DDS night tiles issue

[Ripsaw]

Hi Guys,


Somehow my tiles are causing this to occur:






• The tiles are all DXT1a (alpha off) mipmapping enabled.

• H Tiles 512, M 256, L 128

• I'm building 'hand done' night tiles for the city tiles, but not every day tile has a corresponding night tile at this point.

All I'm doing is replacing DDS.

Thanks in advance for you advice.

Cheers!

[Expo]

If i understand it right night tiles are auto created during texcompress.
This means that you have to pick the day tiles, use (in photoshop) the 0-3 palette colors that you want to see at night. put them on the daytiles wherever you like and then run texcompress to test it. Hope this helps.

[Snake Man]

I cant help as so far all our work has based on PCX's which then are converted to DDS with the SeasonSwitcher util.

[ranger822]

Rippy - were you able to fix your problem? If so, how?

Is it easier to do all work in PCX and convert, then perhaps go back and remaster the DDS days tiles? Then the night tiles are done? For a collaborative effort it would seem this might be the most advantageous way to go for other theaters. Anyone else want to comment on this?

Also, just curious - anyone know the max number of tiles for Falcon for RV, Cobra, OF, and AF? If would be useful to know this for collaborative efforts - maybe some exe's would be limited to a lesser number of tiles.

Is it possible to include tiles (tile sets) in the Texture.bin without actually having tiles loaded into the texture.bin? What I am getting at would it be possible to build a very large texture.bin file with lots and lots of theoretical sets, random tiles, and phototile blocks which could be "dropped" into the texture.zip later? I seem to recall that if tiles were listed in the texture.bin they had to be in the texture.zip else Falcon didn't work.

[Sherlock]

Rippy - were you able to fix your problem? If so, how?

Is it easier to do all work in PCX and convert, then perhaps go back and remaster the DDS days tiles? Then the night tiles are done? For a collaborative effort it would seem this might be the most advantageous way to go for other theaters. Anyone else want to comment on this?

Also, just curious - anyone know the max number of tiles for Falcon for RV, Cobra, OF, and AF? If would be useful to know this for collaborative efforts - maybe some exe's would be limited to a lesser number of tiles.

Is it possible to include tiles (tile sets) in the Texture.bin without actually having tiles loaded into the texture.bin? What I am getting at would it be possible to build a very large texture.bin file with lots and lots of theoretical sets, random tiles, and phototile blocks which could be "dropped" into the texture.zip later? I seem to recall that if tiles were listed in the texture.bin they had to be in the texture.zip else Falcon didn't work.

I believe the maximum number of tiles allowed in the texture.bin / texture.zip is determined by the maximum number of tile sets, i.e., 255 sets x 16 tiles each = 4,080 H tiles (plus their accompanying M, L and T tiles).

[ranger822]

Anyone one else have different numbers. 255 sets is rather crummy

I am pretty sure no one except perhaps Com-GP has even tried to approach the max tiles number. But, lets ask here and see.

I think I could be pretty happy if we could have around 10000 unique tiles and say 550 sets. This would give the ability to have the regular tiles for a theater of say around 2000-3000 tiles. But then have 7000-8000 tiles for photo tile projects. Okay call me crazy - but that is what I want. .

[Closter]

I believe the maximum number of tiles allowed in the texture.bin / texture.zip is determined by the maximum number of tile sets, i.e., 255 sets x 16 tiles each = 4,080 H tiles (plus their accompanying M, L and T tiles).

Are you sure, Sherlock? My reading Baldeagle on this:

viewtopic.php?p=171296#171296

...is not that pesimistic. Perhaps, if you have an exe that could use more tiles, and the tools that can use more tiles, then it is possible to make theaters with more tiles. But I can be wrong.

