[casual_games] Procedural rendering - again

[Phil Steinmeyer]

I don't know what Reflexive uses, but I use the open source Inno Setup, and 
it beats WinZip by about 10%.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Lennard Feddersen" <Lennard at RustyAxe.com>
To: "IGDA Casual Games SIG Mailing List" <casual_games at igda.org>
Sent: Tuesday, January 10, 2006 2:42 PM
Subject: Re: [casual_games] Procedural rendering - again


> That's an interesting thought, since I create a single binary file and my 
> executable I haven't bothered with installers for my PC products, just 
> zip'em and ship'em.  All the data sits, compressed, in a single binary 
> file on the users hard disk and is uncompressed at run time.  This may 
> change with some updates that are coming with Battle Castles as I may be 
> dropping some things into the registry so an uninstaller starts to make 
> more sense.
>
> My tool chain allows me to compress on an individual file basis so it 
> would be easy to turn it all off, create an uncompressed binary and then 
> run it through a different installer to test the idea.  What compression 
> technology does the Reflexive installer use and does it generally beat 
> WinZip?
>
> BTW, distro size, for the PC at least, is more important to me than 
> installed size - hard drives are big and cheap when we are talking about 
> <10MB files.
>
> Lennard Feddersen
> CEO, Rusty Axe Games, Inc.
> www.RustyAxe.com
>
> Lennard at RustyAxe.com
> P. 250-635-7623 F. 1-309-422-2466
> 3521 Dogwood, Terrace, BC, Canada, V8G-4Y7
>
>
>
> James C. Smith wrote:
>
>>>>my tool chain uses zlib to compress everything and I think this is going 
>>>>to make sense for a lot of people on this forum.
>>>>
>>
>>
>>Net necessarily.  If installed size is your concern then ZLIB will help 
>>but
>>if distribution size is your primary concern then ZLIB doesn't accomplish
>>much and may even hurt.  A good installer will usually get better
>>compression because it had a better compression algorithm than ZLIB and/or
>>because it cam compresses the whole application rather than each 
>>individual
>>asset or file.  But it is hard to recompress data that has already been
>>compressed. I wouldn't be surprised if your distribution size decreased if
>>you disabled all your ZLIB compression and let the installer do the
>>compression.
>>
>>I prefer to let the game/tools chain do any lossy compress compression 
>>that
>>makes sense. But I leave lossless compression to the installer.
>>
>>
>>One point I want to make is that the JPEG compression I use is also part 
>>of
>>a tools chain.  Artists never save .JPEG files. They save everything as
>>.TGAs and TGAs are when we check into the version control system.  The 
>>tools
>>chain automatically converts them to the distribution format according to
>>compression setting stored in property files for each piece of art. In our
>>editor the artists can pull up any individual art asset, adjust it's
>>compression settings, and see the results in real time not just in an 
>>image
>>preview but in the game sprites themselves.
>>
>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: casual_games-bounces at igda.org [mailto:casual_games-bounces at igda.org]
>>On Behalf Of Lennard Feddersen
>>Sent: Tuesday, January 10, 2006 11:44 AM
>>To: Alex Saveliev; IGDA Casual Games SIG Mailing List
>>Subject: Re: [casual_games] Procedural rendering - again
>>
>>
>>I did some contract work last Summer for Artifex specifically to speed up 
>>Jasper - I expect they kicked the source back at some point so there 
>>should be a faster version of Jasper available if anybody is interested in 
>>going that route.  I can't remember what the #'s were but there was a low 
>>level bottleneck that got significantly faster.
>>
>>I don't use lossy compression for my games, my tool chain uses zlib to 
>>compress everything and I think this is going to make sense for a lot of 
>>people on this forum.  Somebody yesterday mentioned 10% of their size was 
>>in the executable - maybe this was just a guess but if it isn't then they 
>>may want to make sure that they are decoupling their data and not shipping 
>>with debug info. on (obvious but worth mentioning if 10% was accurate).
>>
>>"Of course I wouldn't recommend compressing all the textures in Half-Life 
>>2
>>into JPEG2000 :) But for casual games it should be just fine."
>>
>>3d games like HL2 are going to survive JP or JP2 better than casual market
>>games.  Casual market games are typically 2d, hand tweaked by pixel images
>>(I'm a big fan of gorgeous pixel art so applying lossy compression seems
>>unfortunate) that will be shown with no filtering, scaling or other 
>>blending
>>and lighting tweaks so that the artists work is shown unmodified.  HL2 is
>>going to be scaled, perspective corrected, lit, blended and pumped through 
>>a
>>half dozen other low level hardware tricks so I don't see how a misplaced
>>pixel or two makes any real difference.
>>
>>
>>My 2 cents,
>>
>>Lennard Feddersen
>>CEO, Rusty Axe Games, Inc.
>>www.RustyAxe.com
>>
>>Lennard at RustyAxe.com
>>P. 250-635-7623 F. 1-309-422-2466
>>3521 Dogwood, Terrace, BC, Canada, V8G-4Y7
>>
>>
>>
>>Alex Saveliev wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Hello Ron,
>>>
>>>Tuesday, January 10, 2006, 9:31:12 PM, you wrote:
>>>
>>>R> It has also been my impression that decoding JPEG2000 is much much
>>>R> slower than JPG.  Is this true?  That is the thing that's kept me from
>>>R> investigating it much further.  Load speed is more important to me 
>>>than
>>>R> download time or disk foot print.
>>>
>>>JPEG2000 is definitely slower than JPEG.
>>>When I started looking for JPEG2000 decoder I've tested Jasper and it was 
>>>way too slow. So I've created my own library :)
>>>
>>>J2K-Codec is somewhat 50 times faster than Jasper.
>>>So it decodes JPEG2000 5-6 times slower than the old JPEG.
>>>
>>>But this doesn't mean that your game will load 5-6 times slower. Old JPEG 
>>>is very, very, very fast, so 5-6 times slower than very, very, very fast 
>>>is still fast enough :)
>>>
>>>For example, 450x450 JPEG2000 image on my AthlonXP 2000 decodes in 67 
>>>milliseconds.
>>>
>>>Of course I wouldn't recommend compressing all the textures in Half-Life 
>>>2 into JPEG2000 :) But for casual games it should be just fine.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>
> -- 
>
>
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