Background question in 4.02
 

Silly question... is the background supposed to look like this in 4.02:



Just trying to figure out if thats the new style or theres some sort of alignment problem with my setup.

ya it is, but i can tell that gm9 didn't save the .dds's in a higher quality because the quality looks poor.

i liked the older version better personally (maybe it was the color?)

drago.

Yea, I liked the old one too... This one seems like its tiled incorrectly or something, where as the old one was a banded gradient background.

Is it possible to change the backgrounds? I really appreciate the UI, and all the work that's gone into it, so I don't wish to complain... but the new background makes it a wee bit difficult to tell what's going on in the crafting window. All the colors are very similar now, including the background. It's also rather busy now, and visually distracting. Maybe a nice mostly-flat color, dark enough that everything stands out against it?

Actually I do, DXT3 highest quality using the Nvidia plugin. Can you recommend something better?

I had not noticed but you are right the quality is poor. Thinking about switching the entire UI over to use RLE compressed .tga files. Not sure how much of a performance hit that would be though. And I'll have to check whether I can "disguise" them with a .dds extension. What do you think?

not sure, you can definitely try, i know sony uses a compressed version

drago.

The advantage of using DXT compression is that they use 1/4 (for DXT3 and DXT5) or 1/8 (for DXT1) of the video memory since they are native formats for graphics cards.

The type of color compression works well for images that don't have many sharp color changes but it doesn't preserve sharp details very well. Here are some links from one of my other posts.

UnrealWiki (general overview)
Wikipedia (more technical)
MSDN (most technical)

The quick guide is:
DXT1 (called BC1 in DirectX10): 8:1 compression, use if you don't need an alpha channel or a 1 bit (on or off) alpha channel.
DXT3 (called BC2 in DirectX10): 4:1 compression, same type of color compression as DXT1 and best for sharp, hard-edged alpha transitions.
DXT5 (called BC3 in DirectX10): 4:1 compression, same type of color compression as DXT1 and best for smooth, more gradual alpha transitions.

Thanks Othesus, I know, that's why I'm afraid of the performance impact. From my experience DXT3 generally produces the best results for what is needed in eq2 but it really hates my current graphics... :(