DRD Team

Ok something really weird is going on. I wanted to convert some of my true color model graphics to doom's graphics format in order to improve performance, but gzdoom doesn't seem to recognize that format for models (opposed to WIKI article). Test: http://destiny-server.dyndns.org/stuff/test.pk3

wtf.lmp was converted from bark.jpg, and is currently set to be used as a skin, but upon starting the game, console prints that wtf.lmp cannot be found.

I don't know if it is meant to work or if it is a wiki error but have you tried using paletted PNGs instead of JPGs to improve performance? I once got a noticeable improvement with a model that used a large JPG as a skin when I converted it to PNG.

However, the problem of performance only tended to happen on seeing the model for the first time. After that, the skin was cached and everything was fine. If you are getting performance issues beyond the initial sighting of the tree, it might be due to something else. eg the tree model has quite a few "bits" to it and if you are using a lot of them, the slowdown might be due to that rather than the skin.

Well, I use the tree many times so I want to improve performance wherever I can. The model was created with a tree generator, so basically I just had to supply the textures, so I don't have any knowledge on how detailed the model is (apart from the filesize, which is around 300KB altogether). I will try to use paletted PNGs then.

Graphics format only matters during loading. Once in memory they all look the same and shouldn't have an impact on performance.

DoomerMrT wrote:The model was created with a tree generator...

Sounds like it might be useful. Got a link?

Graf Zahl wrote:Graphics format only matters during loading. Once in memory they all look the same and shouldn't have an impact on performance.

I thought that having PNGs with large transparent areas (eg. high res leaf textures) do have impact, since they consume more RAM than eg. a paletted image. That was the reason for the first place that I stopped making my high-res true-color 35FPS weapons, since it took more than 2GBs of RAM.

@Enjay: TreeMagik G3

DoomerMrT wrote:I thought that having PNGs with large transparent areas (eg. high res leaf textures) do have impact, since they consume more RAM than eg. a paletted image. That was the reason for the first place that I stopped making my high-res true-color 35FPS weapons, since it took more than 2GBs of RAM.

Read what Graf wrote again - the keyword here is loading, not memory usage. I believe if you have enough memory for all the graphics (and of course the other stuff like sounds, etc) and a powerful CPU, I guess, then you should be alright. If you max out your RAM, then you have to rely on virtual memory to store the excessive data and the exchange between the RAM and the virtual memory is slow, resulting in these periodic "hangs" whenever the game tries to retrieve something from the virtual memory and swap it for something from the RAM.

Of course, that's what I think is going on, and for all I know, I could be wrong about it since I'm not an expert.

DoomerMrT wrote:

Graf Zahl wrote:Graphics format only matters during loading. Once in memory they all look the same and shouldn't have an impact on performance.

I thought that having PNGs with large transparent areas (eg. high res leaf textures) do have impact, since they consume more RAM than eg. a paletted image.

No, they don't. Internally modern graphics cards cannot handle paletted images so they get all upconverted to 32 bit. Anything less would reduce the display quality.

That's good to know; I will have to cap my models somehow then.