S3TC

[Kerilkkorn]

I think that in a few days I will have extracted the S3TC textures from the UT packages.
But I know nothing of the way S3TC textures are inserted in the packages, and in wich kind of format : Hi-res .BMP (or .TGA) or in .DDS (compressed).

Any help is welcome, so that I know what kind of format I should use.

[Smirftsch]

u found a way to extract it as 32 bit image ? sure it is 32 bpp depth and not only a 8bpp converted to 32 bpp ? anyway, we should meet in irc

[Kerilkkorn]

unfortunatly at work I cannot connect to IRC, and it is the only net available. (I'm not home)
But yes they are s3tc texture compacted in RGB565 from textures in RGB888 or masked .tga textures.

Every level of mipmap is compacted so they will be extracted as well. Tell me if they are generated during the package making so I won't send them.

Each block of four*four texels are encoded on two DWORD so you get a six time compression compared to 24b BMP (RGB888).

I just have to finish coding my package extractor to retrieve the needed data, decoding is quite simple after that. I have some docs on it if you are interested.

I found the egyptian s3tc level (on a corean page ). I sent you the adress in a mail. Thought you might be interested.
I'ts with it's help that I found the textures. And I checked back on ancient.utx when I got back home.

I'll send you the S3TC extractor when I'll be sure it is working.
:):):):):):):):):):):):):)

[Kerilkkorn]

I was just thinking, the difference between unreal And UT .UTX might just be the package version. Maybe I could rebuild the packages directly without extracting the Compressed textures, because I think we may lose quality by extracting and recompressing them.
Tell me what you think about it...

[Smirftsch]

nope, unfortunately its not the package version; ihe problem is that they merged s3tc textures with normal textures because they used dxt1 --> that causes that they are not ablle to display the s3tc-textures masked --> and because of that they merged the packages to display the necessary textures masked (to use in that case the "normal" packages...)

[Kerilkkorn]

But there is a suport in DXT1 for masked textures. So if our driver really support S3TC (DXT1) we could create our own masked texture and include them in any package with my utility.
Because I will finally be able to rebuild a package wthout using unreal ucc.
This way I won't have to extract and recompress textures and avoid quality loss.
The tool I plan to realease would create a S3TC only package by giving it a UT 2nd CD texture package to read.

[Smirftsch]

umm...somethin must be wrong here, i know the texture compression used in unreal isn't able to dcreate masked dxt1 textues; iif i remember correctly i used for the decompression in the renderer the version which supports it; but if u are really able to create own texture packages without ucc it should be possible to enhance it to dxt3, the changings in the renderer are(u know ) absolutely no problem, to increase quality.

[Kerilkkorn]

DXT1 supports 1 bit alpha texture compression, so if the decompressor is DXT1 compliant the opengl instruction to decompress it should work OK with masked textures even if UCC doesn't support them.
If you want to enhance the texture version to DXT3 that should be possible.

Building a compressed texture package seems easier to me has there are no more palettes and uncompressed texture to save.

While opening the file in my program, every information about the package is saved (ExportTable ImportTable NameTable Package version ....), every mipmap saved alone.
The hardest thing will be, I think, to recompress the indexes (not that hard) and writeback the properties of the objects.

The version of the file will be also needed. What version do you need?

In a first time couldn't we rebuild the package with compressed textures for normal textures, and uncompressed ones for masked textures?

[Smirftsch]

thats the way epic does it, and i don't wanna do it like epic...buaaah -so i suggest to use dxt3, since the original dxt1 standard in unreal was the one without the masking feature...i'd have to look into glext.h to tell it more exactly, its a while ago i used it...and i think we MUST meet in irc tell me in the private forums when i can meet ya, and where to see the first results of your program, maybe its time to kick some ass with a reworked unreal that is much more better than ut - would be the first step and would offer completely new possibilities...and for me the reason to start my work again on the code

[Kerilkkorn]

I'd like to meet you in IRC but the only internet access available is at work and I can't run an IRC client.

But we could set up an hour in the afternoon friday (around 2 pm)and chat using your forum, in the developper board we should be OK.

About the program : Textures are read, palettes are read too, properties are OK, package version 61 is implemented. I just need to write it back, it should be done by friday, I'll send it to you(with sources but no realease until I'm sure it works with every package, wet/fire textures might cause problem....). Palettes will still be saved in this version in order to avoid modifying the name table and export table (just the serialsize and offset will be modified).
And it will be epic fashion (Textures with compressed mimaps will be saved compressed, whereas texture without will be saved uncompressed (seems logical in a first time for me).

For DXT3 we still have format flags unused so we might be able to use them to specify this type of compression.

Did you take a look at the "UT package file format". Almost everything is explained in this file.

[Smirftsch]

the fileversion doesn't matter, thats easy to change in the code; for the program - i won't publish anything of you without ur strictly permission u should know - i think there are a lot of tests necessary anyway, and i'm lookin forward to make first tests with dxt3 - friday at 2 pm ? ill try - yes i read this document about the ut-package-format, yes but i wasn't able to make anything usefull out of it, my work seems to steal to much of my brain-ressources atm...