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Best 16bit file format

Started by Rock2000 Oct 6, 1999 at 9:17 PM 2 replies 1.2k views

Original Post

Rock2000

Oct 6, 1999 at 9:17 PM

What is the best file format to use in games for high color images? I'm leaning toward pcx, even though it supports 24bit instead of 16 color, it at least compresses it, and its a very simple decompression algorithm. bmp doesn't compress anything except 8 bit images, and it seems most other formats don't compress the data either. Assuming at least a downloadable demo, where size matters (I'm not trying to fill up a CD with umcompressed images

), what would professionals use.

And no patented formats either.

Rock

mutex

Oct 6, 1999 at 7:22 PM

What I did was use BMPs anyway because I'm just too lazy. BMPs are easy to load, but they have no compression, so I used the free ZLib library to compress them, which was really easy. You can get ZLib at http://www.cdrom.com/pub/infozip/zlib

Phillip Schuster

Oct 6, 1999 at 7:30 PM

Hi !!

Well, I also use BMP !! It's easy to load, but they are uncompressed you are right. If you want produce a professionell game it comes on CD, and to fill a cd just with textures is not easy. If you want to provide demos on the new, well, that's no problem with BMPs too, because WinZip (or any other packer) packs them very well, so why not use BMP. And, it really is easy to load BMP into a DirectDraw Surface, especially with so many source flying around on that.

Phillip

Abe

Oct 6, 1999 at 9:17 PM

For my 2D sidescroller, I'm using PCX. I use it because it's almost always smaller than BMP (if your image has lots of colors in it, it'll be about the same size, but most images don't have that many colors.) BMP is easier to load, but when you have thousands upon thousands on different tiles that make up different tilesets in your game, BMP vs. PCX can start to make a big size difference. So I use PCX instead.

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