Request for S3TC textures for Decorations

[ahaigh01]

Guys,

I’ve been thinking about the idea of creating a separate set of higher res 8-bit textures for non-open gl users. I’m not sure if is really workable. First, out of the 4 renderers possible, open gl, direct 3d, glide, and software, only open gl and software are able to display resolutions above 256 x 256. Under glide and direct 3d, a 1024 x 1024 texture will be displayed just as blurry as a texture at 256 x 256. Secondly, 8 bit textures, to optimize for speed in the game, need to be palletized with a program like ‘bright’so that as many textures in a package share as few palettes as possible. This would make it harder to add new ones as they are produced, because you would want them all done, and then palletize them, I believe. For the in-game screenshots (under open gl) that I made a few months back, I produced high-res unpalletized 8 bit PCX versions of the plant skins, then imported then into unrealshare.u and resaved it. It worked for the purpose of getting screenshots, but the game noticeably slowed down with every texture added. After about 10 textures the game was unplayable. Of course not palletizing them worsened the speed some.

So it would be a lot of extra work to try to support non open gl, and it may not work out very well anyway. Just something to consider.

[BOZO]

I have finished extracting all of the Unreal Beta 98 textures. The maximum size they will be is 256x256 so we can at least provide something that all renderers can use. Going higher resolution than this does not seem like a good idea as per ahaighs post....I'll set up a download location as soon as I can. As far as palletes go, we may be able to get away with using the same ones that currently exist in the UnrealShare.u, UnrealI.u, and UPak.u files. This is something to look into anyways.

On a side note: 256x256 is the maximum size that you can make a procedural texture. I have done extensive testing and can force a texture size larger than this easily but the defined area for performing the dynamic changes will always be limited to a 256x256 area. This is hardcoded in the engine through some of the variable definitions and cannot be circumvented. Thus only procedural textures of lower resolution than 256x256 may be modified to increase their resolution. I am figuring out the best methodology to extract the procedural textures so we can stick them into our modified packages with ease. Not sure if we will gain much from trying to inrease their resolution anyways....

[BOZO]

Thanks to Hyper.nl running a bunch of public test servers I have received some real world operational data to look at. The nuts and bolts of it is I am working on the beta mutator some more to improve some operations and try to get past some bugs that showed up once it was operating for awhile. No hard crashes just some intermittant operation. I will add in some more intelligence/configurability also while I am at it. Expect a new version before too long.

[BOZO]

Ok. I finally broke down and created my own FTP server here at the house that I can host downloads on.

I still haven't set up a domain name but my IP address is usually static as far as I can tell anyways.

So here is my first public offering. The extracted higher resolution textures from the Unreal 98 beta version.

[ftp]ftp://65.182.73.85/Unreal/UnrealOne/BOZ ... xtures.zip[/ftp]

Enjoy!!

DieHard and ahaigh, these are the textures that I thought we should include in the HighResolution package. Can you guys see about creating test package that we can check out and see if the increased resolution even seems worth the effort of pursuing a 2x texture resolution increase? Thanks guys.

[BOZO]

Thanks once more to Hyper.nl for some additional beta test results. I am rewriting some of the mutator code to fix some client crash problems and make it much more robutst. I just realized with my long development time I actually had some horrendous code workarounds that were completely uneccessary - I am spending time optimizing the code and adding a few more features before a second beta release.

[Hyper]

Nice to see my crash reports are being used to make a better final. :-)

Nice work there.

[ahaigh01]

Cool, I can't wait to try it. 8-) Bozo, I haven't been able to download those texures you put on your ftp. It doesn't seem to be accessible. Is there another way to get them?

[BOZO]

Doh!

My server shut down while I wasn't watching it. Try again buddy.