FlightGear Newsletter September 2014: Difference between revisions

{{Newsletter-cover-item|FlightGear 3.2 released (this time for real!)}}<br/><br/>

We are looking for feedback about possibly adopting DDS textures in FlightGear:

* dds is a compressed format, hence the download size of the FG base package may be decreased

* compressed dds can be directly used by many graphics cards, reducing also GPU memory consumption

* dds stores all texture resolution levels, i.e. no lower resolution levels have to be generated when the texture is used, hence it loads much faster into memory

Practically all commercial simulations use dds for these reasons.  

However, the dds compression algorithm is patented, which means that it is not readily available for OpenSource graphics drivers used by Linux distributions. Dependent on the specific hardware, this may or may not be a problem (modern graphics cards typically do not need the driver to process dds, for older graphics cards there are non-patented workarounds available which decompress the dds on the software level). The development team is concerned about making the Flightgear experience pleasant for all users, hence we would like to gather feedback how many users would be affected by a change in practice.

If there are no problems reported, FG will change defaults to textures in dds format with the 3.4 release, and then phase out the use of png textures.