Skydome texture resolution [Solved]

[Oceans14]

As you'll see in the following screenshot, the orange-ish glow on the horizon is pretty pixelated and low quality in game. The texture is 256x1024 and looks fine in an image viewer. Since it looks almost "too close" in game I decided to double the resolution, however this didn't change anything. I also played around with .option parameters but frankly even with the docs in front of me I don't know what I'm doing. If somebody could help me out that would be great. I'm hoping to make it look sharper and smoother.

Hidden/Spoiler:

[Marth8880]

Try these texture option parameters:

Code: Select all

-format a8r8g8b8 -maps 1

[Oceans14]

That seemed to do it, thanks!

[thelegend]

I personally recommend using the -maps 1 parameter in all your .tga options in case you didn't know of its existence. Bf2 looks so much sharper when nothing looks blurred in any way. Especially on character and vehicle textures.

[Marth8880]

I personally recommend using the -maps 1 parameter in all your .tga options

While it makes things look "sharper", it definitely should *not* be used with *all* textures. Weapon and character/vehicle textures, sure, but prop/environment textures should use a maps value of at least 3 or 4, otherwise it'll just look bad (especially terrain).

[thelegend]

Yeah terrain is a true no go for that string. But for diffuse textures (Including props) I am not sure if that's a bad thing. I even use -maps 1 for normal maps (Excluding props and vehicles).

[Oceans14]

While it makes things look "sharper", it definitely should *not* be used with *all* textures. Weapon and character/vehicle textures, sure, but prop/environment textures should use a maps value of at least 3 or 4, otherwise it'll just look bad (especially terrain).

What does a value of 3 do vs 1, and why do you recommend this for props as opposed to other ingame objects? Is it due to optimization or just the way the engine renders different things? I did enough research to have a rudimentary understanding of mipmaps and why they're important, but I don't yet understand the purpose for multiple settings and how they'd be useful for different applications.

[AQT]

Here's an example of just about everything using 1:

Hidden/Spoiler:

It makes everything look "speckle-y" from a distance.

[SleepKiller]

What does a value of 3 do vs 1, and why do you recommend this for props as opposed to other ingame objects? Is it due to optimization or just the way the engine renders different things? I did enough research to have a rudimentary understanding of mipmaps and why they're important, but I don't yet understand the purpose for multiple settings and how they'd be useful for different applications.

I would expect his reasoning to be that weapons and characters are likely to be closer to the camera thus less likely to suffer from the artifacting that occurs when mipmaps aren't used/available.

If I remember correctly it goes something like this. (If anyone is more experienced than me with this feel free to correct me! This is outside the comfort zone of my knowledge.)

So I have a portion of a texture that looks like this that I want to sample from to draw something.

2 0 4
0 4 0
2 0 2

Up close past it's resolution it might be sampled like this. (This isn't an actual filtering method, see here for a list of filter methods used by GPUs.)

2 1 0 2 4
1 0 2 0 2
0 2 4 2 0
1 0 2 0 1
2 1 0 1 2

Because the texture is lower resolution than the screenspace being drawn to the GPU does some filtering to give us the extra texels and all is well. However if the screenspace being drawn to is smaller than the texture's resolution it can end up being sampled like this.

2 4
4 0

Thus producing small (noticeable) artifacts in the drawn image. With mipmaps the GPU could've switched to sampling a low resolution of the image that had already down sampled using more expensive algorithms than it can use, giving a much nicer result. This is (to my understanding) why you seldom want to disable mipmaps except for textures that you know are going to be drawn at a fair constant range (like the skydome texture) or the main player model texture in a game. Even then though you can't predict what resolution someone is going to use (a texture sampled fine at 1920*1080 might be sampled horribly at 1366*768) so it's probably best in the end to leave them and let the GPU do it's job.

(And I see now finishing writing this AQT has bet me to it with a much simpler explanation. Oh well I will still post this.)

[LitFam]

- 32 bit - maps 4 would you exclude the -32 bit for props.

[Marth8880]

- 32 bit - maps 4 would you exclude the -32 bit for props.

'-32bit', '-8bit', and '-4bit' are all PS2-exclusive parameters and will not have any effect when munging PC or Xbox, which use the '-format <type>' parameter instead.

Resources:
https://sites.google.com/site/swbf2modt ... umentation

[thelegend]

Here's an example of just about everything using 1:

Hidden/Spoiler:

It makes everything look "speckle-y" from a distance.

Off-Topic: While I really love the map and especially its graphical looking, I wonder why you included -maps in for tree branches and the terrain?

[Marth8880]

Off-Topic: While I really love the map and especially its graphical looking, I wonder why you included -maps in for tree branches and the terrain?

Using '-maps 1' for all textures was unfortunately just a thing that we used to do, but thankfully we've grown past it.

[AQT]

Yep. A part of me knew it doesn't even look all that great. It kind of looks like the textures had been over sharpened. But the procedural side of me said to put it in all .tga.option files. Just go by eye instead.

[Oceans14]

Honestly I think it looks nice and crisp. Tbh that entire map is gorgeous lol

Seems like what you're all saying then is that there isn't a "rule of thumb" for what parameter is used for what type of ingame entity - it's just sort of trial and error as needed. I'm definitely looking forward to fooling around with this.

[Marth8880]

Seems like what you're all saying then is that there isn't a "rule of thumb" for what parameter is used for what type of ingame entity - it's just sort of trial and error as needed.

It's a bit of both - there's a general rule of thumb that you should try to stick to, but not so much that you should stick to it absolutely, you should always always always tweak as needed.

[LitFam]

This article helped me understand .option properties a lot.