Thank You Herra Thotori...I really like your mod!!
May I suggest to make all .tga textures in 8bit instead of 24bit?
I've converted the 24bit ones from your previous version with no quality loss with the gain if no stutters flyin' at sea-level.
If I've already suggested that..sorry!
Best Regards!!
I would be amazed if there was any actual advantage from using 8-bit indexed textures, for several reasons.
The only 24-bit textures in this are the normal maps.
The normal maps of
stock IL-2 water are also in 24bit colour depth. What you're saying would mean that if these textures worked better when indexed, you would get improved performance over stock textures.
As it stands, these water textures use exactly the same amount of resources as the stock game - with the exception of the foam texture which is of higher resolution.
Moreover, there are several technical reasons to why indexed colours in textures don't actually help with rendering performance at all. This is because, despite the file size being smaller, the actual texture takes just as much video card memory as a 24-bit texture.
The only case in which smaller file size can have an effect is with HDD to RAM transfer times, which can in some cases speed up loading times, but when those maps are loaded into memory, there should be absolutely no difference between 8-bit and 24-bit texture performance on in-game rendering graphics.
I'm not disputing your claim right out of hand, though. Could you elaborate on the "stutters"? Can you do some benchmarking? If so, does the stutter affect benchmark results, or is it only a visual perception thing?
Are you certain that there are not some other factors that might be causing it? Because, like I said - technically you should then be getting stutters with the unmodded, stock IL-2 water, too.