Call For High quality Texture Suggestions

[safemode]

Besides the bump maps for ships, I'd like to bring to all the artists attention that the High Quality Texture Pack is a reality. It just has no textures in it.

We need suggestions and eventual commits to the hqtextures repo of the textures that artists feel _deserve_ to be uncompressed. The standard data will contain only DDS files. hqtextures is a way to bring some textures above that quality.

So what's good enough for hqtextures guys? I need a list of textures.

My only suggestion while you guys decide what should be in the hqtextures repo is to remember, they're gonna be uncompressed textures.

[chuck_starchaser]

All base backgrounds, for starters, should available as jpeg's in HQ.
Also, the opening screens, and all textures used in 2D mode, when not flying in space.

[ace123]

I'm sorry if I am missing something obvious, but what is the difference between the 'hqtextures' repository and the 'masters' repository?

Or are you talking about storing things as jpeg's inside of the data directory.

[safemode]

no,

hqtextures repo is a special "mod". I already have support for it in the game. Read back on some of the 0.6 thread.

Basically, any textures added to hqtextures overrides the textures in data. They wont be compressed either. hqtextures sits next to data, and is completely optional. It's disabled by default, you have to uncomment the line in vegastrike.config to enable it. hqtextures does not negate the use of real mods, but it will override their textures, but mods dont have to allow the use of the hqtextures repo, or they can create their own, doesn't even have to be named hqtextures.

hqtextures is very different from masters, masters does not have to have textures in a format usable by the game, be it datatype, or resolution or whatever. Usually it does have direct input to get dds files but it also has tons of other stuff not related to distribution. hqtextures is for distribution.


OK, so splash screens. Base backgrounds. menu screens. All jpeg i take it. Anything else?

BTW, we can make these textures larger resolution than in-game dds files are. That may or may not help quality.

[chuck_starchaser]

I'm sorry if I am missing something obvious, but what is the difference between the 'hqtextures' repository and the 'masters' repository?

Or are you talking about storing things as jpeg's inside of the data directory.

Ace, the idea was that there are textures that suffer more than others when DDS-compressed. DDS has very coarse color representation, and anything with smooth gradients, for example, tends to show banding artifacts. The best people to judge what textures deserve to have uncompressed alternatives for download are the artists themselves, who may feel disappointed to see the final texture they worked so hard on kind of "ruined" by compression. On the other hand, there are many players out there who value quality over performance and who would gladly have the opportunity to download high quality versions of textures.
Base backgrounds and opening screens are perfect good examples for hqtexture candidates, as performance there is not much of an issue, and stuff like that painting by Oblivion really deserve higher quality than what DDS can offer.
And the reason why jpg should be acceptable for hqtextures is that, although jpg is a "lossy compression format", it is non-the-less of infinitely higher quality than DDS. So, the idea is basically that the engine no longer re-compresses jpg to DDS automatically, and people who want a higher visual quality experience can switch to the hqtextures alternative repo.

@Safemode:
You're right! Some textures may not suffer in the color precision domain, but may suffer a lot from reduction. I typically work on textures at 2x or 4x the final resolution, and it can be heart-breaking to see a lot of the fine detail gone after reduction. Well, not always; sometimes reductions are just fine, or even better than the full rez versions. So, here again, it could be left to the artist to decide whether to offer a higher rez alternative of a texture in hqtextures.

[safemode]

Well, i'm committing a bunch to hqtextures today. splash screens, base backgrounds, other stuff that's been suggested.

Basically, all you gotta do is pull the hqtextures repo and drop it down next to your data dir. Then uncomment the line in vegastrike.config.

I'm very interested to find out if i have to modify the order it's put into the path for mods. Mods override VS, but hqtextures has to override mods. Though, i think most mods just modify the data dir, not build on it in a /mods dir.

Keep in mind, there is nothing in hqtextures right now, i'll commit some images this evening.

If there are any unit textures in particular that need to be uncompressed, give the path. Maybe some planets or such.

[safemode]

splash screens have been committed. I dont notice any difference because they're barely displayed for any length of time, but maybe others will.


my time is being stretched these couple days, so it'll be a day or so before i can get the other more static images updated.


I think i'll add some logic to vssetup to enable and disable hqtextures, so you dont hve to go into the config file and do the minor hand editing.