BZ2 Texture editing

[Shadow Knight]

The usual use for low-resolution textures is for lodding or mipmapping.

[GSH]

BZ2 1.0 used 256x256 because the 3DFx Voodoo 1 had a maximum texture size of 256x256. That's why the .bik movies are also 256x256 max. The Voodoo1 was a great card -- I bought one some time before being hired by Pandemic Studios -- but it was also popular enough that we had to respect its limits. None of the textures had mipmaps on disk -- they were created on the fly at load time -- so we couldn't easily ship multiple resolutions. And, we would have (should have!) created .bik files at 256x256 and also 512x512 or somesuch, as there's no good support for downsampling .bik files on the fly without a lot of code.

If you use BZ2DXTGen to create textures (required for all recent 1.3 patches), all the mipmaps are created automatically for you, and your GPU transparently picks which one to use based on the rough screen area of each triangle. BZ2 will also silently drop any 'too large' mipmaps that are larger than what your card says it can support.

These days, I'd recommend 1024x1024 or 2048x2048 for source texturing work, and let BZ2 and DirectX figure out what mip to really show.

-- GSH

[XxHAMADEHxX]

@GSH Nice. I think we used to have one of those cards(or some kind of voodoo) on a pentium 3.

Btw guys Im almost done with my texture but have no idea how to get battle zone to use it.

any ideas?

Thanks

[Nielk1]

Damn and I was working with 512 for some textures. 1024 does look a lot better. 2048 look fantastic.

[General BlackDragon]

go to matesfamily site and get the BZ2 DXTGen program.

use it to process the texture to make a .dxtbz2 file, and put that someplace bz2 can see it.

[XxHAMADEHxX]

Thanks

I only need a special type of sabre to use the skin. It has a separate xsi but it uses the stock texture and I have no idea how to change it to mine.

[XxHAMADEHxX]

I figured it out. Thanks guys =D re texture will be posted later today or tomorrow Godwilling XD

[DarkCobra262]

I figured it out. Thanks guys =D re texture will be posted later today or tomorrow Godwilling XD

I actually want to see this tbh

[Nielk1]

I figured it out. Thanks guys =D re texture will be posted later today or tomorrow Godwilling XD

I actually want to see this tbh

No you don't.

[XxHAMADEHxX]

Here it is viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2032

@Nielk1 how do you know? =P

[MrTwosheds]

Sorry for double posting but why do we use 256x256 if these exist?

Because its still work in progress. I reworked that ivtank00.tif from the 256x256 one, because we do not have the original art.
I am very slowly attempting to rework most of the stock textures into larger resolutions rather than just upscaling them.
That is the first ship skin I got almost finished, there are still a lot more to do as I have been mainly concentrating on terrain and props etc, While hoping that someone else would lend some talent to the task as well...
The buildings and ship skins are the hardest to do as they require quite a lot of detail recreation, I don't know if I will ever do them all, I've already suffered one RSI injury (mouse) and have no intention of going anywhere near another.

[XxHAMADEHxX]

I do a bit of work in gimp. If you could tell me what you do to make them less pixelized (or better quality in general) I might be able to help.
Sorry bout your hand bro =(

[Zero Angel]

Wish I still had the master PSDs for these.

[MrTwosheds]

The pilot skins will need quite a lot of rework to look good at 1024x1024. It would be great if we could get a few people to work on improving stock textures and then share them as community assets, so that people who then wish to modify them further could start from that base rather than from the 256x256 versions.

[XxHAMADEHxX]

I tried to upscale a recycler. I was able to do something, but I couldn't figure out a way to do smaller details without remaking them.