posted
Is there any way to prune the Evergreen camp backgrounds from the list in the World Editor? I'm not using any of them and it's annoying to have these names forced onto my list when I don't have them in my worlds scenes directory.
Posts: 1043 | From: Toronto, Ontario, Canada | Registered: Jul 2000
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posted
Try putting "aaa" in front of all your BGs and it will clump them together at/near the top of the list. Posts: 1443 | From: Penn State | Registered: Apr 2001
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posted
there are a few reasons for the low quality:
1. (already mentioned) they need to be stretched to fit the screen size, and if you make the window a weird size, the pixels will have odd shapes
2. The game only uses 256 colours! If you want realism, you want AT LEAST 16bit colour mode... But it is better for some games to have low colour settings because it makes the games MUCH quicker, thus lowering requirements for hardware.
3. The jpegs look pixelated because of 'hashing'... Where it uses several different pixels to try and mimic a colour that you cannot actually have in the limited 256 colour palette. so, if you wanted for instance, purple in a 4 colour mode containing only black, red, blue and green (example), then it would put pixels like blue, red, blue and on the next line red, blue red, like this :p
pretend the smileys are pixels, and if you get far enough back, it should look a sort of bluey yellow colour :P
posted
Background jpegs are first loaded (24 bit color, but with some pixel 'noise') into memory. Then each pixel is converted from 24bit (3 bytes) to 256 color (one byte) by picking the 'closest available color' in the palette. This is where most of the image degradation comes from.
The pixels themselves are not yet resized, so any increased pixellation is an optical illusion brought about by the greater color change between pixels.
Then the image is stretched to fit the current screen size, at which time pixels are duplicated/dropped as needed. This definitely increases the pixellation of the image when displaying a small BG image on a big windows screen.
The world designer has the option of providing a higher resolution JPG in the first place to minimize that part of the degradation, with the attendant increase in download size for the world. I chose 320x256 for evergreen since it was 'good enough' for my esthetic sense (lots to be read into THAT sentence) and resulted in a pretty small download.
A more esthetic world designer might, at the very least, consider using a higher resolution image for the more common/important backgrounds (the well of souls itself, for example).
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But you're stuck with the 256 color palette.
[This message has been edited by samsyn (edited 09-21-2001).]
posted
yeah, if you look at the clouds you can see the big difference. The real clouds have lots of very subtle color differences which require high precision color to visualize. Post 256-colorization each pixel has to be one of a small handful of related colors, so the individual pixels are much more obvious, even though they haven't really changed size (assuming you haven't stretched the screen yet, I mean)
Posts: 10561 | From: California | Registered: Dec 1998
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