EnigmA Amiga Run 1997 July/EnigmA AMIGA RUN 20 (1997)(G.R. Edizioni)(IT)[!][issue 1997-07 & 08][EAR-CD IV].iso/lightwave/lwmlist/96.lightwave-0422/[e-mail] _Tue Apr 23 01:40:58 1996.msg

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From: [e-mail] (Gord Davison)
To: Multiple recipients of list <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: Fori's Power Texture plugin??
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>Gord Davison wrote:
>
>> My other concern with Windows BMP is that the RLE option [perhaps REAL-
>> long encoding in this case?] seems very inefficient compared to other
>> RLE formats like IFF and PCX. Does Windows BMP [RLE] use the standard
>> lower 2-byte method?
>
>Not sure what that would be, but it's fair to say that BMP's RLE is
>comparable to other RLE schemes.  It's a little more complicated than
>average, though.  A good writer is hard to implement, so the de facto
>standard BMP is uncompressed.
>
>But in the context of this plug-in, I don't know why people are getting
>panicked about filling their hard drives.  You only need a BMP version
>of your image for interactive positioning.  Once this is done, there's
>no reason you can't substitute other images or sequences in whatever
>format you like.
>
>Right?
>
>- Ernie
>
Right Ernie. As always, you raise a good point :-). A correction, though:
my panic isn't so much because of Fori's [I'm sure] excellent plug-in
supporting BMP exclusively, but the realization that, hey, BMP *is* Windows
standard. That means -- potentially -- we will be seeing _much_ more of it in
future in the Intel neighbourhood as new apps struggle for "Win-Compliance".
And, as far as general purpose graphic formats go, [IMO] BMP stinks. BMP
has all the sophistication of a screen dump. In one of my "Programming
Windows" books, it says that the RLE option for BMPs is rarely used because
the file size is often *larger* then the uncompressed BMP: now that's what
I call compression!

I'm sure that eventually Fori's Power Texture will support the current
cornucopia of LW graphic formats. That's certainly not in question. I'm just
amazed that a non-format like BMP has managed to become *the* Windows
standard.

**Off-topic**
It is my vain hope that the newly proposed PNG format, which strikes a nice
balance between: file size; extensibility; support for various BPP depths;
compression ratios; and compression/decompression speed; will be adopted in
future to complement the current JPEG [DCT, Huffman] format. Logic dictates
that a format like PNG _should_ become the next de facto lossless standard;
experience teaches us that PNG will fall by the wayside *because* of its
intrinsic suitability ;-)

BTW, it's rumoured that JPEG [the "Group" that is] may be adopting a fractal
compression format in future. The benefits are: _extremely_ small file sizes
[an order of magnitude higher than JPEG], lossless compression, and resolution-
independence [because the graphic will be encoded into a fractal formula].
The disadvantage is that fractal compression is slooooowwwww. Recent advances
have meant that hardware-assisted fractal compression may not be that slow
after all, however. That should make me forget about BMP. ;-)

==========================================================================
 Gord Davison                      | 2D/3D Animator � Multimedia Designer
 Phoenix Interactive Design, Inc.  |
 graphics � animation � multimedia |   "Complex problems have simple,
 [e-mail]             | easy-to-understand, wrong answers."
==========================================================================