Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 8.2
Grayscale banding patterns for 24-bit, 16-bit, and 8-bit depths.
that artists will choose the biggest format every time, so some gentle incentives might
be needed to get them to optimize their art along the way. Just like programmers,
artists tend to be perfectionists in their craft.
Using Lossy Compression
A discussion of art storage wouldn
t be complete without taking a look at the effects
of using a lossy compression scheme such as JPG. The compression algorithm tweaks
some values in the original art to achieve a higher compression ratio, hence the term
'
as
one of your choices. Beyond a certain threshold, the art degrades too much to get
past your QA department, and it certainly won
lossy.
It
'
s not a mistake that if you spell-check the word lossy you get
lousy
'
t get past the artist who spent so
much time creating it.
Perhaps the best approach is to get artists to decide how they
'
ll save their own bit-
maps using the highest lossiness they can stand. It still won
t be enough, I guarantee
you, because they are much more sensitive to subtle differences than a consumer, but
it
'
'
s a start.
Data Sizes for Textures
Texture storage is one of the big budget areas for games. They take up the most space
second only to audio and streaming video. Character textures for high-definition
console games like Gears of War can be as large as 2048 × 2048. They also have mul-
tiple layered maps for specular and emissive effects that weigh in at 512 × 512 or
1024 × 1024. This starts to add up extremely quickly.
An uncompressed 1024 × 1024 texture is going to take 2MB to 4MB in memory,
depending on whether it is a 16-bit or 32-bit texture. Most of your level geometry
 
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