Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Nerdiest thing? Freedom Force texture compression theory.

I created an unnecessarily long treatise on textures and compression in Freedom Force. You can read it here on my Freedom Force sub-site. I did this because I wanted to know how best to get my skins out to the people who so desperately crave them, (3 people tops) but I am so dedicated to those few that I struggle with how to better please them. They where not however my core reason for doing this. This is:

It may not be immediately obvious but what I’m getting at is that Minute Man, the main character, has gotten worse looking between the games. The problem is that all the textures in FF1 where at 256 pixels while FFV3R were at 512 pixels. The original characters weren’t upscaled for the sequel but they were compressed in the change to DDS from TGA. I ran the texture from FF1 through a professional level upscaler to 1024px and then compressed to DDS. This is what should have been done when FFV3R from the beginning.