Game Development Community

Palletized textures?

by Sean H. · in Torque Game Engine · 04/27/2005 (9:30 am) · 3 replies

Has anyone been able to run torque in 8 bit palletized mode? i recall seeing a preference or global to set this rendering mode but i havent tried it yet. I assume it would require creating all textures in the same application to utilize a similar color pallette.

you may be wondering why im even asking about palletized textures as theyre a very old technology. the reason is because ive found that running at an 8 bit color depth can free up alot of processing while only taking a moderate hit in quality. if this is possible in torque i want to take advantage of it as im targeting a low spec system.

#1
04/27/2005 (10:54 am)
Any takers?
#2
04/27/2005 (10:59 am)
Convert your textures to BM8's. Then load them.
#3
04/28/2005 (7:03 am)
Last night i tried importing paletted textures into the game and it didnt work. i made a simple 8 bit 256 color texture and saved it to .bmp format. i then saved the file to the appropriate directory along with the other textures and added a material mapping statement. i then ran torque in default mode without touching any of the prefs or configs settings. the application ran but i received an error when i tried loading the mission which referenced the .bmp file. the other missions started up fine and when i went to the texture painter, of course my 8 bit texture wasnt in the list.

i then changed the "forcepalette" option to true in both prefs and config, and tried loading the texture again. this time the mission which references the texture loaded fine, but my 8 bit texture still wasnt a part of the list. I could tell that the game was running in palettized mode because the cloud texture looked very pixelated. i assume that this option converts high color images to paletted images but i didnt notice a real difference in the terrain texture.

does anyone know what the "forcepalette" option affects? and is there any way to import 256 color textures into the game in script?