Thursday, 8 April 2010

New buildings by tidbit + further testing/bugsquashing with Ardor3D version

Pleased to inform you that in the recent weeks tidbit created some nice new 3D content, namely new buildings for a temple and a shop. Thanks! Meanwhile I've been pushing the tests/validation of the ported code, squashing some upcoming problems and bugs. It looks like it is steadily becoming more and more finalized. Latest improvement was the restructuring of the directories containing textures and creating a separated media-raw hierarchy which servers as convenient base for batch converting images to the different detail levels and ultimately to DDS file format. I'm happy to tell that now 98% of the images are converted to DDS with mipmaps with AMD ATi's Compressonator and that all of these finally got their proper detail level versions (high/middle/low/low_png) obsoleting most of the textures found in the 'common' category. The DDS part was hiding some traps for me, for now I had to change to use the Compressonator instead of the GIMP DDS plugin as that one was generating DDS with missing mipmap levels somehow - interestingly it was okay under Linux + ATi, that way I didnt notice until I tested it under Windows where it presented small gaps in the texture. (Another thing that I should rant about is Intel's driver -- works under Linux but the UI part crashes under Windows + Intel GPU... this is still unresolved, funny thing is that if I downgraded to a 3 years old Windows Intel GPU driver the crash went away.)

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