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32 Bit texture support

Available since version: 0.3.0

Gothic 2 Online improves texture quality by adding proper BGRA8888 format readout and DirectX 32 Bit surface support in ZenGin1. This essentially allows server creators to include far superior quality textures into their servers.

Compilation

ZenGin doesn’t natively support the compilation of such textures. This can only be achieved using external programs. The simplest method to create a BGRA8888 texture is by utilizing zTEXiPy.

  1. Open your texture in zTEXiPy2: zTEXiPy's splash dialog
  2. Choose Save TEX as...
  3. In this window: zTEXiPy's saving dialog
    • Uncheck Generate Mipmaps if your texture is meant to be used as UI.
    • Colorspace must be set as BGRA8888 (zEnum:3)
  4. Press Save and check your texture in-game: Ingame Example

But why?

This type of texture is compatible with any asset, whether it’s armour or a sword. However, the primary application for such high-quality textures is in user interface elements, which make extensive use of gradients and the alpha channel:

Comparison between BGRA8888 vs DXT3 (Alpha)

This example shows comparison between raw BGRA8888 colorspace and DXT3 (BC2)3 compression. DXT3 shows noticible banding throughout entire texture wherever there's alpha channel, while BGRA8888 has smooth gradient transition.

Comparison between BGRA8888 vs DXT1

This example shows comparison between raw BGRA8888 colorspace and DXT1 (BC1)3 compression. DXT1 shows lossy quantization artifacts, while BGRA8888 has none.

Source comparison files are available here.

The drawback of using these textures is their large size, as they contain uncompressed color data. Nonetheless, the G2O downloader compresses the data, so it shouldn't matter in the long run as long as you're using your own VDFS addons.

  1. To learn more about ZenGin Textures reference click here. ↩

  2. zTEXiPy supports TGA, DDS, PNG and WEBP by default, so make sure it's one of those formats. ↩

  3. To learn more about DXTn Algorithm click here. ↩↩