Over pixelized backgrounds

[dividenot]

One of the things i noticed first when beginning to play VS was the over pixelized system backrounds.

I'm curious if this is only something that happens on lower end computers or does everyone experience this?

Is there anyway to fix this problem?

I've read through the System backround article by pyramid and am still slightly confused about how editing and implementing a new backround works. I suspect I just have to do some learning on my own because I've never dealt with spherical backrounds.

I'm not so much interested in making my own backrounds as I am in making the current ones look better.

Anyone willing to help me through the process or tell me what it would take to make those dreaded pixels less appearent?

[chuck_starchaser]

We'll soon (hopefully) be moving to using cube-maps, instead of sphere-maps. Klauss was working on it when his videocard died. He got it working, but not with the most desirable cube-map format yet --that being the format that ATI's CubeMapGen tool exports. It's important to be able to do conversions with CubeMapGen because that tool, unlike any other, makes the cube-map LOD's (mip-maps) continuous around the cube, by filtering across cube faces. Otherwise, reflections off low gloss surfaces will show sharp seams.
Anyways, indeed spheremaps are for the birds; but we'll be rid of them once and for all pretty soon.

[dividenot]

So, what can I do to help with that process?

[Fendorin]

So, what can I do to help with that process?

how knows?

maybe contact klauss or Pyramid by PM for help them

i m in other side position i wanted made star-background like painting with Photoshop+the hdr shop and after export to ati cubemapgen but my videocard maybe is so old and the Ati tool doesn't work!
and i knew nothing about the right setting with cubemap and how o for transform a cross map in cube map.


thank

[pyramid]

At the moment there is little we can do about the backgrounds other than providing a higher resolution ones so that the pixelization is not visible after dds compression, which then would end up eating too much of Video RAM.
I find the backgrounds awful, too, but when klauss is ready with CubeMap support we will do better ones

Sorry to hear the docu about backgrounds is not clear. Suggestions how to improve are welcome.

[Dunkelheit]

My question would be, why in 0.4.3 the backgropunds look perfect, and in newer versions look so horrible? , this backgrounds make the game not so believable.

[pyramid]

That's cause in 0.4.3 we didn't have dds compression, which makes the backgrounds now look like crap. I haven't tried to go back to uncompressed backgrounds but would vote to do so for the sake of visuals even if it eats up all the VRAM.

*EDIT*
Just tested and the loading of uncompressed backgrounds works well. It would be however better to have them load through hqtextures but that doesn't work. I'll ask safemode how to make this possible.

[pyramid]

As safemode is currently up to his neck with RL, and only able to enable the hqtextures for backgrounds later, for now I can offer a workaround for better backgrounds. Just copy all content from masters/textures/backgrounds to data/textures/backgrounds and mass rename the extensions to .image. You'll end up with more VRAM consumption but at least the backgrounds look acceptable. There are some background masters that were not committed as pngs but as source only. I will commit them within the next days when the renderings finish.

[Fendorin]

@ pyramid : i tryed to understand your starfield pov ray tools generator

but maybe for use it i need to have some first skill in pov ray?
or i missed a tutorial?

thank

[pyramid]

Actually I haven't yet written a tutorial for the starfield generator.
I hope soon I can put one up on Space3D after finishing some minor improvements that it's undergoing at the moment.

Thanks for looking into it.