Celestia Forums

deleted

guest jo wrote:Theres a plugin for dds at http://nifelheim.dyndns.org/~cocidius/dds/ .
I have never used a compiler ( except for fortran 77 many years ago).
Can anyone explain to me how I can get this addon into GIMP for Windows XP ?
( I don't ask in the (german) GIMP-Forum they obviously don't like windows users.

If I correctly remember, the main problem is that this plugin only works with GIMP 1.x which noone nowadays wants to use anymore...

I coded my own converter ('texconvert') that works very fast and well both with Linux and Windows. Unfortunately, however,I simply don't have the time to go step-by-step through installation of the DeVIL libraries, setting-up compiler environments etc with Windows users who often (like in your case) are facing compilation (essentially) for the first time.

Usually this generates 'avalanges' of emails: errors and incorrect installation steps have to be located from a distance,...a very time-consuming business. In addition, there are left-over bugs in the DeVIL lib that needed to be located and patched. So people also have to know/learn how to patch and recompile libraries.

Similar experiences arose even from the really very simple task of properly installing and operating CYGWIN (Linux) and its gcc-compiler environment under Windows.

If other experienced people are willing to supervise these steps, of course, I am ready to release my source code any time.

As was discussed at length before, I will NOT release /binary/ Windows versions of my 'texconvert' tool. Because then any bug reports, suggestions for improvements etc will flow back TO ME. In case of source code, its the responsability of its users to apply necessary changes to it.

Bye Fridger

Well, I'm quite unhappy with the devil library myself. I hacked it
some time ago but I still have some problems creating DDS files:

(1) DXT1: Sometimes it core dumps (maybe in 1 out of 1000 cases).

(2) DXT3: Mostly look "funny" when viewed within celestia

I didn't spend much time looking for these bugs because I'm
simply using nvidia's .exe files (under wine) as fallback (via a
perl-wrapper) when devil fails or to create DXT3. But devil is faster
and has no size limit.

I'm interested if somebody has patches for devil that solve
some DDS problems.

I'm software developer (c++, c, perl), using Linux since
version 0.99 at work and at home (SCO Unix before Linux), so
I don't need somebody to hold my hand to apply patches.

As was discussed at length before, I will NOT release /binary/ Windows versions of my 'texconvert' tool. Because then any bug reports, suggestions for improvements etc will flow back TO ME. In case of source code, its the responsability of its users to apply necessary changes to it.

That's quite reasonable.


HJW

hjw wrote:Well, I'm quite unhappy with the devil library myself. I hacked it
some time ago but I still have some problems creating DDS files:

(1) DXT1: Sometimes it core dumps (maybe in 1 out of 1000 cases).

(2) DXT3: Mostly look "funny" when viewed within celestia

I didn't spend much time looking for these bugs because I'm
simply using nvidia's .exe files (under wine) as fallback (via a
perl-wrapper) when devil fails or to create DXT3. But devil is faster
and has no size limit.

I'm interested if somebody has patches for devil that solve
some DDS problems.

...

HJW

My experience with DeVIL strongly varied with its version:

1.6.5 was highly buggy wrto DXT format (except perhaps DXT1). At that time, I used a strongly hacked 1.66CVs version for quite a while. When I ported the code to Windows, I tried the latest 1.6.7 version which had most problems with DXT3,5 fixed. There were still remainig bugs that are however not crucial for the library's functioning: e.g. : although the building of mipmaps is logged, they are actually NOT stored into the DXT archive.

Still the DeVIL library is the only working way of converting really big archives into DXT. NVIDIA's nvDXt command-line tools were incredibly slow until the nvDXT programmer incorporated the DeVIL algorithm as a 'fast' option! For quite a while, I was in extensive email contact with him. Also, until recently at least, >=16k texture conversion was impossible (despite my 3GB of RAM!). So for me the nvDXT tools are entirely uninteresting. I examined the DXT3 quality from the recent 1.6.7 DeVIL /very carefully/ and concluded that it is in no way inferior to that generated by the nvDXT tools.

Bye Fridger

Since we are just talking about GIMP plugins: I compiled the latest GIMP-normalmap plugin with a click and tested it with my latest GIMP 2.2.4 installation under Linux. It's worth noting that it works fast, conveniently and very well with all GIMP versions above 2.0. There is also a nice OpenGL 3d normalmap viewer built in. Surely, it will have more noise than if one starts from a 16bit GRAY levelmap and generates the normalmap with Chris' nm16 tool. But it's really convenient and works well...

Here is the URL (it is even cited on the NVIDIA developer site!):
http://nifelheim.dyndns.org/%7ecocidius/normalmap/


Bye Fridger

gimp dds on win xp

the short is at this point it can't be compiled
gimp biulds on win and so dose gimptool-- for making plunins --
but dds requires linux

i sopose you could do a cygwin build of gimp


as for when i make a dds i have been using direct x sdk tool(it works on images at least up to 16k) or the nvida tool