Remaking backgrounds...

Post by **hellcatv** » Sun Apr 27, 2003 5:36 am

the vega strike nebula does light up randomly if you pay attention--unless that feature somehow got b0rken recently

but y es the nebula mesh is in DIRE need of replacement by a competant modeller

peteyg · Post by **peteyg** » Sun Apr 27, 2003 7:10 pm

yikes!!! Do the backgrounds HAVE to be uncompressed .bmp files!?

There's 70 megs uncompressed worth in that single zip alone!

Post by **hellcatv** » Sun Apr 27, 2003 7:30 pm

they are supposed to be .png files named .bmp

Post by **hurleybird** » Sun Apr 27, 2003 7:38 pm

Yeah, i knew we did something like that for them, but wasnt quite sure what, so i just left them uncompressed, so just save as .png, and then change the file extension to .bmp?

Post by **hellcatv** » Sun Apr 27, 2003 7:40 pm

you gots it, hurleybird

Post by **hurleybird** » Sun Apr 27, 2003 9:03 pm

sweet, i can get pretty much every textures from 10kb-20kb with only a small visible loss in quality.

Post by **hellcatv** » Mon Apr 28, 2003 3:17 am

don't overcompress these things

I would rather have people chew down a few more megs than have terrible quality jpeg artifacts everywhere

and make *SURE* to keep the un-lossyified version somewhere in case people want to modify stuff

Post by **hurleybird** » Mon Apr 28, 2003 3:24 am

i dont think you'l have to worry about losing quality... heres an example, one image is 16Kb the other is 768Kb, just by looking at the quality try to guess which is which

see what i mean?

you can sort of tell... but it takes a while... i think that the massive saving in size justifies the small loss in quality.

Post by **hellcatv** » Mon Apr 28, 2003 3:44 am

ok...well one way or another make sure they're 512x512 not 256x256 (I think these were only 256...correct me if I was wrong or if you just sized them down

I would say go no less than 7 or 8 on the jpeg compression scale
no where near 5 or 6--then most of the info is gone

Post by **hurleybird** » Mon Apr 28, 2003 3:54 am

i think the forum software may have scalled them down... if you click properties it does say 512x512 though... I have no idea what compression factor that is... i found out when i opened a file in universe and then saved it, it auto .jpg'ized the .bmps but retained .jpg format...

how is for quality loss any way? is it aceptable? beacause i find it a lot easier just to open and save in universe then to use photoshop, select the quality factor, ave as .jpg, rename extension to .bmp, of one hundred or so files... unless you know of a good free program for doing stuff like that fast, which would be really awesome!

peteyg · Post by **peteyg** » Mon Apr 28, 2003 4:11 am

I could see a quality difference between the two.

If the compressed one was 16kb as opposed to 700some... i wouldn't mind if it was 32kb, or even like 70kb.

If it's 70kb as opposed to 700kb... that means that the 70megs or so of unccompressed images would shrink down to 7megs. That's still pretty good!

And I bet the quality would be even LESS noticeable at 70kb as opposed to 16kb.

All I'm saying is... you've got plenty of room to bump up the quality from where it is at now, even though where it's at now isn't horrible.

Post by **hurleybird** » Mon Apr 28, 2003 4:32 am

Its more a matter of the amount of time you have to spend in the conversion. The program universe has no quality controls, but is VERY, VERY fast at doing what it does. When your dealing with 100= files that can be a BIG thing.

Post by **hellcatv** » Mon Apr 28, 2003 5:50 am

can you set global compression options

Post by **hurleybird** » Tue Apr 29, 2003 12:28 am

I dont beleive so... what program would allow you to do that?

Post by **hellcatv** » Tue Apr 29, 2003 2:25 am

maybe gimp?

Post by **hurleybird** » Tue Apr 29, 2003 3:51 am

i'll try that... got bored of backgrounds and did a planet...

http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/galle ... s/gasgiant

enlightenment · Post by **enlightenment** » Tue Apr 29, 2003 4:44 am

You're looking for a tool to do batch conversion to JPEG?

Irfanview can do this. Freeware for Win32; http://www.irfanview.com .

Post by **hurleybird** » Tue Apr 29, 2003 5:02 am

thanks!

Post by **hellcatv** » Tue Apr 29, 2003 5:53 am

I wrote a shell script to do it in unix if you need it

Post by **hurleybird** » Thu May 01, 2003 3:57 am

Ifran view can convert all files to JPG, looking at around 40KB per file at 100% quality, so around 7-8 Megs of textures, it can also change the name back to .bmp, but i cant figure out how to do a btach change back to .bmp extension. Anyone know how?

Post by **hellcatv** » Thu May 01, 2003 6:13 am

some unix user could probably write a shell script real easily to do that *G*

Post by **hurleybird** » Thu May 01, 2003 6:28 am

Humm... i wonder if "some unix user" is browsing the forums

Shrike · Post by **Shrike** » Thu May 01, 2003 8:34 am

http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=rename&section=projects

Post by **hurleybird** » Fri May 02, 2003 12:27 am

good finds there... but i still cant find anything that will rub on M$ Windoz... maybe someone with unix could do a batch rename if the 7Mb DL isnt to daunting?

Shrike · Post by **Shrike** » Fri May 02, 2003 12:35 am

This one is a perl script, and perl runs in windows:

http://freshmeat.net/projects/cmv/?topic_id=861%2C253

Vega Strike Forums

Remaking backgrounds...

do you want to see more screen shots of new backgrounds?