1. Gah, I am getting sick and tired of everyone calling this Compression.

Compression implies that you take a texture and make it 70% smaller, when in reality, the tech is a procedural texture SDK, so you create a texture using their toolkit, and the engine generates it on runtime. so smaller memory footprint, smaller file size. It does not compress anything.

Posted at 2:36AM on Oct 6th 2006 by Robert Headley

2. Bear in mind, Robert, that after the word 'procedural', all I hear is 'wonkwonk wonk wonkwonkwonk', a la the parents in the animated Peanuts series. I have no doubt you know what you're talking about. But as I was reading your comment, my skull heated up, singeing my headfur, and making my werefleas jump off for their lives.

Posted at 2:39AM on Oct 6th 2006 by Akela Talamasca

3. Actually, 70% is too low of a percentage, in my first-hand experience. Maybe my comment on Joystiq can simplify how it works. Give it a quick read: http://www.joystiq.com/2006/10/05/new-tech-puts-the-squeeze-on-texture-files/#c2348188

Nick

Posted at 3:52AM on Oct 6th 2006 by Nick

4. In case it wasn't obvious (and apparently it wasn't), my reply to Robert's post was meant to be humorous. I was referring not to his techiness, but to my lack of ability to understand it.

Posted at 5:14AM on Oct 6th 2006 by Akela Talamasca

5. It sounds similar to a Windows metafile, though not exactly the same thing. It's also akin to vector graphics.

Instead of storing the image itself, it stores your actions when you drew the texture. And then at runtime, instead of rendering the image data the usual way, it plays back your actions when you drew the image.

Compression is a misleading term, because it is a different file format, so it can't be applied to existing textures like TGA or JPEG.

I don't know very much about graphics formats, but it seems to me that this is not a new concept. I believe from peripheral awareness that OpenGL, SVG, and even PDF have this concept at their heart.

Although maybe it is a valuable refinement at some detailed level.

I just looked up texturing in the OpenGL specification and it is listed under "rasterization". Raster graphics can be thought of as a system in which the image itself is captured, and vector graphics can be thought of as a system in which the drawing commands are captured instead of the image itself.

The fact that texturing is listed under rasterization may mean that texturing in OpenGL could get a boost from this vector or metafile type means of storing and rendering the textures.

Something like this has the potential to increase CPU load while reducing storage space and transmission bandwidth, so I'd be wary of a lonely claim about compression that says nothing about CPU load... as a skeptic and a cynic, that says to me that the CPU side of the equation doesn't look so great.

Posted at 10:26AM on Oct 6th 2006 by Orlie Omegamu