DeleD Community Edition

WeirdPumpkin · Posted: Thu Jan 13, 2005 12:23 am Post subject: How chance of support for .PNG?

Hi,

I've been using Deled for a little while (although this is my first foray on the forums) and its quickly become my favourite 3d modeller for its excellent ease of use.
Mainly i use it in conjunction with 3Impact (www.3impact.com) a great engine which provides realtime physics, vehicles, ragdolls, volumetric shadows, bump-mapping, etc (no, i don't work for them - it really is worth checking out).

Enough about that, i'm writing to ask about .png support in Deled. So far as i can tell, Deled doesn't yet support the .PNG format. When i try loading a .png texture i get an error message about JPEG!
There doesn't seem to be any info in the forums about this (according to the search) so i'm guessing .PNG is not supported? Question

If not, are there any plans to support this format eventually? Its very useful: you get lossless compression and an alpha channel. With .png and .jpg you'd be covered for everything!

Anyway, its not an urgent issue, but a nice to have in some situations.
Other than that, an excellent editor. Congrats to the Delgine crew. Very Happy

Regards,
WeirdPumpkin.

Jeroen · Posted: Thu Jan 13, 2005 8:41 am Post subject:

Hi there and welcome to these forums! Smile

Support for TGA is going to be implemented. Support for PNG is something we have to make a decision about yet but it sure sounds like a good idea. I'll keep you posted!

Paul-Jan · Posted: Thu Jan 13, 2005 8:49 am Post subject:

First of all, thanks for the kind words!

At the moment, the only two fileformats supported are BMP and JPG, and we are working on TGA. Support for PNG is a very good suggestion (as it is a neat fileformat), and I think we should put it on the todolist. [edit]do note that Jeroen and I did a simultaneous post[/edit]

(The fact that DeleD reports a jpg error when trying to load a .png would be a bug, and as such will be fixed asap Wink

)

Without wanting to bother you with too much technical details, one of the reasons why we stuck to BMP and JPG thus far is that we wanted things to be easy exportable to external (game and rendering) engines. The most commonly supported fileformats for those engines are BMP and JPG, and if we want to support loading of different imageformats, we'll also kinda have to support image conversion as well (no sense in building a level with png's if you can't export it to any engine). But it seems that we are moving in that direction anyway, so maybe I should stop whining and start coding Smile

WeirdPumpkin · Posted: Thu Jan 13, 2005 10:13 pm Post subject:

Thanks guys,

Its good to hear you'll be adding TGA at least, though i hope you decide in favour of PNG too. Smile

Its useful to have at least one format which supports alpha layers and provides some lossless compression. With JPG, BMP and PNG/TGA all bases are covered.
The lossless compression is probably the biggest advantage, since BMPs get so large, and JPG looses so much info to remain small. Let's hear it for PNG!!

( Embarassed

I just noticed i called this thread 'HOW chance of .png?' - what did i mean by that?!? I'm sure i meant to write 'ANY chance of .png?' Must be a late-night type. Oh, the shame...)

Paul-Jan · Posted: Sat Jan 15, 2005 2:23 pm Post subject:

Well, in theory, TGA supports lossless compression as well, but (as previous discussions on this forum learned me) that is not exactly a much-supported fileformat. PNG is, and we will definitely put it on the TODO-list. Will take a little longer than TGA support (as TGA support is 90% done), but at some point in time it will be implemented.

About the thread title, you can always pretend you are not a native english speaker (like a lot of other people on this forum), no-one will notice... Except for the Brisbane location ofcourse Wink