Hicolor animations are going to eat memory to be sure but if an effect can get away with 8-bit color then that's still an option. There a a few animations that look like absolute crap when they are in 8-bit color so we could have the option of something better. It would be easy enough to restrict the hicolor anims to be available only when -jpgtga is used or even a separate "Use high color animations" option.
I think that most of the effect animations look pretty good as is, like the glowmaps and weapon particle effects. These are usually small and don't use that many different colors so 8-bit works for them. Even the newer explosion anims look pretty damn good. When you get something like the warp map or shockwaves which can be pretty big and have gradients I think that hicolor versions would be worth while. I personally think it sucks when I work hard to destroy that absolutely beautiful hi-poly model with nice textures, glowmaps and pretty specular hilights just to have this pitiful looking shockwave be my only real reward.
I've already found ways to knock nearly 40meg of the memory usage with the MediaVPs just because of inefficient use of what's there. Five or six months ago between 60 and 80 megs was chopped off just for not loading starfield bitmaps that aren't actually used in the mission. A gain of 15 or 20megs can be had for not loading all of the weapon effects, most of which aren't available in that mission. With Lightspeed (and hopefully others) making more textures in DDS format we save memory there too. The point is that as long as it's used properly then it could work out for the better. Slap those new anims in the hieffects MediaVP so people have a choice and revel in the new found beauty.
Another thing I'd like to bring up since I seem to be ranting a little here is that what I'm suggesting for the new anims doesn't necessariy mean 32-bit color. It's just a text file which has an extension and number of frames in it. It could still be 8-bit PCX used but they wouldn't have to share a palette.
@gevatter Lars
The text file would just be something like this:
Basically like a normal tbl file and the normal parsing code could be used to read it. All of the files would have to be the same type (DDS in this case) and the same dimensions but that's it. The loader just looks for the 32 DDS files to make sure everything is good and then setup the basic structure. The rest of the code doesn't have to know anything about this and should work as is. I've gotten this about 80% implemented already so I should have something finished and tested soon for people to try out for themselves.
As far as the movies go, DivX itself does work under Linux but incorporating a decoder into the game is another matter. We can't use GPLed software since it's not compatible with the Volition license. Most decoders are GPL or are dual licensed for commercial use and I don't intend to pay for that. It's the same for the Mac, no problem just playing the movies but try to get them to work in-game and you've got problems. Quicktime is worse since the newer codecs are difficult to use under Linux. Also note that the game works on 32-bit and 64-bit (Linux x86_64 and Mac G5) platforms which some decoder libraries don't support well yet. I am being a bit selfish here since it would probably be me that has to figure all of this out and I don't want too, plus I'm a big Linux user and supporter as well as a user of a 64-bit Linux version so I'm rather adverse to something that I wouldn't get to enjoy.
With regards to number of users I don't have any real numbers. I still get plenty of e-mail about the OSX version and icculus.org versions from English, German and Polish users. Just go look at the 22 page thread
here to see if there is any real Mac interest.