What are rleD's anyhow?

EVWeb

What are rleD's. Like are they some sort of movies or pictures or animations.

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Mantaray

Rlë8/Ds, to my understanding, are simply the PICT and the mask combined so Nova doesn't use as much RAM as it would otherwise.
The reason this is the case is because EVN ships can have more animations going on, so RAM would be a problem if the EV way were used.

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AriosSw

Quote

Originally posted by EVWeb:
**What are rleD's. Like are they some sort of movies or pictures or animations.:p

**

A search should yield some more detailed results.

As a brief explanation, rleD's are PICTs that have been run-length-encoded (a process that makes them smaller and therefore load faster, I won't go into the algorithm here). The D stands for "deep" (16 bit graphics) and the 8 in rle8 means those are 8 bit graphics.

In Nova, they are the ship sprites, weapon sprites, etc. They are (basically) the same as the PICT sprites in EV/EVO, but they have been compressed to provide for faster speeds.

Edit: Arggh, Mantaray, you beat me! Anyway, yes, since they are smaller, they take up much less RAM.

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(This message has been edited by AriosSw (edited 04-17-2003).)

mrxak

Nova has to convert any PICTs you use anyway, so it's always good to do that work yourself ahead of time.