Hey! Got a question for you guys about UT....

[rhink]

I'm not a matrox user, but I heard that someone here had decompressed the S3TC textures on the second UT cd so any card could take advantage of them... any truth to this? I know S3 used to have a utility which would allow you to decompress S3TC textures up at their website, but it's long gone now (the new Diamond/S3 website BLOWS). I don't care if it's slow, I just want to see what it looks like... I've got a 32 meg TNT2 btw, so maybe w/ 32 megs of ram for texture storage it'll do decent...

If anyone has ANY idea what I'm talking about it, I'd appreciate it. Thanks for helping out!

[Thundrchez]

I don't think that you need a special program to use these. DirectX7 has it integrated in. However, I think it will be done in software if your hardware does not support s3tc accelleration.

After you have installed the extra textures from UT CD #2, start up UT.
Hit the backtick key (`) to bring up the console and type "preferences". This should take you into windows with a form that lets you set all kinds of nitty gritty options.
Go into the "Rendering Options" and then "Direct3D"
Set the one called "Detailed Testures" to True, and you'll be slowed down the the S3TC textures.

[rhink]

thanks... but I don't think that's it. Enabling "detail textures" isn't the same thing as the high res S3TC textures. What detail textures does is adds another layer of random "noise" over the textures as you get in close to them, to sort of add in detail that was lost from texture filtering. It helps get rid of the over-filtered look you get when you move in close to a texture.

While S3TC is supported in DX7, it's not supported in the UT D3D renderer... only in the S3 MeTaL renderer. And you do need hardware support for texture compression to work. I suppose if UT's developers wanted to be nice, they could have added a feature that could decompress the textures on the fly and feed them to the card as normal, uncompressed textures, so those people in the future w/ 64 meg vid cards wouldn't have a problem with them, but of course, they are too much in bed with S3 to do something like that...

Not to mention, the installer says that if your card doesn't support S3TC, "these textures will have no visual effect."

Anyway, if anyone knows of someone that's done this, or can point me in the right direction to the S3TC compression/decompression utilities so I could convert the textures manually, I'd be greatly appreciative of that.

BTW, is there any info about new cards from Matrox coming out any time soon?

------------------
www.rivazone.com
All your NVIDIA and RIVA related news and discussion