BZ2 Large Textures Pack, v1.0

[Nielk1]

I've used scripts in PS, I've made some too...

[Cyber]

The textures are not detailed enough imo

They are made from 1024x1024 images. You will probably only see the full size mipmap image close up, as a pilot, or deliberately pointing your ship at the ground, at least that's what happens on my pc. Making the textures even larger will not alter the general appearance for normal game play circumstances for most people, Personally I don't see any need to go larger as close up examination of the terrain isn't really what I play bz2 for and my screen resolution is currently 1280x1024, so I would probably have trouble getting bz2 to display a 2048x2048 terrain image, without deliberately filling the screen with a really close up view of it.
I don't know what hardware you have, but if its like mine, when you sit still in your scout, you will probably see the 512x512 mipmap infront of you and the 1x1 on the horizon, the 1024x1024 will not appear until your looking right at the terrain, making them bigger would not alter this, buying a huge monitor might.

The size... TwoSheds
It has nothing to do with the size of the image, 1024x1024 is fine.

I mean the textures in bz2 look blurred.

Example for a blurred picture:

And a detail rich picture:


Thats why I asked for a graphical option like 'texture antialiasing' or even 'texture unblurring' (?).

[MrTwosheds]

Cyber I did not work on all of the images. the textures look blurred because long ago someone reduced them all down to 256x256 pixels before releasing the game. That is about 4 x the size of an avatar picture on this site...
No added function can cleverly reverse that or create image that is just not there, drawn on modern hardware, blurred is actually a good result. If we want more resolution in the images, WE are going to have to put it there.
It would probably be much easier to crawl round the internet "stealing" hi res images to replace the originals with, but it would completely alter the look of the game, and that is not something we should be doing. (outside of a mod)
All games come to suffer from this in time, DukeNukem3d, for example, looked a lot better when it was released than it does now, it has not changed but our hardware has.
I dug out my old Unreal disk yesterday and had a quick play on that...looks dreadful! And I can clearly remember it being all new and shiny and having to turn down the graphics to get it to run properly. Now I'm looking for ways to turn them up.

[Nielk1]

...

So what, we don't need bigger images, we just need a magical "make it better" button? Let me just tell GSH to go flip that switch from broken to fixed to take care of all those other niggles too.

...Oh wait...

The images are blurry because that is all there is to show, for it to be unblurred there must be more data. Your two options aside from replacing the textures entirely are as it is now, and how Minecraft looks.


Aside from that, the only thing you could possibly be thinking about is how distant angled textures are blurred in a way, and that is anisotropic filtering, which I think 1.3 does have options for.

[Feared_1]

A larger image with more fine details creates a better texture.

I've made some giant terrain textures just for kicks and giggles to test out (4096 x 4096). The bz2dxt generator has some real issues working with that, but it seems to finish the texture conversion even though it never actually says "Done." In any case, I got the texture into the game and the detail is quite incredible. It feels like you're moving extra fast or your ship is hovering extra high because of all of the little details.

One problem I found with higher-resolution textures, though, is when looking at them from a distance, they appear black. All of the tiny details blob together until you move in closer. The same thing happens when looking at them from a sharp angle. Also, aiming your sniper rifle at the giant texture will allow you to see completely through it for some reason. I'm not sure if these things are issues with 1024 x 1024 textures.

[Nielk1]

What version of the BZ2DXT Generator?

Also, the lower mips should have kicked in for the distant textures and anisotropic filtering should have helped too.

[GSH]

4096x4096 is inconsistently supported under DX9/WinXP. Googling around, some sites say the max is 4048x4048, oddly enough. Stick with 2048x2048 max for now.

-- GSH

[MrTwosheds]

dxtbz2 are like an array of images, the first one would be 4096x40996 the next 2048x2049, then 1024x1024 all the way down to 1x1.
At a distance or angle you will always be seeing the low mipmaps, if there are not enough pixels available in your screen to draw a mip map it goes down to the next size, The lower mipmaps of your image are probably just black because that was the predominant colour in the original image. The hi res textures will only ever be viewable in the situation where there are enough screen pixels to draw it. So to actually see all of a 4096x4096 texture, you would need a monitor of that resolution.
For a normal sized monitor, the only place its really worth putting such a large texture (eg 2048x2048) would be on the sky dome, where it might actually display 1/2 of that image on your screen at any one time.
If you all want to chip in to buy me a really huge monitor ill consider making some really huge terrain textures

[Nielk1]

Distance sets mipmaps, not angle.

[MrTwosheds]

Angle would reduce the number of screen pixels available to draw the image and the video card would presumably pick a lower mipmap.

[Zax]

Future reference: thumbnail huge pics so as not to break the formatting of a page.

[Nielk1]

Angle would reduce the number of screen pixels available to draw the image and the video card would presumably pick a lower mipmap.

Only within one dimension. So no. A completely different system kicks in for angled textures.

[MrTwosheds]

Still slowly working through the stock terrain textures, upscaling and adding subtle detail.
Texture sets bane, dunes, mire, moon, pluto, toxic, dark and rend mostly done.
Metal and Core are problematic and require a different approach, not sure what to do there.

[MrTwosheds]

Just bumping this topic again in the hope that someone else will join in.

I now have processed over 90 terrain type stock textures from the "worlds" section of data.pak. All are now based on the original textures.
I do not have the originals of any of the terrain textures added into the patch1.3.pak.
So far I have avoided doing core, metal, fort and few others that contain structural type sets of textures.
Going to do the rock textures for props too.
This of course still leaves a lot of building and vehicle textures needing some fine detail work.

Scion specialist required.

Got no idea what to do about sky textures. Idea's welcome.

It also leaves the effect sprites, another area where preservation of the original look is important, any thoughts on this?

[Red Devil]

no idea how to help, otherwise i'd chip in, but thanks for doing this. i'll bet it looks great so far.