posted 06-15-2002 07:39 PM               

The idea is that instead of posting zipped .tga's online, people would post zipped .tpak files, but then there would be the added hassle of uncompressing once you've downloaded it.

The question is, given the choice of a 750k download and a quick unzip, and a 450k download and an unzip that takes twice as long, which would you choose?

posted 06-16-2002 12:25 PM               

However if you wanted the format to be supported by third party programs (such as Texture Edit) then you will need to make the source code for the format available.

------------------

John "IconJohn" Jones
http://www.croftsgate.co.uk
iconjohn@croftsgate.co.uk

posted 06-16-2002 03:17 PM               

What I had was this: TGA files are arranged like this: (sort-of)

pixel1 R value, pixel1 G value, pixel1 B value, pixel2 R value, pixel2 G value, pixel2 B value etc etc etc...

And I thought - hey, what if instead of writing the RGB values of a red pixel 84 times, why not write them once, and then an integer, 84? Well, I did it, and it worked, and the resulting file size was smaller.

(it's kind of like the difference between doing 3+3+3+3+3+3, or doing 3x6.)

So I very pleased with myself, until I zipped a regular .tga and a .tpak file generated by my program. They were both the same size. What had happened was that the .zip software was only able to conpress my .tpak file by 50%, and the .tga by 80%.

All I did was cheat WinZip out of some compression.