Less formats vs less dependencies ?

[CareBear]

Mh, i dislike games which only produce jpeg screenshots. Because often the red becomes very blurry.

[PM]

I'm not arguing about the quality. But I'm currently working on one game (it was started WAY before SFML first release, so it doesn't use it) and it's a network game and people often want to post screen-shots (their achievements) on the forum. JPEG are the perfect formats for that.

You have to keep in mind, that some of your game fans might not be IT professionals, so to speak. They might not know how to manually convert picture formats and/or shrink images. So a user-friendly way of doing things is to create screen-shots of the appropriate size and format for the web.

One might argue, that PNG is just as good for the web as is JPEG. However, some older Internet browsers have crappy support for PNG, and unfortunately, we have to keep that in mind.

[DrEvil]

SOIL supports plenty of the major formats, so I hope it gets to replace devil in SFML. Because I am impatient I went ahead and replaced devil with it in my local copy of the code and it was very simple. Now I'm free of external dependencies(I'm not using the sound libraries atm).

[zarka]

PNG is realy the only format im using so im all for a change

[herc]

did you know that you can get similiar, and sometimes better compression if you use tga files and compress them using b2zip library?

i store all my textures in tga and put them in a bz2 compressed archive.

bzip2 is completely ansi-c and can be easily compiled and statically linked. i even managed to throw all bzip2 c files into one singe c-file, so i only need to add that single c-file to my project.


about openAL. you can make a static linkable version of that one, too. you will loose native hardware acceleration, though. but if you are fine with openAL generic software and hardware modes, you can just link it statically (with some minor modifications to the source code)



about less image formats: strong vote for NO EXTERNAL DEPENDENCIES!!! if possible.

and memory loading is an absolute must have! i load all stuff from a compressed archive, and do not want to be forced to first write stuff to harddisk to be able to load it. everything in SFML should be also loadable from a memory location. very important!!

i have looked into the stb_image.c  source - it allows loading from memory. but it has an ugly c interface. so combining stb_image with SFML sounds like the perfect idea!! cant wait to see a new SFML released!


p.s. really nice project. i love the simplicity of the network stuff. its so nice that i now finally think i will try out to add networking to my little game.

[dunce]

Finally I got rid of all dll dependencies except OpenAl distribution pack. LGPL-ed libs that required dynamic linking have gone. I use static linking for everything including VC8 runtime libraries. From now on I can distribute just an exe file and game assets.

[Lord Delvin]

From now on I can distribute just an exe file and game assets.

You could make a package, hardcode it and then load it from memory :twisted: