I am getting very close to releasing a new beta with a lot of new replacement map textures. I am hoping to get it out before Christmas but I don't want to make a promise since of course it is a busy time of year. It may be early January instead.
I just finished down converting all the bitmap textures to 8-bit dithered images of 256 colours. Why you may ask? Swat 3 runs in 16-bit colour mode in Windows which only gives a maximum of 65,536 colours. With Bitmap images (.bmp files) you only have two choices. You can have either 8-bit images (256 colours) or 24-bit images (16.7 million colours). I have a theory that using 24-bit images leads to horrible colour banding in the game since it can't handle the extra colours. When they released all the original maps with Swat 3 they did exactly this (down converted to 256 colour images).
The added benefit to using only 256 dithered colours is that the file sizes are about 50% smaller so I assume it will allow the game to run on video cards with limited VRAM.
Don't worry though. I am keeping all the textures on my hard drive backup in full colour 24-bits in case somehow we magically figure out how to hack the game into giving a larger range of colours.
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