At least, I remember clearly reading in Frugals forum that bms exe could use 16384 tiles. and AFAIK bms.exe ---> RV.exe and bms.exe --->OF.exe

[Sherlock]

I believe the maximum number of tiles allowed in the texture.bin / texture.zip is determined by the maximum number of tile sets, i.e., 255 sets x 16 tiles each = 4,080 H tiles (plus their accompanying M, L and T tiles).

Are you sure, Sherlock? My reading Baldeagle on this:

viewtopic.php?p=171296#171296

...is not that pesimistic. Perhaps, if you have an exe that could use more tiles, and the tools that can use more tiles, then it is possible to make theaters with more tiles. But I can be wrong.

At least, I remember clearly reading in Frugals forum that bms exe could use 16384 tiles. and AFAIK bms.exe ---> RV.exe and bms.exe --->OF.exe

Closter,
yes, Fred changed the utilities to accommodate greater tile numbers but the question is does the exe accommodate that number of unique tiles? No one seems to know the answer to that question because no one has tested it with that high a number of tiles yet (to my knowledge).

[Closter]

I am glad to realise that my memory is not that bad

At least, I remember clearly reading in Frugals forum that bms exe could use 16384 tiles. and AFAIK bms.exe ---> RV.exe and bms.exe --->OF.exe

And this link to support it:

http://forums.frugalsworld.com/vbb/show ... ostcount=8

In case of orphan links:

on your subject of tile number limitations, a quote from BaldEagle.

Quote:
In the current BMS beta the max tiles is coded at 8192. I just bumped it up to 16384 for BMS 2.0. I have no way to test these changes since I don't have a tiles set (texture.zip) with >4096 tiles. Note the limit is on the number of texture.zip tile filenames.
_________________
Fred "BaldEagle" Balding

It's fair, he didn't test it. But the support is in there.

[Closter]

Note the limit is on the number of texture.zip tile filenames.

I didn't understand this first time, but a quick research give me this result:

Number of entries in Zip archive: 64 k (2^16 - 1 entries)

So, given the need of a H, M , L and T versión of the tile, means a limit of (64k-1)/4 = 16383 unique tile names on a Zip file.

But changes in the code could allow the use of a more advanced version of the zip format, not checking that parameter or so...

[Sherlock]

So the increase in tile count/filenames in the texture.zip file is only affective for BMS exe derivative falcon versions aka RV (and OF?) but not AF since it is a SP3/SP4 derivative, right?

[ranger822]

I think we are okay - - the limit isn't the exe - it is the tools . . . maybe a minor change in a line of code - - lets give it a try . . . Fred is still kicking around and so are the other code guys . . . if we run into a problem we can probably it fixed - else we stop

Here is what Fred has to say -

As I told you when I was working on Dudi's photo-realistic tiles,
which extended the number of tiles > 4096, it is the number of SETS
that limits the number of tile to < 4096 (16 tiles per SET time 256 SETS
max. = 4096). So the limit is bound by the utilities, not the F4 exe.
The F4 exe may required a small change (one line) to accept more than
4096 tiles, but this has not been tested or proven to be required.

I have fixed the 3 utilities that require a fix to accept more than 256
SETs. I have made those utilities available to you and others, however
I do not know if anybody downloaded them. They all have the version of
1.55. They were required to look at or work on Dudi's version of the
Israeli Theater tiles. The utilites are Terrainview, PathMaker and
SPTinstall.

What i s the max. tiles limit for the utilities? I don't know. The
theorectical number of tiles is 65536 times 16 = 1,048,576 tiles. The
same holds for the F4 exe. How many tiles can really be handled by the
utilities and F4 exe can only be determined through experimentation.

Fred

http://www.zianet.com/baldeagle2/Downlo ... r-1.55.zip
http://www.zianet.com/baldeagle2/Downlo ... l-1.55.zip
http://www.zianet.com/baldeagle2/Downlo ... .v1.55.zip

Note this version of Terrainview works with both the 2-byte and 4-byte
offsets.


Say thanks to Fred. . . .

[Sherlock]

Ok, let's try it and see what happens!