post 0.5 texture change

[safemode]

We have issues where some people want quality above what DDS can offer, and it's causing a lot of conflict with those who dont want to give up the performance, or cant afford the memory requirements.

My solution is as i mentioned in the artwork 0.5 submissions guidelines threads.

We create a new repository called hq-textures.
hq-textures contains only those textures that those people want to make uncompressed. they can be png or jpeg. They exist in the same path as the DDS of the texture does, as if hq-textures was data4.x.

hq-textures gets downloaded beside data4.x, so it exists in the same parent directory. Though, we could make it configurable. Either way, it wont be inside data4.x.

hq-textures will be completely optional.

hq-textures will have a vssetup option for super high quality. This option sets the config variable hqtextures to a boolean. In vsimage.cpp, we will have a check before opening a file to see if hqtextures is true. If true, we change the filename to point to hq-textures. If the file does not exist, we fallback to the original filename, otherwise we load the texture we find and dont compress it on the fly. (compression on the fly will just be disabled altogether).

In this way, hq-textures can evolve into a HQ texture pack, completely external to data4.x, and wont affect developing in data4.x, wont have an issue with updating etc etc. It'll be awesome (tm).

People updating textures to data4.x wont be responsible for updating hq-textures like they are for the masters repo. The hq-textures repo will only be updated by those people who want a particular texture uncompressed. The only time anyone would have to go and "fix" things in hq-textures is if someone let a texture go that was changed in data4.x or someone made added a texture that makes the texture pack unusable to most people (dont try and make all the ships uncompressed). etc etc.

What this means is that data4.x will be almost entirely dds, and will stay that way. If you want some better images and you can handle the load, pull hq-textures, and set the vssetup option.

Eventually, if we get a lot of uncompressed images, we can subdivide the option to load uncompressed textures, so that say, an option in vssetup will have us load only backgrounds from hq-textures, another would add to that some uncompressed shader textures, another would be base textures. etc.

I really think this is the only way to make the compromise and make everyone happy.

[loki1950]

Good compromise safemode

Enjoy the Choice

[safemode]

I also want to add, this is not a response to the conversion to dds lowering quality. The game compressed everything to DXT on the fly before DDS was added, which means it actually looked worse before.
This is in response to people wanting a path for uncompressed texures without having to in-fight and debate forever or further increase data4.x and eventually leave nobody happy.

[klauss]

Nobody's blaming you for the quality drop, safemode. In fact, converting to DDS offline actually increased quality. However, some mods shipped with disabled texture compression because of those quality issues (mods with less textures or ones of lesser resolution to worry about than VS). Now there's a choice other than that, and hence the motion to have select stuff uncompressed.

BTW: I think your solution is pretty optimal. And you can implement it as a mod! (a mod that changes textures only). Take a look at how mods change file lookup sequence in vsfilesystem.cpp, you probably need little or no change to the code, only vs.config changes.

[safemode]

If we can implement hq-textures as a mod, all the better. Then i wont have to hack vsimage to do the trick.

[bgaskey]

If we end up doing it as an option in the svn checkout, it can be implemented alongside separating the binaries from the data4.x tree and having mac and pc binaries that reference the main data tree, as was discussed a while ago.

[safemode]

there are no binaries necessary, or changes to the binaries as they exist.

all that needs to be changed is vssetup.

The texture pack will be treated like a mod in the VS code, but all it will be is some replacement textures.

We will expose the texture pack as a texture pack, not as a mod to users. Vssetup will have a quality option that re-defines extreme. Extreme will now mean "use texture pack if available"

end users can download the texture pack optionally, they would pull data4.x then if they want, pull hq-textures.


I really _really_ do not want to link hq-textures to data4.x in any further way. It's completely optional, it's checked out seperately, and the only modification to data4.x is apparently a minor edit to vssetup.

[chuck_starchaser]

Sounds very good, Safemode. The only ship texture I would consider deserving hqtexture alternatives is the normalmap. Normapmaps really suffer quality-wise when DDS converted.