High resolution is just ugly! (content development?)

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BillP
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High resolution is just ugly! (content development?)

Post by BillP »

Hello all.

I know it's a bit malapropos for a first post to be a complaint, and for that I apologize. I also don't know where such threads go, so I will put it under user help.

I'll attach a screenshot, for the sake of it, but I'm guessing this is not a new issue.
Image
2560x1600, 4.2M PNG

OK. So, question: Do none of the devs have high res screens? 2560x1600 is just vacant and boring, and in some cases, there are single-pixel lines that will break up, depending on your OpenGL settings and your gpu. I took it down to 1920x1080 and it's slightly better, but still fairly useless. The threat indicators, the off-screen target arrows, and the radar, all this stuff is so minuscule it's practically invisible. Compounded by the heavily aliased scaling of the background "system" cube maps. Also, is there any easy way to control the opacity of the cockpit screens, mostly the radar? Those backgrounds wash out everything. Is it a preference? I searched on http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/wiki/ ... :Variables but it doesn't list anything, although I did test text_background_alpha and it works, but of course only for text. Can someone point me to where in the code I'd look for the radar opacity? I'd also love it to be a single variable to increase the line widths of most indicators on the hud, but I'm guessing that will take more effort.

I know the game is made to support as much hardware as possible, but it seems kind of backwards to cater to the low end and not the high end. Granted not everyone has high-end GPUs with 4 Gigs of VRAM that pull hundreds of watts feeding into 2560x1600 monitors, but we're talking about systems that are specifically built by - you guessed it - gamers. And in my world, no one has less than a 1920x1080 screen (unless perhaps it's a laptop) and a modern sandy/ivy dual/quad core with 4+ gigs RAM.

I found in some of the older posts, that supposedly there are high res backgrounds and cube maps on the SVN server, and I just download those and then bump the <var name="max_texture_dimension" value="65536"/> and <var name="max_cubemap_size" value="65536"/> values to something higher, maybe 1048576? (Would 16x be enough?)

I was really hoping someone(s) had already gone though all this before, and I could find a download ready-to-go, a vegastrike-highres-texture-pack.tar.bz2 or something. Sadly I cannot find such things.

Any help greatly appreciated!
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Re: High resolution is just ugly! (content development?)

Post by TBeholder »

It's listed in the new wiki (http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/wiki/ ... :Variables).
As to radars, alpha may come from the sprite, i.e. referred somewhere in data/cockpit and ends in textures/.../radar.image or something - most of HUD is there, after all.
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Re: High resolution is just ugly! (content development?)

Post by loki1950 »

Welcome aboard BillP I usually run at 1920x1080 and there are indeed some graphical artifacts at that resolution,that said I think that klauss will most likely chime in soon as he is the one that is most familiar with our graphics pipeline and to to answer one of your questions I don't think anyone has tested at greater that 1920 x 1080 so that maybe the reason that those artifacts are still around ;) klauss is a bit of a perfectionist so he will be sure to have something to say 8) Their is a set of hi-res textures about it is in the svn repo and I do not recall if it was ever packaged don't know it included better cube maps though if not then new ones will need to be generated.

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klauss
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Re: High resolution is just ugly! (content development?)

Post by klauss »

Lol, yeah.

Honestly, I only tested 1920x1080 on a 40" LCD TV, so... it didn't look that small ;)

But I can see how it'd look small on a monitor-sized screen.

Problem is, catering to everybody's need is just outside the capabilities of our mostly hardcoded HUD vector graphics. Someone talked about SVG, and how it'd help. And it would, but we have nothing that will read an SVG and create a (2D) mesh out of it, which is what would be needed, so no joy yet. Patches are welcome ;)

The transparent panels aren't vectors, so you can't easily change their transparency. But if you're able to edit the images that compose them (defined in cockpit files), then you certainly can.

As for the backgrounds, they're from a time where the highest sane resolution was around 1280x1024. Wide screens weren't even around I believe, or very uncommon. So it's mostly about outdated art. Very few people possess the skills to create high quality high res background cubes, but we have one contributed from NASA milky way sets that looks a lot better. Thing is, that one's NASA-licensed, so it's tricky

In any case, screen resolution is high enough nowadays, and going higher, that there's no hope of keeping up with bitmap-based art. That's why I was suggesting we should use meshes for background, pre-rendered as imposters for performance, but dynamic in nature. That would let them scale graciously, and we could even have a "galactic" scenery definition that will create customized backgrounds for all sectors. That'd be fun. But it's a lot of work. Plus, I haven't come up with a good shader for nebulae yet.

