Space Dust + Nebula

Hay all.

Im trying to add nice looking smoth and colourfull space nebula's to my current project, the problem is that under 16 bit they dont look nice at all, ie blocky city. but under 32 bit they look class.

Im wondering if anyone has any ideas or tips on making or useing or even setting up good looking space nebula space dust type things when the game is running in 16 bit.

TA.

Ill post some screen shots of what I mean in a sec.

EDIT::


Top being 32 bit, bottom is 16 bit.

Try bit 512 in the texture flags to force true color textures. I'm assuming this is a 3D mode game since this is the Blitz3D forum.

Try the Dither command :)

http://www.blitzbasic.com/b3ddocs/command.php?name=Dither&ref=3d_a-z

Yavin tried downloading a demo from Blitzcoder but link is broken?

Or just dither the bitmap.
Here are 2 examples that are in 256 and 128 colors (nebula02)
either one should display the same in 32 bit or 16 bit mode.
Just use your favorite Paint proggy to make the nebula and
convert it to a 256 color or less dithered pic...
Examples:
Nebula01 256 colors

Nebula02 128 colors

@RAM Yeah I took the zip off the site , my bad Ill re upload it when I get a chance.

Ill have a bash at it and let yall know how I get on.

Ahh :: new problem.

Right I can force the use of true colour with the texture flags and and I can use the dither command. I also found a few other things I could do, the problem seems to be that as soon as I add alpha to the texture it goes.

Without alpha it looks sweet. with alpha it looks like above.

OK Ill explain what im doing. this might help some one suggest a better idea.

The above image as you can see shows the players ship in the nebula. the importance of this is that some bad guys can hide in the nebula and not be seen by the player
(well no easily.)

So im trying to create a cloud of dust in space the player can go under or through to hide in. that wont cripple my fps.

Why don't you create a 16 bit color texture for it?

Why do you need alpha to do this? when you could easily keep a tilemap of the nebula in a bank and use it to calculate the alpha values of enemy ships...

Dither, dither, dither...
These GIFs have transparency and have 50% of the pixels set
to the transparent color.(this makes them "see through")



Use your backgound, stick one of these in front (black is
the transparent color) and you should have clouds to fly behind

I solved the problem..

If you make a nice looking cloud(i used fireworks) about 640*480 in size (the size my clouds were) and shrink it down to about 90*90 and then load it in and scale it so its HUGE, it actually looks awsome.

Ill upload some screen shots when I get a chance.