How to arrange Anim Textures on bitmap?

Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Programming/How to arrange Anim Textures on bitmap?

Dock(Posted 2005) [#1]
I'm playing around with animated textures at the moment, so I'm paging up animated sequences on to texture pages.

The program I'm using to stitch the frames together seems to make them into one row, making one loooong bitmap (4096 x 64) rather than something a bit more sensible (512x512). The long file works perfectly fine in Blitz3D, but I'm curious as to whether this will be any less efficient or cause problems for low-spec machines.

How exactly does Blitz handle its animated textures? Does the LoadAnimTexture command do something clever with the texture?


_PJ_(Posted 2005) [#2]
Well one long row is fine, but if you edit this into multiple rows, Blitz handles it fine too! Reading from topleft frame along the row, then onto each subsequent row wih the bottom-right frame being the last as one'd expect!


Dock(Posted 2005) [#3]
Thanks - I realise it works both ways, I just want to be certain that lower spec machines don't baulk when they see a 4098 texture. :)


_PJ_(Posted 2005) [#4]
I dont know for sure... nut Id gues as long as the frame size is reasonable (i.e a power of 2 and between 64x64 and 512x512 is best I think), then all should be fine - Of course the memory I think needs to be able to cope with the whole image as a file in RAM, but I doubt there is any cause for concern there!


Jams(Posted 2005) [#5]
I would assume that Blitz internally breaks up tile strips into seperate images and then renders based on frame index rather than keeping the tilestrip as is and rendering based on frame offset.

Therefore your massive tilestrip shouldn't have any problems because it's broken down into 64x64 pieces...

FYI this is all based on an assumption.


John Blackledge(Posted 2005) [#6]
but if you edit this into multiple rows, Blitz handles it fine too

Hey, I didn't know that. Thanks.