Finally, and I haven't seen this mentioned on the OP but it's valid, text is awful at all resolutions. We need a TTF rasterizer like Freetype to make it scale graciously, but none has contributed the required code, and it isn't trivial. I've had Freetype's docs on the bookmarks for months now, since I intend to do this soonishly, but still. Not trivial. Not enough time. No joy. Patches welcome ;)
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Re: High resolution is just ugly! (content development?)

Post by TBeholder »

loki1950 wrote:Their is a set of hi-res textures about it is in the svn repo and I do not recall if it was ever packaged don't know it included better cube maps though if not then new ones will need to be generated.
Technically, there's already /hqtextures directory and data/hqtextures confvar, with relative location counted from one step above data directory. But in repository there's nothing inside except splash screens.
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BillP
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Re: High resolution is just ugly! (content development?)

Post by BillP »

Old code, eh? I didn't know how late to the party I was. I see from most of the activity on the various mods, the real fun was back in 2002-2005? Ten years is a lot of time in this world. I guess when code goes from being outdated to an anachronism, it's more tragic than that. I think it's very cool that people are both still playing and still coding for it!

As Deadpan Allie said at the end of Cadigan's short story Nearly Departed (whose contract could be adapted to an in-game mission) ...
"life's a bitch. And then you die."

Resolutions aren't going to get smaller. Tens/hundreds of thousands of 2560x1600 Macbook Pros are out here, and how many millions of those 9.7" 2048x1536 touchscreen things are in use? (A Nexus 10" is also 2560x1600). 4k monitors are still a bit pricey, but people do own them, not just art/photo departments at companies. They'll become the 21" Trinitron of 10 years ago soon enough. (hey, remember floppy drives? This generation will say "hey remember hard drives?" while posting on tech support forums about their multi-terabyte SSDs performing poorly, getting a measly 1.5G/sec writes...)

I tried dropping the resolution and letting the LCD controller in the monitor do the scaling. It looks just as bad running a non-native resolution. A CRT would have fared better at running a lower resolution and looking good, but the point is moot; haven't had a CRT monitor in a decade, and I'm sure some of you have never owned one. Still considering just running with it though, maybe add in an OGL scanline CRT shader, have a retro experience w/o dosbox.

OK I know the codebase is dated, but no GL_MULTISAMPLE? Does the average VS user run on hardware that wasn't current 10 years ago? In the most congested battle I could muster, maybe ~80 ships in range, forced 16x FSAA is only a few percentage points of GPU for me on a 2 Gig GF114 using the proprietary driver. The (fans never kicks into high gear playing VS at any point.)

Actually speaking of, where is the most resource-consuming point? Can we piss off a planet or fighterbase or something to spawn out thousands of fighters from dozens of capships, can we have a 50k vs. 50k system-wide race war? Or is that just impractical currently? Put another way, at any given point in the campaign storyline, what is the busiest system/jump? I can't seem to generate a truly chaotic battle.

re: cube maps, those NASA graphics from deep space widefield scopes are crazy bright! And the biggest ones I could find to download are only 6000x6000, which for a single image isn't bad, but wrapped into a cubemap is going to be 1500 per, assuming it's all usable, so scaling is still going to be visible. I guess we could do the sneaky reverse/mirror to make a seamless center but if it's got nebulae in the starfield it'll be obvious you ran a seamless tiling filter to get a monster 18Kx18k image.

I've started reading through the code and have implemented a couple changes, like for the line weights. It's hard-coded but seems to work, I'll work on it to fit in with the existing config system and then when I have the time, I want to work on rendering some high-res radar bitmaps in Blender or something. I'd love to see it go realtime generated not overlays, but that's a huge undertaking and I'm still trying to play the game. :)

Thanks all!
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Re: High resolution is just ugly! (content development?)

Post by klauss »

BillP wrote: OK I know the codebase is dated, but no GL_MULTISAMPLE? Does the average VS user run on hardware that wasn't current 10 years ago? In the most congested battle I could muster, maybe ~80 ships in range, forced 16x FSAA is only a few percentage points of GPU for me on a 2 Gig GF114 using the proprietary driver. The (fans never kicks into high gear playing VS at any point.)
Yeah, I've been forcing it with the driver, but it may be a good idea to add multisampling options to vsconfig. Feature request? (if it ain't there already?) :)
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