When this problem really came forward in community consciousness (http://forums.insideqc.com/viewtopic.php?p=26885#p26885) I had just recently fixed it by dynamically recalculating visibility for each client, for each entity, each frame. That was effective (it wouldn't have pulled large bmodels into the PVS all the time) but caused hugely excessive CPU load.

It turns out that in this case just drawing it anyway is a more efficient approach, at least for hardware-accelerated engines (the point I made above about r_speeds counts not being so relevant to a properly-optimized renderer can't be overstated enough). 

Might be a good feature? It's really annoying to convert from tga... 

 

I recommend LodePNG. 

I am always installing GIMP or using imagemagick to convert to png, it's a pain.

@Fifth
I'll try to look into a cvar for the classic behaviour of "always run" before the next release.

@boristhesp1der (late reply!) glad you liked tfuma, Fifth built the majority of the map and I took over finishing gameplay and routes, w/ contributions from sock. I did set up that slime pit fight :) 

But for most web stuff you need JPG-compression, and for the rest TGA is mostly not a problem. 

JPG is not really "needed" for web use, it just the most common. Many times it gets used when PNG would be the better choice.

I always wondered why Quake used TGA, which is an obscure format and pretty much obsolete now.

Even if its improved capabilities aren't used, I think PNG is the best choice, but for in-game screenshots JPG is probably fine as long as the compression is low. 

The code to write TGA is pretty simple, that might be why. Or maybe it was compatible with other software they used at id at the time. 

Simple and fast. PNG with compression will take longer. It will freeze game for a second.
Of course I'm just speculating. 

I prefer to start with uncompressed images. It's easy enough to convert quickly with any number of apps. I use something similar to this: https://www.imageconverterplus.com/features/right-click-menu/

@metlslime id was most likely was using Truevision video accelerators in their Windows machines back then. TGA was originally from Truevision. 

 

Software Quake used PCX. Because that was an 8-bit renderer it was also just a simple matter of "dump the pixels".

According to Carmack's .plan file ID were using Intergraph accelerators on NT as their graphics workstation platform of choice at the time GLQuake was written.

PNG format didn't even exist when Quake was released. First release of PNG was October 1996.

TGA offers simplicity and speed, although nowadays with disk IO being the primary bottleneck for many operations a compressed format may well be the faster option, at least until SSDs go cheaper than spinning plates of rust. 

I prefer to start with uncompressed images. It's easy enough to convert quickly with any number of apps. PNG has lossless compression. It's like ZIPping TGA, but in one operation. It is easier to preview and maintain. 

Got it. Obviously PNG would be the most handy format at the moment especially for immediate sharing. I take the previewing aspect for granted as I have the aforementioned shell viewer/converter and Photoshop. 

JPG is not really "needed" for web use, it just the most common. Many times it gets used when PNG would be the better choice.

Read about how those compression algorithms work and when they're appropriate to use. 

Quake screenshots are not a good case for png, but are OK for jpg. 

Quake with texture filtering off is a bad case for JPEG, though. JPEG is also a bad choice if you want to make brightness adjustments afterwards, especially extreme changes (something I often do when I get screenshots of lighting bugs.)

Ideally JPG, PNG, TGA would be available. I think MarkV can do those and has a cvar to pick the format. 

aye, jpeg sucks. you can reduce the compression to get something close to png, but doing so just increases the filesize too. if you've got high res textures (which frankly just look like noise in the first place) etc then jpeg can't make it any worse, but otherwise imho png is a better choice than jpeg at least for a default setting.

(windows) bmp might work if you want something more equivalent to tga, its basically just a different header but much better supported (at least on windows and except by quake engines). it can also be paletted, and doesn't need extra libraries.

but png is best if you're going to shove it on a website (and why take screenshots if not to share them). 

The problem with BMP is that each row must be a multiple of 4 bytes, so for odd resolutions like 1366x768 or if you want 24-bit data you can't just fwrite the output from a glReadPixels. 

Open the source code for JoeQuake. There are 3-5 headers. 1 cvar. Link libpng and libjpeg. Call the appropriate function to write a png or jpeg. 30 minutes tops. 

Well okay, TGA isn't particularly small, either... 

doesn't matter what the engine writes out, you should convert to jpeg before uploading it. 

http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/xlarves_dream_3.png 

doesn't matter what the engine writes out, you should convert to jpeg before uploading it.

Depends.

If I wanted to highlight something like a conchars font with different filtering and scaling options I'd leave as PNG.