The Dink Network

I've learned enough about blender to start making nice buildings and stuff in high color graphics(24 bit). It still looks o.k. while the engine is running dink pallete, but when will a 16 and 24 bit support be available? The Invertigo version only runs 32 bit. After learning about the alpha channel usable with 32, I agree it may be the best, but my computer won't let me use any better than 24.

Uh... I believe Invertigo's version is compatible with 16 and 24-bit color bmps as well.

Nope.
It sounds like he may add it though. I don't know what it involves, but I'll just keep building. Still looks good.

Aren't 24 and 32bits the same? I believe 32bits is just 24bit (3 x 1byte) mode plus an unused byte that fits alignment constraints (32 bits) and allows better speed (though requires more video RAM). It would be difficult to properly divide 32 bits in 3 colors fields anyway.

Actually, that "unused" byte, while most of the time actually unused, is separated for the alpha channel. So, instead of dividing into three parts, you'd divide into four parts. Note that it is perfectly alright to leave the alpha channel unused.

Oh, and I'd like to ask, Ric, what graphics card are you using?

Just a wimpy Intel 810e. I upgraded the driver and now have 32 bit, but I've been using MS paint to save the images as 24 bit .bmps . It wont do 32, so I'll try Paintshop pro or Irfanview to re-save them as 32 bit.
Does anyone have a plan yet for the alpha channel?

Ric, the bmp file format doesn't support the alpha channel (at least, as far as I can tell from my tests of saving a 32-bit, half-transparent bmp in Photoshop, and re-opening it to find none of it transparent), and I think Beuc is correct in his technical explanation of it.

And I just tested Invertigo Dink's capability of loading 16 and 24 bit bmps... and it worked flawlessly. I assume you didn't test it, and just went by the readme/description? Or did you experience difficulties loading such bmps?

I tested a graphic that would show color depth and found it shallow, but all I did to run it was replace the dink.exe with the one from Invertigos' file. Is there more to it? I'll experiment more.
*later....* oh.
I don't have a compiler. Must go find one.
Or someone nice could email me a compiled exe

Sigh, okay. An unknown feature of the SDL port of dink: It supports .PNG's. Yes! .PNG's. I believe it also supports .JPEG's and .GIF's, I dunno, I only tried with .PNG's. And guess what? .PNG "r0xx0rz", expecially since you can save it as 32-bit.

PNG rules in most cases. Except for when you wish to trade a little quality for size.

Bmp files do support 32 bit color depth (I used 32 bit bitmaps to make all the fading effects in my portal graphics pack) the problem is that a lot of graphics programs ignore the alpha channel of bitmaps so you can't see it and if you resave the image the alpha channel will be lost .

Ooh, yay. 8 MB .bmp files. What's next?