True color textures in MTM2?

[Kmaster]

https://web.archive.org/web/20121107214 ... ne-2468389

The Photex2 rendering engine features the ability to plot true color texture maps to polygons. Although the concept is a fairly simplistic one, other gaming engines don't allow it. Since the scenery is acquired from photographic sources, it will give the user a highly realistic view. TRI says that although the engine was created with simulations in mind, it can be used in other applications as well.

The Terrain5 geometry engine is the fifth generation of TRI's fractal graphic engine and goes one step higher by making scenery photographic by use of true color images. Other features supported include true reflections, animations of textures, and water.

Now that some of our members have access to the source code, was this a "disabled feature" in MTM2? or it is just plain BS? MTM uses 8-bit color in all of its textures, for a 1997 3D game true-color capabilities would be pretty impressive.

[Fila]

True color is 24bpp so that's bull. But there are some references to hicolor (which is 16bpp).

But none of those 16bpp references are in the texture loading module. So while I think technically the game might be able to do 16bpp (think it converts 8bpp to 16bpp), the actual textures are strictly limited to 8.

[Fila]

Checking more now, 16bpp is specifically disabled for direct3d

Edit: Looked into it some more. So there's definitely 16 bit instructions which means that the engine, theoretically, can deal with 16 bit textures however all the code that is actually used is 8 bit and the code that specifically deals with textures only has 8 bit instructions.