I Thought about something, dunno if it can be done\was done cause i don't really understand how the UV maps work and how you set them but i thought about something...
As you all know lots of models have many, many textures, custom ones got hi res and lots of them.
The Color limit for 1 texture is 256 Colors, so how about making/using a script or some method to split your texture in... PS lets say ? to many little pieces, from like 512x512 to 20 parts and then you set them in the UV map, and you could reach up to 5120 colors, for something that was just in 1 texture, but making it for a model with like... 9 textures ? you could reach 50,000+ colors in 1 model.

No idea if the HL engine could deal with it, no idea how, no idea if it's something that can be done/easy to get it working, but it's just something i was thinking about.

You are welcome to comment ;]
Cheers.

It's possible to uv map the model to use as many small textures as possible, but it's not worth the trouble. Most of the times it's almost impossible to distinguish the 256-color texture from the true-color one.

Is that so ?

This would make a difference in player models and map textures, thats about it.

It becomes noticeable when you have many different types of materials on one texture sheet. Travis and I usually try to seperate the textures into different color types - for example, the k98 might have all it's wood texture on one sheet, while all it's metal textures are on a second sheet. Misc stuff of various other colors will be on a third, smaller sheet. It really does help w/ the variety of color you can put into texture. (At least from what I've seen of Travis's textures)

Uh, who's Travis?

Originally posted by engineer
Uh, who's Travis?

Uh.. who are you?

I don't know, honestly. <3 molo

Anyway, Why are the textures locked at 256?

Originally posted by engineer

Anyway, Why are the textures locked at 256?

Just an engine limitation. 8-bit textures were actually a big advancement at the time HL was released. Having the ability to use 256 colors per texture rather than 256 colors for the entire game was a pretty huge step. (Think of quake1, where the game was pretty much brown/grey/tan)

disclaimer: I may be totally wrong about everything I just said.. vague memories.

We were using 512 textures in replacements a long time ago, with good results. Why tell us we can't now?

Originally posted by engineer
We were using 512 textures in replacements a long time ago, with good results. Why tell us we can't now?

I'm not talking about image size, I'm talking about color depth.

Ok just to top it all off, it is a pain in the ass when a mesh has lots of wood and then a tiny bit of metal coz no matter how detailed the metal is made to look, as soon as its converted to 256 colors it usualy turns to one flat colour. I have that problem a lot, to combat that though, in ps i select the part which will be most distorted then convert it, i still lose a bit of detail but not as much...hope that helps ya....probaly just in significant rambling tho:D

There are a number of limits on the textures. The most significant are the 256-color limit and the size limit. The size limit means the texture's dimensions can be anything up to 1024, but width * height can't be much more than 512x512 (in the compiler source the limit is at 640x480 for some reason). This means one can use resolutions such as 1024x256, 1024x128 and so on, but not 1024x512 for example. It's also possible to use non-power-of-two dimensions, but they will be scaled to a power-of-two with a crappy algorithm reducing quality.

To summarize: the color limit (256) is different than the size limit (max. 1024 per dimension, 512x512 total).

Originally posted by BruTaLiz@tioN
Ok just to top it all off, it is a pain in the ass when a mesh has lots of wood and then a tiny bit of metal coz no matter how detailed the metal is made to look, as soon as its converted to 256 colors it usualy turns to one flat colour. I have that problem a lot, to combat that though, in ps i select the part which will be most distorted then convert it, i still lose a bit of detail but not as much...hope that helps ya....probaly just in significant rambling tho:D Try using a program called ACDsee to convert color depth. You can’t even tell the difference most of the time between 32bit and 8bit when it converts. Just save in true color in Photoshop.