lost_soul on 21/10/2011 at 15:26
Quote Posted by Koki
Yeah, that's kind of the point, if it's 10GB of textures then how come they still suck so bad they need a hi-res patch?
It can't be texture variation because lolconsoles.
(Also that's second hi-res texture pack for PC version after Crysis 2. Wonder if it will become the norm?)
Go take a photo with a high quality digital camera. Now go have it printed on a poster measuring 400 inches by 400 inches. Understand now? No matter how high the quality of a texture is, if you stretch it enough (to cover a lot of land) it will eventually look blocky/blurry when you get up close. Wonder why they didn't use detail texturing like the old Unreal games did. This could make things look better up close without having to release an HD pack.
Basically, detail textures are transparent monochrome images that are applied over regular textures to fake more detail than is actually there.
demagogue on 21/10/2011 at 16:52
Of course it's in their interest to play down any confidence shake ups they've had in-house because it'd just project back onto people's perceptions of the games. Even if they don't postpone anything, they might be doing some serious rethinking. And there could have been some shaking up because of all the tech issues in the release, and this game was hyped so much even "decent" sales could seem disappointing, but I haven't read anything about outright "bad" sales either.
june gloom on 21/10/2011 at 18:25
Quote Posted by lost_soul
Go take a photo with a high quality digital camera. Now go have it printed on a poster measuring 400 inches by 400 inches. Understand now? No matter how high the quality of a texture is, if you stretch it enough (to cover a lot of land) it will eventually look blocky/blurry when you get up close. Wonder why they didn't use detail texturing like the old Unreal games did. This could make things look better up close without having to release an HD pack.
Basically, detail textures are transparent monochrome images that are applied over regular textures to fake more detail than is actually there.
What the fuck are you talking about? I don't know, and neither do you.
lost_soul on 21/10/2011 at 18:39
Okay, I will make this extremely simple. You have a texture of any particular size. Let's say it is 1024x1024 and it covers a brush in the game world measuring 2 feet by 2 feet. The texture is tiled on the surface, so the same pattern repeats again and again. This would still look pretty decent up close, because there is enough resolution in that texture to cover the surface.
Now with this megatexture stuff, your texture is 32000x32000... but you expect it to cover a massive piece of geometry, hundreds or thousands of times bigger. Unless the megatexture is INSANELY high resolution, it is going to look blocky up close.
I've seen Thief FMs where somebody stretched the textures out too far and it is the same effect.
june gloom on 21/10/2011 at 18:53
Pretty sure that's not how it works, and you need to stop making comparisons to decade-old games.
Sulphur on 21/10/2011 at 18:57
The megatextures were insanely massive. A terabyte of raw data. There's no need for tiling, bar laziness, because the stamping system allows for pretty much any amount of unique art for any given scene.
The reason why the textures are blocky and the PC needs a high-res pack is hardware-related. Consoles have a limited memory pool compared to PCs, and obviously you can't have supermassively detailed textures stretching from your window to the horizon without the console subsystems going LOLWAT and exploding. So they dropped the quality and compressed the shit out of it and there you go. It hasn't been reduced to a 32,000 x 32,000 sized megatexture, not from what I can gather at least. It's much bigger than that, probably around 120,000 x 120,000 or thereabouts for multiples of 8.
PCs can obviously handle massively higher resolution textures 'pages' (as the wiki informs me the way a megatex is split up) being streamed from hard drives, so all id has to do is release a less compressed version that won't choke GPU bandwidth - probably weighing in at around 100 GB, if what I've read on the internet is true - that would run pretty well and look much better up close on current-day PC hardware.
wonderfield on 21/10/2011 at 19:57
Quote Posted by Sulphur
The reason why the textures are blocky and the PC needs a high-res pack is hardware-related. Consoles have a limited memory pool compared to PCs, and obviously you can't have supermassively detailed textures stretching from your window to the horizon without the console subsystems going LOLWAT and exploding.
It's the same story on the PC, really. Pump up the texture pages to 8,192 x 8,192 and you run out of memory on a 1GB graphics card very quickly. Quadruple the size for 16k pages and you need around 1.5GB. It's not that the content within the view frustum requires that many pages to stay resident, but you also need to keep a cache when the player rotates his view around — it's just a ton of data to keep in memory at any given time. The more you try to keep in, the more the engine's going to have to flush out to keep it all within video memory and the more time per X frames spent transcoding.
Quote Posted by Sulphur
It's much bigger than that, probably around 120,000 x 120,000 or thereabouts for multiples of 8.
There are multiple 128,000 x 128,000 VTs.
Quote Posted by Sulphur
...so all id has to do is release a less compressed version that won't choke GPU bandwidth - probably weighing in at around 100 GB, if what I've read on the internet is true - that would run pretty well and look much better up close on current-day PC hardware.
I commented on this elsewhere, but I genuinely don't believe even a four-fold increase in the bit rate on the VTs is going to have a dramatic effect on the image quality. It will result in fairly significant quality increases on darker surfaces, where compression artifacts are more evident, but reducing the compression rate alone won't have dramatic effects elsewhere. As far as having a high-res texture pack is concerned, I honestly don't know if id's uncompressed VT(s) sitting on one of the servers in Mesquite has any higher-resolution data than what shipped. id has the "bitmap" version, so to speak, whereas what shipped was the "JPEG" version (actually a Microsoft HD Photo format). Giving us the a less compressed version, or even the full "bitmap" itself, just isn't going to get us much.
Detail textures are being implemented in the next patch. That's going to help more than less-compressed VTs would.
