Custom menu graphics?

#1 Yes. I've made mine so it just uses textures from a common folder. I store them as .PCX so the end-users can skin it all to their hearts content

#2 Cuz, you know, everyone has a program that can edit PCX files... ;)

There are some good resources on how one can add skinning to Torque's GUI, and controls like GuiBitmapButtonCtrl make it pretty easy to get things looking good even without changing the source.

#3 Very cool.

Hmm.. is it only PCX format that it supports (that's a fairly old format, isn't it? I could swear I remember seeing that back in the early 90s... hmm..)

Anyway.. thank you once again for the info :-)

#4 Rofl 90s? old? Oh man i'm in trouble.

Torque supports several formats like PNG, BMP, JPG, etc. PCX is indeed old, older than 90s. IIRC PCX is one of the very first picture formats and goes back to the amiga days.. Colorpaint? or something. Though my memory might be bad.

#5 Yeah, its old but its still the best. Textures compress to nothing which is important for memory footprint. Once I implemented that and the ability to add alpha, didn't see much point supporting anything else..

#6 Pretty sure PNG compresses better, but i'm no expert on the matter.

#7 If you use PCX due to its small memory footprint, and you mean RAM memory, there's a great amount of chance you're getting things wrong.

Only the image file is compressed. Once it's loaded into memory it gets decompressed, so it doesn't matter which file format you used. It might get compressed again if you use texture compression in the video card.

Sure, torque could store the image in its original compressed format while it's not being used, but I doubt it.

#8 I doubt there's much in it between PNG and PCX, certainly for the style of image I'm working with, and the main reason I chose PCX over other options is that I have code to load them in that fits in a single small file.

I refer to both download size and on-disk footprint, though admittedly the final zip up for install will mitigate the former to a degree. The casual gamer doesn't want 1Gb installs though, I can assure you of that.

I use a small selection of texture formats in my engine but they're usually loaded as either paletised or DXTn so yeah, whilst still small in VRAM, this doesn't depend at all on the originals storage size.

I also doubt Torque uses what you suggest, though it might be workable given a software texture cacheing system and a very fast decompression algorithm such as RLE (with no cache-busting backward references). I wouldn't know for sure - I've never used it.

#9 @John: I think you're thinking of .AIF (Amiga Interchange File (format). PCX was definitely a PC invention but probably from almost as far back. The clue is in the title - or rather, the extension ;)

.LBM ruled the day then, largely thanks to DeluxePaint (that what you're thinking of?) but its compression was poo/non-existent. GIF was far better the LBM all round thanks to its LZW compression but we've all heard the stories of UniSys and their ridiculous attempts to make money from a file format.

#10 DeluxePaint was what I was thinking of.

#11 Heheh... Oh.. I wasn't insinuating anything about anyone's age. If I wanted to be more accurate, I should have said that, in computer terms, PCX is "ancient" :-p

Seriously... I remember that LBM format - Deluxe Paint II Enhanced, was *the* tool, it seemed, among game designers, wasn't it?

In any case, thanks for the feedback.. I'll be sure to keep that in mind when I get around to that part of things.

#12 @Paul: Based on en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCX, your comment that "I refer to both download size and on-disk footprint, though admittedly the final zip up for install will mitigate the former to a degree. The casual gamer doesn't want 1Gb installs though, I can assure you of that." seems a bit odd. It seems like PNG or JPEG2000 would give you significantly better compression than the run length encoding supported in PCX, for any sort of non-cartoony textures.

And if we're talking about Torque, it already supports jpeg, png, and others. I think Paul is talking about a proprietary engine, as Torque spends perhaps a few hundred K of space on the loading code - a size quickly cancelled out by the space you SAVE from having a good compression algorithm.

#13 JPEG is lossy, so thats out. Dunno about JPEG2000 - missed that one completely. I'm a big fan of not having millions of different formats for anything tho tbh, so don't know what the '2000' part brings to the table.

PNG is probably better than PCX generally, but not for me - my game is quite cartoony and uses a lot of solid colour that will RLE very nicely. The fact that code to load all flavours of PCX is a page long whilst PNG is an oracle was also a key factor when starting with nothing.

You should've picked this one:
"Yeah, its old but its still the best. Textures compress to nothing which is important for memory footprint"
which was admittedly over-generalising with my own personal bias :)