TexView2 compression silliness 98kb .jpg to 683kb .paa

[Amontieri]

Hello.

I'm trying to create a custom face to a online game server, and for the possible 100kb restriction that server holds
I've stumbled upon a problem.

I've made a 1024x1024 custom face template and compressed it to just under 100kb .jpg-file (not touching the resolution, only image quality-slider when saving the picture).
Now jpg's seem to be hard to control when getting the colors right, always too bright, and if this is being compensated with
darker colors in image editing software the colors seem to start to fade away in-game the darker color is applied.
See picture below:


Converting to .paa is a solution on it's own what comes to getting the colors right, but what is with the compression?
So, as the topic already states, I converted this jpg-file that was already under 100kb limit to a .paa with TexView2 and ended
up having over a 600kb-file to use. Goes without saying, it's a no-go.

Then why are the 512x512 and 256x256 .jpg's being compressed, if I recall right 512 had a file size of something over 250kb-> converted to .paa with a file size of ~140kb, just a TAD over the limit.
And 256 went under 100kb in jpg-format, and converted to .paa it's 45kb!
I'm not intending to use 512 or 256 resolutions unless it's a 'you have to', because those are losing all the detail.

Editing to .tga or .png usually end up with a larger file size but converting to .paa has the same file size as converting from jpg.

Any suggestions how to use TexView2 properly, or advice how to properly configure compression?
Anything that comes to mind???

Might as well put some tags here (without understanding how a modern days Google search is working :P), hard to find any information about what I'm dealing with:

TexView 2, TexView2, compression, converting, custom face, Arma 2


Greetings:
Amontieri

[T_D]

paa and jpg compression are working completly different. paa is nearly lossless. If you want to reduce file sizes of paa you dont have many options. Make sure you use the latest texView2 which uses LZO compression (automatically). Besides reducing the resolution your last option would be to remove the mipmaps of the texure via MipMapRemover which can be found here: https://dev-heaven.net/projects/tdt/files
Otherwise you have to go with jpg.

[Max Power]

Usually one would convert from tga to paa. I have had good results with that. If you have the source file, export as a tga and then compress it. Converting from lossy jpg to less lossy paa is not really taking advantage of the paa file format.

As T_D said, some of the file size inflation is probably due to the creation of mipmaps. In an RGB image, 25% of the file size can be accounted for by mip maps.

[Amontieri]

Hi T_D and Max Power. And thank you for the answers.

So there wasn't too many options to try like you both pointed out. I took the BiTools pack (I think it was the latest) and installed TexView2 from there.
Got the same result, converting from .tga or .jpg (1024x1024), didn't matter, the .paa file size was 683kb in the end.

Tried to use MipMapRemover through Windows Command prompt, but that gave an error "Input string was not in correct format". (I have bis.dll in the same folder as MMRemover).
Click if care to read on:
Spoiler:

show spoiler

I can't quite understand MMR's instructions from readme.txt.
"MipMapRemover.exe src [dst remove removeLast]". What, where?
But this is how I typed in Command Prompt:
F:\dumdedumdaa\mipmapremover.exe c:\users\dididii\lalaa\face.paa [h:\perse 1]
Thinking that "1" would correspond one layer of mipmap.

(program didn't want to run straight from desktop, was telling me about a "MipMapremover has stopped working"-error.

Shame.

But have to try making as detailed face as I can to 256x256 size

Cheers mates!

[T_D]

Try something like this:
F:\dumdedumdaa\mipmapremover.exe myFace.paa myFace_wo_Mipmaps.paa 0 20

[Amontieri]

Try something like this:
F:\dumdedumdaa\mipmapremover.exe myFace.paa myFace_wo_Mipmaps.paa 0 20

This worked. But you would know that, I think
So the MipMapRemover could shrink file size, but not to extent that in the end I would have had a file under 100kb.
Some observations:
683kb 1024x1024 .paa shrank to ~530kb
230kb 512x512 .paa shrank to ~120kb

I also fiddled with the MMR numerals and got 512x512 file to shrink to 43kb, with ("1 0") but then using that file made Arma 2 to crash when applying as custom face

So I conclude here my testing. Made the decision to use 256x256 .paa-files with camo (woods and desert) applied on them and then as a no-camo face a 1024x1024 .jpg.

Thanks again T_D and Max Power for your help!

[Rocket]

Be careful with ditching the mip-maps, they are there to provide a performance improvement. The extra ~100kb in HD space the texture takes up is more than compensated by the reduction in the size of the texture loaded on to the GPU/texture atlas when the object is rendered. Mip-mapping is an important part of the GPU rendering process, and you should be careful about removing mip-maps simply to save a few kb in HD space taken up.

[Günter Severloh]

Hi, what tool can I use besides textview2 which dont work for me, to convert a jpg, or better to a paa?

[[APS]Gnat]

No
But whats your problem? I see no post from you elsewhere.
Is the file dimensions ^2 ?

[Günter Severloh]

We've had this discussion before (text2view woes) remember Gnat.
I usually get my buddy who has Photoshop to convert images to paa for me, but the res are 512x512 -1366x768+

Just wondering if there was a tool elsewhere that I may have not seen before that could convert a simple jpg or png to a paa, I ask as T_D posted his tools list.

Textview2 wont convert anything for me, and tbh i haven't tried in many months, it worked once for me but after that it wouldn't do it any more.
but if there was a tool then well maybe I can do some things myself.