Terrain Textures

[cybersphinx]

ok, 512 was a mistake but also I tried to replace an old 128x128 decal by a new one 128x128 and in the game with standard zoom it looks blurred while the all new terrain textures in the background look good

Hm, can you post that, to test if it's not a problem of the engine?

[Per]

I do not have much opinion on what the max size of texture decals should be, but I would like to point out that the number of pixels that you can see at once in a rendering is not the limit at which point an increase in texture resolution ceases to have an impact to the crispness of the rendering. This is because each application of a texture to the scene is interpolated, and higher base resolution has increasing effect the more the texture is tilted in regards to the viewer. However, on the other hand, if you try to cram a too high detail texture on a too small area, it will look horrible because the details will be seen partially and mixed up.

[MaNGusT]

And at maximum zoom, a tile is ~256 pixels wide.

I noticed that when I zoom in to max, decals increase their size but aren't visible after the borders of the tile.

Hm, can you post that, to test if it's not a problem of the engine?

Of course.

[cybersphinx]

I do not have much opinion on what the max size of texture decals should be, but I would like to point out that the number of pixels that you can see at once in a rendering is not the limit at which point an increase in texture resolution ceases to have an impact to the crispness of the rendering. This is because each application of a texture to the scene is interpolated, and higher base resolution has increasing effect the more the texture is tilted in regards to the viewer.

Hm, but when I look at a tile from above so it shows at 1:1 and then tilt it to the back (as happens with Warzone's camera), I squash the texture pixels in a smaller area. Not sure where more pixels would do any good there. I guess around 1:1 the pixels might get smudged together a bit, but as I said, I'm don't think that at usual zoom levels more than 128 is needed. It might sure make a difference at higher zoom levels, but for example the attached crater tiles are 49KB are for 128, 190 KB for 256, and 665 KB for 512. That's roughly an increase in size of 300% for the next level, and the result will only be visible at the lowest zoom levels.

I noticed that when I zoom in to max, decals increase their size but aren't visible after the borders of the tile.

Decals are one tile, not sure how easy that can be changed. But if they change size relative to the terrain, that sound wrong.

[MaNGusT]

Decals are one tile, not sure how easy that can be changed. But if they change size relative to the terrain, that sound wrong.

look at the borders of the decal. looks like it has a bigger size than the tile or doesn't fit the tile, may be tile size is 120x120 or something similar? That happens for 64 decals too, so I think it's a bug.

Untitled.png

crater256.png

[cybersphinx]

Oh, that is probably Buginator's "lets cut off the tile borders to prevent seams" hack. I've intended for quite some time already to fix that the proper way, but haven't gotten around to it yet...

[Zarel]

That's... a lot of border to cut off. Shouldn't we be cutting off just two pixels or so?

[Buginator]

Ok, take one tile like so:

128.png

And now, we zoom in like so:

wz2100-20100803_223510-CAM_1END.png

The more you zoom out, then you get:

wz2100-20100803_223350-CAM_1END.jpg

and so on for 32 & 16 ...

Hope that clears things up.
Oh, and the game is currently hardcoded for 128x128 max for decals.

[MaNGusT]

Hope that clears things up.
Oh, and the game is currently hardcoded for 128x128 max for decals.

OK. why do we cut off the tiles?

[Zarel]

So around 9 pixels are being cut off from a 128x128 tile. Why?

[lav_coyote25]

because no one wants to fix it properly. right?

[Zarel]

No, I'm asking why the decision was made to make the buffer zone that big specifically. It seems much higher than necessary.

[Buginator]

Hope that clears things up.
Oh, and the game is currently hardcoded for 128x128 max for decals.

OK. why do we cut off the tiles?

It is the way we handle sampling and filters.

because no one wants to fix it properly. right?

It is a proper fix, is it the only way to do it ? No.

No, I'm asking why the decision was made to make the buffer zone that big specifically. It seems much higher than necessary.

Here, read this.
http://www.sjbaker.org/steve/omniv/tiling_textures.html that explains a bit more about this.

Oh, and I am not sure the way it is currently done is needed in trunk, since we do things differently than in 2.x

For those of you that forgot, here was the issue before: viewtopic.php?t=3203

[Safety0ff]

Here, read this.
http://www.sjbaker.org/steve/omniv/tiling_textures.html that explains a bit more about this.

Another reference (though some pages are missing): http://books.google.com/books?id=H4eYq7-2YhYC&pg=PA274

The other way to fix it would be to change the way the mosaics are created, which would give the proper spacing between tiles, the tradeoff is that the tiles won't be as dense in texture memory.

I wonder if it is possible to get away with using one pixel borders at all levels.

[cybersphinx]

I wonder if it is possible to get away with using one pixel borders at all levels.

In theory, that works. But afaik, you need the same texture coordinates for all mipmap levels, so you need the lowest mipmap level expanded up (does that make sense?) regarding the space needed.