Adventure Game Studio

AGS Support => Beginners' Technical Questions => Topic started by: on Tue 07/10/2003 02:49:34

Title: BMP and PCX
Post by: on Tue 07/10/2003 02:49:34
I was wondering, if their is any advantage to using BMP images to PCX ones.  The quality seems the same, but PCX files are about 8 times smaller.   Can some computers not run them or something.  Any information on this would be appreciated.
Title: Re:BMP and PCX
Post by: Gilbert on Tue 07/10/2003 03:15:32
There're no real advantages in using each, since whatever format the image's originally in, it's converted to the same internal format in an AGS game, so that doesn't matter.

BMPs are uncompressed format (except for some rare cases 16/256 colour ones can be RLE-compressed) and PCX utilises RLE compression, that makes PCX sometimes smaller, and there're no detail loss in both formats (unless you mean saving a Truecolour pic into a 256 coloured file say for example), so they're both perfect to use.
Title: Re:BMP and PCX
Post by: on Tue 07/10/2003 03:33:50
Thanks.  So, in the end, they're compressed by the AGS editor. Ummm, how good is the compression for the AGS editor, because I wanna make a 16bit game, and making a 640x480 bg becomes pretty big.
Title: Re:BMP and PCX
Post by: Gilbert on Tue 07/10/2003 03:44:07
I've heard that bgs were compressed with a scheme similar to ZIP format (Huffman I think), but the results depends on how "complex" the pic is, for example if it contains large area of solid colour it may compress better, if there're lots of variations and details, it may not be that good.

Sprites are not compressed for speed's sake, so be a game can be real large if there're many large sprites in it.
Title: Re:BMP and PCX
Post by: on Tue 07/10/2003 05:01:26
Alright.  Thanks a lot man.