There has not been lots of progress on the site over the past week as I have been trying to the software section back up and running. This involves updating all the software I had up since its been such a while.
However, indirectly I ended up starting work on another little software project came from trying to move my audio/video media collection to a new server. This has lead me to start working on my own media converter tool and C# wrapper for FFmpeg...
I have used DevExpress WinForms components in the past for application. But my license being expired and having access to a vewsion a few years old, I decided to take a look at other WinForms components I could use. My first stop was Telerik's WinForm components.
Initial evaluation is looking good but I did hit one snag. If you want to apply a application-wide theme, the support only exists at runtime. So you either have to design using the default theme or you need to manually set the theme on all controls in the form. This was not so acceptable to me and set off to look for a solution.
Finally back online after a long absence. Been through lots of personal changes over the past year and with the rush from shipping CoD:Ghosts, it had been difficult to find the time and energy to write and get into new projects.
The site is now running on a new content engine and should give me the flexibility I want for long-term growth of the site. Unfortunately, there was not an easy micration path for the old blog posts. However, re-create the DXT texture compression article from the old site since this was one of my bigger technical contributions.
I also intend on merging the content from SebbySoft onto this site. I will start posting new versions of the software as soon as I can go over it and make updated versions.
I have also dabbled in electronics over the past year and intend on doing more projects along those lines. Keep an eye out for posts on that topic.
It's good to be back! :)
The idea comes in part from necessity at work and also in part be curiosity. In our engine, we do have a texture streaming mechanism which reads DXTC compressed textures from disk as needed. But especially when dealing with a DVD, bandwidth quickly becomes an issue and our streamer is often hitting limits which in turn causes texture loads to be delayed and visual quality to degrade.
Besides the need for improved bandwidth for our texture, one aspect of the decompress->DXTC transcode approach is the fact that no one is taking advantage of the fact that DXTC compression is a lossy compression to start with. Why can’t this fact be taken advantage of in order to tweak the DCT/Range Coder settings in order to maximize compression? This would require the coder to encode the two DXTC colors per block differently so they are known at decode but I wonder if the extra compression would make up (and hopefully go beyond) the extra bits added for the DXTC colors.