Low-Quality Textures thoughts

[clintbellanger]

dorkster recently added a config toggle for High/Low quality textures. This refers to the transparency of textures -- full alpha (8 bit) vs. magic pink (1 bit).

On some systems there may be a vast performance improvement by using the low-quality textures -- e.g. systems that support hardware blitting but have slow processors to do alpha transparency calculations.

How to arrange all these textures? I suggest a new folder alongside images that mimics its structure, named something like images_noalpha or images_low.

I need to poke around and see which images don't have full alpha versions, even in the art_src folder. I need to check NPCs and flying loot animations, perhaps others.

For power animations we can carefully create no-alpha versions. It's all about the Alpha Threshhold (as it's called in GIMP).

And future thoughts: it might be a lot to ask for every Flare game to supply both full alpha and 1-bit alpha images (especially for projects where full-alpha makes no sense, like most pixel art). Perhaps in config files we can enable/disable this toggle feature and set a default for the project.

[dorkster]

Here's the ImageMagick command I used for converting images, if you don't want to do it manually in the GIMP:

convert SOURCE.png -channel A -threshold 50% +channel -background \#ff00ff -flatten +matte noalpha/DESTINATION.png

[igorko]

Migrated to clintbellanger/flare-game#38