Celestia Forums

Just installed the latest version of PAINT.NET (beta 3.10)
it supports reading and writing DDS images correctly.
Paint.net is a small but versatile free image manipulation program. Offcourse this works only on windows with .NET installed.
Writing DDS files give you an option to select
DXT1,3,5 or other RGB options (??), compresser-type,
error-metrics and options to generate MipMaps and "color weighted by alpha channel" .


Ren?©

Ren?©,

since good quality DXT-algorithms are rare, it is important to point out that Paint.NET is built against the VERY best one: Squish 1.10 on which also NVIDIA's texture tools 2 are based.

Afterthought:

Why supporting Windows-ONLY software, while the new NVIDIA tools are OpenSource and compile easily for any Operating system...? Just for the "Click of it"? My forthcoming txtools will certainly be using shell scripts for the NVIDIA tools 2 and not for Paint.NET.

Bye Fridger

But why isn't that being done with Gimp?
Because Gimp is said to be the Photoshop of Open Source and works on Windows, Mac, Linux and Unix.

(I assume it supports dds.)

As far as I know Gimp doesn't support
reading or writing DDS files, at least that was the situation a few years ago.

Ren?©

OK , there seems to be a plugin for Gimp ,
but that isn't based on the squish library
as Fridger pointed out to be the very best one.

Besides that,

I don't like the user-interface of Gimp, but ofcourse that a matter
of opinion.

Yes, even the latest GIMP DXT plugin isn't very exciting. Also it's unsuited for handling large files and most of all it doesn't know about the all-important dxt5nm format!

The quality of a given DXT compressor can easily and quantitatively be judged by inspecting the root mean squared difference between the original PNG image and an image that was first DXT compressed and then uncompressed to PNG again.

If DXT was a lossless format that difference should be zero.

Bye Fridger

Okay

well if one wants to go to the trouble of installing .net 1 ,1.1 ,2,or 2.1
you might as well install MS's directX sdk
But i gave up on the dds format ( even 888) do to the very pore / BAD image quality
personly i like the nvidia tools for my mostly unused second system ( win XP)
i have to tell the box to boot into xp otherwise fedora auto boots

John, if have windows XP there's no need to install .NET ,
it is already on your system.
Then, installing paint.net requires only a 1.5 MB download,
it even doesn't require administrator rights installing the software,
and can be easily used as portable software.
Especially the last two items count for me at my work.

Ren?©

do to ms visual studio.net 2002 i have dot net framework 1.1 installed
i do believe that .net 1.1 and .net 2 are incompatible and can not live on
the same box .
also I DO NOT USE DDS and for the most part use xp only for two games
( both Direct x ) and once in a wile to build a program

But some do use dds in celestia ( why), now in a fast paced game it would be fine but not in the slow paced celestia where one can see ALL the artifacts in the image .It is worse than .jpg

i do believe that .net 1.1 and .net 2 are incompatible and can not live on
the same box .

I use Homeseer Home Automation software and have .net 1.1 and 2 on my XP Home box. It was explained to me at the HS forum that if a program needed 1.1 it would use that. If it needed 2.0 it would use that. But have not seen, or heard, of any conflict with them on the same box.
Tim

png and jpg rule!!!!!!!!!

(and mayby jp2 will rule too in about 10 or 30 years from now!!!!, jp2 can do lossless compression)

duds26 wrote:png and jpg rule!!!!!!!!!

(and mayby jp2 will rule too in about 10 or 30 years from now!!!!, jp2 can do lossless compression)

You should have a look at the performance of my high-quality DXT format VT tiles! Don't forget this format works with HARDWARE support unlike PNG and JPG!

DXT5nm is virtually indistinguishable from PNG except it works many many many times faster.

So just be happy with your : png and jpg rule!!!!!!!!!

You are missing much of the fun. PNG is a very good LOSSLESS format, no doubt. I always work with it. But NOT for production runs of huge Celestia textures.

Bye Fridger