2004-02-27, 23:53
i've implemented compressed texture support into the latest build of xbmc. this helps reduce the memory used by skins significantly. it does, however, mean that you will need to mind a few points while creating skins.
all textures used are now power of 2 (i.e 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc.) if you supply a non-power of two texture, it will be padded to the next largest power of two. this can result in a large amount of wasted space. for instance a 40x40 texture is padded to 64x64 wasting 2496 pixels - more than half the pixels in the image are wasted. so basically, try to keep your images as close to power of 2 as possible.
png, jpg and gif files are automatically re-compressed on load into an xbox compatible format, this can cause some quality loss, particlarly in the alpha channel. i have added support for dds files to help with this. dds files are loaded without any conversion - whatever you put in the file, you get loaded directly. to create dds files you'll need an app, this util includes a plug-in for photoshop that will let you convert your textures to dds. please note xbmc does not support mipmaps. if you want animation, you'll have to use gifs still.
all textures used are now power of 2 (i.e 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc.) if you supply a non-power of two texture, it will be padded to the next largest power of two. this can result in a large amount of wasted space. for instance a 40x40 texture is padded to 64x64 wasting 2496 pixels - more than half the pixels in the image are wasted. so basically, try to keep your images as close to power of 2 as possible.
png, jpg and gif files are automatically re-compressed on load into an xbox compatible format, this can cause some quality loss, particlarly in the alpha channel. i have added support for dds files to help with this. dds files are loaded without any conversion - whatever you put in the file, you get loaded directly. to create dds files you'll need an app, this util includes a plug-in for photoshop that will let you convert your textures to dds. please note xbmc does not support mipmaps. if you want animation, you'll have to use gifs still.