Sharper looking textures (detail textures?)

[MirceaKitsune]

I noticed while playing different games that many modern shooters have a strong looking overall environment, while Nexuiz still gives the effect of something being too simple even with all rendering effects enabled. I tried looking as to why and comparing the view in Nexuiz to other games, and I think the worst issue on the side of looks is the low quality textures and blurred environment rather then a sharp and detailed scene. I would say this is currently the main limit which keeps Nexuiz from looking like a modern game with high quality sharp looks.

I'm not sure how the quality of surfaces can be better improved at this point, though I think a few ways could work. Here's a comparative image between Nexuiz, UT and the new Xreal regarding texture quality.



From my understanding there could technically be 3 ways to improve texture quality:

1 - Replacing all textures with higher quality textures, most of at least 512x512. That would be a ton of work and would cause big file sizes and loading times however... I don't know why I even thought of this

2 - Implementing detail textures in Darkplaces, the easiest, most performant and highest quality way imo. My vote is totally on this For users who are not familiar with detail textures, this is a short explanation of how they work like in UT (the system exist in many engines I think).

3 - Implementing some other filter in Darkplaces which can make textures look sharper one way or another, though this probably wouldn't solve seeing textures blurred when looking from way up close like detail textures would. A possible technology could be mipmapping of textures.

I think it would be wonderful if detail textures could be implemented and their scaling, distance and depth adjustable from cvars. All that the engine needs to know is how to blend a grayscale image over a texture on a single surface, and of course shaders to be defined for each texture owning a detail. This is a close up example of what a big impact detail textures have in UT2004.



I'd like to hear more opinions and thoughts on this. If everyone agrees with detail textures I can try to photoshop a few and make some shaders, if someone could add this type of texture rendering into the engine (not sure if a shader can already do that, DP knows to blend a grayscale image but not to render two separately mapped textures over the same surface afaik).

[FruitieX]

IMO no detail textures, they usually don't look very good compared to using higher resolution textures. By the way, not only do the weapon model textures look blurry, but a big problem also is the playermodels. Better texturing on these would improve the visuals of the game by a lot. I'd participate in retexturing a couple of maps that are in the game already, if we had some nice high resolution textures that match the old ones.

I don't think video memory usage is a big issue, as there is a texture quality slider setting in the menu for those who don't have a lot of video memory. What is a problem though from my experience with high quality textures in DP, is that high quality gloss, bump and normal maps practically kill the rendering performance. If the texture was say 1024x1024, maybe the gloss/bump/norm maps should be 512x512 instead then. Does DP scale them up to fit the high resolution texture in that case?

[FruitieX]

BTW, I'm on it.

[ai]

I see you or someone else have used MapZone. :p

[MirceaKitsune]

Hmm... looks pretty different then the original but nice. I wasn't really thinking about replacing textures with (very) different ones, but higher quality versions of the same textures if any existed in the sources or could be created. I'm not sure how actually different ones can look like from what everyone's used to... and this also requires changing the texture mapping on all maps and recompiling I think.

I still see detail textures the most practical way. On the performance side they are a few small textures to load and render at a small mapping, should take the lowest possible performance, memory and loading time. On the quality side I think they look better then plain high quality textures because they simulate a very sharp effect that a plain texture could not (unless it was really huge) no matter what the original texture's mapping is or how close you look from. If performance allows they can even be set to a very long distance, so everything is sharp even when you look far. No map needs to be edited nor textures replaced to add them either.

As for the weapons I remember the weapon skins used to be 1024x1024 when the new weapon models were committed (that was like 4-5 months ago). They were soon after sized down... the SVN revision said they offered better loading time that way, but since then weapons started looking blurred. I would still hope to see the high quality skins back if they don't cause any real harm and still exist somewhere in an old revision.

[Chubby]

BTW, I'm on it.

aggressor looks very neat like that

[Samual]

I agree.. the textures we have right now are blurry compared to what is required (imo).....Models need some revamping too, to bring them up to speed. More polys, sharper textures..... At least have the option to use different models (With increasing quality)

We can get these map modifications in by 2.5.2.... but the model idea would have to be later.

[MirceaKitsune]

I think the weapon models are good and have enough polys, but their texture quality is very low. Manual LOD was just implemented for player models a few days ago... for players I agree more polys would be needed in some parts, but more polys always mean lower performance too.

I didn't really think replacing textures on all maps would be easily doable at this point. Of course higher quality textures (apart from any possible filter) are always great, but I guess that would raise a few concerns too. For one thing, if different textures are to be used, how will each map look like after? Everything will be very different and nothing will look like before, but maybe that's not so bad? And second, what about the file sizes and loading times? Nexuiz will probably weight +50mb more in the best case, and texture loading take two times longer. I think high quality textures away from the blurred environment is very much worth that price, still

[Samual]

I think the weapon models are good and have enough polys, but their texture quality is very low. Manual LOD was just implemented for player models a few days ago... for players I agree more polys would be needed in some parts, but more polys always mean lower performance too.

I didn't really think replacing textures on all maps would be easily doable at this point. Of course higher quality textures (apart from any possible filter) are always great, but I guess that would raise a few concerns too. For one thing, if different textures are to be used, how will each map look like after? Everything will be very different and nothing will look like before, but maybe that's not so bad? And second, what about the file sizes and loading times? Nexuiz will probably weight +50mb more in the best case, and texture loading take two times longer. I think high quality textures away from the blurred environment is very much worth that price, still

Well the crylink I think needs more polys.... Just my opinion... But on the map subject, yes it would make the game larger. But it's a necessity, I would rather have a good looking game than a small-ass one. As for different styles of maps........ We can always try making new textures match the old ones, just with more quality. I mean, I have photoshop CS4/gimp... so I could probably make some better textures.

[Lee_Stricklin]

I think the models are a bit of a higher priority than the textures, but hell the whole game is GPL so knock yourself out. I used to dominate paint (my PC barely ran Doom 95, UT99 ran at 10fps with EVERYTHING at it's lowest) about ten years ago, using that alone I made some pretty high detailed pics. I'll see if I still have some skillz left. More than likely I won't be able to really accomplish anything, but I'll give it a shot.