is this a good idea? where can i get one?
ASW
inserting a character helps indicate scale. yes it is a good idea, I forgot to do so in my blockout… You could make one, i don’t know where to tell you to get one.
Max has a biped built in. You could also get a model from www.turbosquid.com or something, or just make a block that is 6ft tall or something to help with scale.
Also those sizes for .bmps are 16bit, not 24bit, which can lead to color banding.
Which specs you mean? The texture amount or the poly count?
I knew the size of the textures because I’m pretty familiar with the HL2 texture set. I found out the poly count of that room by adding all the poly counts of the props together (you can get them from the model viewer)
I’m still waiting for some opinions about my request of increasing the texture limit.
Again: 10mb are not enough for 20,000 tris. If the master chamber is supposed to be “next-gen” or even “current-gen” a (much) higher texture limit would be appropriate 