DeleD Community Edition

[cyberyoyo]

Hi
I am seriously considering buying Deled Pro, it's a very nice piece of software despite the quirks (it really needs a UV editor).
But there is one Big problem that is preventing me from buying right now:
Is there a way to store the lightmaps in a graphic format other than Bmp because the simplest meshes give me files of more than 1 Mb. Isn't it possible to use jpg?
This is not usable for a commercial game or a serious project.
At this moment I can't use Deled and I'm obliged to use other softwarre for my lightmapping but they have some other problems....
Thanks for your support

[Daaark]

ifranview is free and will convert your bmps into whatever format you choose and do processing on them as well. Once you have the input and putput folders set, it's like a 3 click process to convert them all over.

I sample down my lightmaps and save as TGA really easily.
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[Mr.Fletcher]

But will DeleD accept the new lightmaps? Their filenames are still stored as .bmp in the dmf file then.
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[Daaark]

[Paul-Jan]

Hi cyberyoyo, and welcome to these forums!

1. Saving a lightmap as .jpg is not an option, because jpg is a lossy file format. As the subtextures within a lightmap need hard boundaries, even the smallest jpg artifact there could end up in very visible artifacts when applying the lightmap.

2. One of the major difference between DeleD's Lite and Pro lightmapping is that PRO gives you control over the lightmap size. By setting a dynamic size for individual surfaces, the total lightmap size can be decreased a lot... in the future we will probably reverse this, so you can affect the total lightmap size directly (and a uniform lumel density will be applied to all surfaces). For most realistically sized scenes, where a lot of smaller polygons are involved, the rigid 32x32 pixel lightmap per surface that Lite offers does end up in huge lightmaps.... as you noticed. We put in this limitation on purpose. To overcome it, you can either roll out your own customized pipeline (like Vampyre did), or go PRO.

3. In the future, DeleD PRO will probably offer the possibility to save lightmaps as PNG. However, this solution is not structurally better than having the resource system of your rendering solution (engine?) uncompress packed .bmp's at runtime... the size in texture memory will be the same. Depending on your rendering solution, this might or might not be easy to implement.

Thanks for your feedback. If you have any more questions, don't hesitate to ask!

[hpesoj]

[Paul-Jan]

Although I do think PNG would be an improvement, I kinda disagree with the "distribution" argument (that was precisely the point I was trying to get across in my previous post). If you are distributing a commercial product, you are not going to be distributing individual texture files (in whatever format they may be). In the worst case scenario, you'll be spreading a single zip-file. More likely the product will be distributed in the shape of an installer, and even after installation you will most likely want to put the textures with most other data in a larger resource (using on-the-fly compression if desired). For online media, similar techniques are common (the Blink3D environment being a good example). But that's just my 2 cents, by all means correct me here!

[jwatte]

DeleD is an editor. Size on disk doesn't matter when editing (unless you get truly enormous). Once you're done with your map, usually you export and convert to some engine runtime format; at that point, you can convert textures to DDS, light maps to I8/RLE, or whatever you want.

[cyberyoyo]

I'm using the B3D format.
OK I managed to convert the files manually and change the b3d file's references to bmp with an hex editor. But it would be better to include it as an option in the editor because it would be much more easy.
Packing/compressing is not always an available solution and even if Jpg is lossy, it should be possible to use it when all the calculations are finalized.
You can use the smaller compression ratio that leaves the file relatively untouched while actually reducing the file size by a strong factor.

[Paul-Jan]

I still feel saving to .jpg is a bad idea. I don't mind shadows loosing a bit of precision, but having light/shadows from surfaces that just happen to be packed near yours into the lightmap leak onto your surface is a scary thought. Then again, Vampyre is happily downscaling his lightmaps too, so we might reconsider this approach.

Could you please explain _why_ file size is so important to you? If your lightmap textures were huge, they are still huge in texture memory.

[Daaark]

I get away with downsampling because I use lanczos filtering, and it manages to keep everything looking good. Best resizing algorythym I've ever seen. I don't get ugly little blurry lightmaps like I would with a billeanear filter, or ugly pixelated crap like a pixel resize.

I always forget to bring that up wih PJ. I think he could make use of that to make 2x sized lightmaps and then lanczos filtering to create the half sized patch on the lightmap image. It would fake higher density maps.

Jpg is a horrible format to use in a game. Jpg was made with real pictures in mind, not stuff that was drawn for a video game. The horrible artifacts the jpg compression creates is not as apparent in real photos so it's okay. But you won't appreciate the crisp,hard edges in your lightmaps turning into ugly grey fuzzy blocks. It's going to create artifacts around all the edges of your lightmapped objects where the borders have erroded showing either highlights or shadows that were meant for another surface, as if your UVs were corrupted.

Even though the jpeg files are smaller on disk, they will still take up the same ammount of ram when they get turned into an RGB array. And the disk space savings will be a lie too, as a 15k file will still eat up at least 32k because of the sector sizes to keep the HD running fast.
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[cyberyoyo]

I'm aiming for the downloadable market. For downloadable games, it is important that the filesize be the smallest possible.
I know that lightmap artifacts can affect the final render very badly, but it's really worth trying when you have to hunt for every byte. I plan to use JPEGs at the highest quality and convert the pictures at the very end of the pipeline.
At worst when a problem appears I wouldn't use JPEG for the lightmap affected.
Well in any case, BMPs are NOT AN OPTION. The smallest BMP is several hundred Kbytes large. I really can't use that.
PNG would be a lesser evil yes but they aren't supported yet (that makes me wonder, how is tranparency supported in Deled?). And PNG are still much bigger in size than JPEG files.
I think you should give the user the option to use the most popular formats for all he wants (BMP, JPEG,PNG,TGA).Give him warnings if you want, but let him set his lightmaps at JPG, that's his problem. Or maybe you could creat a custom format for the lightmaps, with a good lossless compression? That would seem to be the best option.
If it's true that packing/unpacking can save you a little bit of space on BMPs or PNGs, it could probably be an even smaller file with a JPEG image.

[Daaark]

It doesn't matter what formats DeleD supports, you can batch convert your lightmaps into any format you want.

PNGs can compress more than JPGs if your software allows it. I actually have a good example of this, as it came up in another forum where a user was discussing with us on image formats and each of their benefits and drawbacks. I pointed out how PNGs can produce smaller images, and demonstrated that his small, lossy, artifacted compressed JPG (for a sig image) was a whole 75 kb, while this huge image is a little less than 16 kb, at FULL QUALITY.


Also, just look at what is actualy going on in the image. I'm compressing a 29k gradient fully into only 460 bytes.

Think about it.

If you need PNG code, the official library for it, libPNG is free to use.
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[Jeroen]

[Paul-Jan]

... and DDS (PRO only), and transparent solid color materials.