About image swizzling...

In the OSLib documentation, you will often hear about a term named "swizzling".

The image swizzling is a process that reorders the pixels in an image to make it more adapted to the way the graphic processor reads it. For more information, please read: http://wiki.ps2dev.org/psp:ge_faq.

As a result, images are drawn way faster. But the downside is that the pixels are no more contiguous, making it harder to modify images, because you can't access a single pixel by its position anymore, but need some quite complicated calculation to find the real reordered pixel position on the image.

So, if you want to access the image data, easily and quickly (for example for an oldschool framebuffered demo), you should use unswizzled (normal) images. For images loaded from files that you don't plan to modify later, you should use swizzled images, as it's really a lot faster (especially if the image is put in RAM).

By default, OSLib will automatically swizzle images when loading them from a file (see oslLoadImageFile). But it won't swizzle images created manually (see oslCreateImage). But you can disable swizzling by passing the OSL_UNSWIZZLED flag when loading the image. See oslSetImageAutoSwizzle.


Generated on Wed Feb 24 10:25:28 2010 by  doxygen 1.5.9