Low quality textures

[sand_man]

I have compiled svn on ArchLinux.
The game seems to run fine but for some reason the skybox is showing really low quality textures and it is also quite visibly a box rather than looking like a sky.
See what I mean by the screenshots I've attached.

I'll admit that I pulled the data from svn at another computer and used 7zip to compress it and take it to the computer I am now trying to play it. Could that be the problem? Did the compression ruin it somehow?

It doesn't matter what performance level I set the game to, this low quality skybox stays the same.

Running kernel 2.6.35
nvidia 256.44

It was the same on 2.6.34 and the previous nvidia release too.

[klauss]

How did you build it?

Your config.log would come in handy (if you used configure/make).

[sand_man]

OK I couldn't find the config.log for some reason so I started another build just to produce one.
Note that I am using gcc 4.4 rather than 4.5. I couldn't compile with 4.5 for some reason.

[sand_man]

I downloaded the data again and I recompiled the binaries. The "box" effect has gone but the sky textures are still really low quality.
Could it be a problem with the library versions I'm using?
I'm not sure which ones are relevant.

libpng 1.4.3
libjpeg 8.0.2
boost 1.43.0


I just noticed this module in svn 'hqtextures'
Is this what I'm supposed to download? I didn't have to do this last time.

[klauss]

Good that boxy thing disappeared by itself, I could find no reason for it.

It was an old bug we fixed long ago, it was puzzling me like hell in that screenshot from a recent SVN revision

About the quality, I believe you're complaining about the DXT compression of background textures. It produces some artifacts, and sometimes it looks lower-res than it really is, because DXT compression produces blocky artifacts.

hqtextures is supposed to have higher-res, uncompressed textures. It's for very high-end hardware only, because uncompressed textures take up 4x VRAM, and higher res even more.

I'm not sure the amount of content that has been committed to hqtextures, though... I believe it's not much.

In any case, I'll try to add getting uncompressed background in the to-do list. Sadly enough, right now the engine can't load uncompressed cube maps (I know, it sounds weird, but uncompressed cube maps are in a weird DirectX format and we haven't implemented a loader for that format yet).

[sand_man]

So what I'm seeing now is normal? Is this something that changed? I'm sure it didn't look this bad the last time I played (must have been within the last 12 months).
Thanks for your input.

[klauss]

Yep, the file format being used changed since 0.4.3.

In 0.4.3, (and perhaps 0.5) backgrounds were BMPs. Now they're DXT-compressed DDS files. The benefit of DXT is that it's a compressed format with a 4:1/6:1 ratio that stays compressed in video memory.

But the compression comes with a price, and that's quality. For backgrounds, the quality loss is significant and, it seems, the tool used to compress the files wasn't that good.

Luckily SVN will hold the old, original files, so all we have to do is find a way to make better files. It's not that easy, we need features of the DDS format for the newest shaders, and the best tools for DXT compression aren't as flexible as we'd like.

[sand_man]

Thanks for the information. Makes sense now.

Good luck with that