New Stuff

[eternalightwithin]

Poof!

Add another 4,732 more and you can build a house

[DaveW]

If it's a Seagate 1.5 and New Vision is on there, please back up . They have a "bricking" issue, where they turn into bricks.

Nope, but co-incidentally the New Vision backup is on a Seagate. But the 1.5 is Western Digital.

[Paranoid]

What is the particular problem you're having that prevents you from releasing anything?

Was it that ucc seems to fail when it comes to compressing images with transparency into 'S3TC'?

Why not run a modern 'professional' tool to compress all the images into DXT1 (which I think is the one supported in Deus Ex)?

[Jonas]

Deus Ex does not support DXT1 by default, it uses 256 colour pcx.

[Paranoid]

I guess no one really knows what ucc -mergeDXT does (http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/Legacy:S3TC) but I suspect that it tries some sort of DXT1 alike compression without the binary alpha to get better compression rates, this would explain why it doesn't work well with transparency.

With DXT1 the file format itself should be DDS, right? (I'm not a texture artist, just a programmer.)

[DaveW]

The problem is that it doesn't seem to like doing that, I've never been able to get that to work right. And it doesn't like transparency, either.

[Paranoid]

What if you just create the utx files in UT3 with DXT1 textures and use those with Deus Ex?

[DaveW]

Problem then is the drawscale. At the moment I've been manually importing the .PCX files and altering the drawscale parameter to 0.125 usually. The ones I have in all the screenshots aren't DXT1, but the custom OpenGL driver increases the maximum resolution possible. So, if I just have a DXT1 package, all the textures will just be too big.

In a month or so I might have the motivation to pick up this project again. Maybe I could enlist the help of the community to use the method I have so far, just on a larger scale. Basically, importing .PCX files and altering the drawscale parameter. Would work, I just don't have the time/motivation to do that to about 1500 textures . Maybe split across a group of people it would be less tedious. We shall see.

[gamer0004]

If you could get some kind of manual ready by that time I'll help you.

[Paranoid]

So essentially compression isn't required? (Since we all have beefed up graphics cards...)

I can see that the manual labour is a bit tedios (1024x1024 -> 128x128 = 0.125 draw scale, but you need to check the orginal resolution in each case...). But then again, the powers of this community are limitless.

Could you use the ucc -mergeDXT to get the scale right? What I mean is:
1) Create an utx file with DXT1 textures in UT3.
2) Run ucc -mergeDXT with the original utx files against the already compressed UT3 utx.
3) Proper, working utx files. Also there will be unicorns.

Or does it do what I guess it will, just skip the bloody utx files/textures it 'does not want'?

[DaveW]

Well, hopefully not. I haven't run into problems personally but potentially, yes it could go bad because the files are massive. I'd want to test it on my Dad's computer which is 256mb, which is sort of the high-end standard nowadays so it should be ok.

That's the method I did try before, I could never get it to work. That's the method I got recommended to try and no one offered a way of doing it with transparency.

Pretty much all the textures are 0.125, there's few exceptions but I know pretty much all of them. That's what the beta test was going to be for anyway

[justanotherfan]

My 8800GT was more of a high midrange card and is obsolete, but it is 512mb. The current high end seems to be somewhere between 896mb and 1024mb. I'm not sure where the reasonable minimal expectation would be for an upgraded Deus Ex, but probably around 128mb to 256mb.

[Paranoid]

Again, I think the issue with transparency is with the compression method you use and how it handles the alpha channel. DXT1 has two versions, one which lacks alpha channel entirely and one with 1-bit alpha channel.

But yeah, my Radeon x1950 Pro (for AGP bus) has 512MB, so we might survive (as long as you use torrents for distribution).

I guess no one knows how to access the draw scale information of individual textures inside an utx file so we might have hope for a script?

[Jonas]

I guess no one knows how to access the draw scale information of individual textures inside an utx file so we might have hope for a script?

Sure, you can do that in UnrealEd. Dave knows that, it's just kind of a bother to do for 1500 textures

[DaveW]

Again, I think the issue with transparency is with the compression method you use and how it handles the alpha channel. DXT1 has two versions, one which lacks alpha channel entirely and one with 1-bit alpha channel.

But yeah, my Radeon x1950 Pro (for AGP bus) has 512MB, so we might survive (as long as you use torrents for distribution).

I guess no one knows how to access the draw scale information of individual textures inside an utx file so we might have hope for a script?

Filefront allows the upload of large files, so I'd probably just use that. Torrents are slower compared to decent download servers (and me seeding them on my Uni's filtered connection is close to impossible). But even the upgraded renderer doesn't like DXT1's 1-bit alpha channels from my experiments.