I know we already have the high-res skies but I was wondering if there are any skilled photoshop artists around up for making a high-res texture pack for all textures (grass, road, gravel etc etc.) in LFS. If we have 10 or so artists it can't be that much work for each artist. I can do some myself but I am by no means professional. With nK Pro on the doorstep, LFS could really use a graphics upgrade. Who's in?

I can make asphalt textures, but they wont be that great. Out of curiosity, what resolution will the textures be?

Well we would first need to see how much we can push it based on what PC's at the moment can handle and how much we need to get the textures to look as good as possible.

Just make all the textures double of what size we have right now, and we would have to experiment with affects our graphics performance.

So if you have 512x textures for road, use 1024x. You get the idea

I actually would be willing to do interior textures, but that would be sometime in 2006 I think .

Not high-res, but an idea of how the laptop texture could be improved

I dream to have every texture ingame in 2048 *g*

I'll gonna experiment a bit maybe and see how much this will look better

Quote from Tweaker :

Just make all the textures double of what size we have right now, and we would have to experiment with affects our graphics performance.

So if you have 512x textures for road, use 1024x. You get the idea

Don't forget that 1024x1024 is not double 512x512...it's FOUR TIMES as much.

512^2 = 262144 pixels.
1024^2 = 1048576 pixels.

2048 x 2048 would be 4194304 pixels - 16 times as many pixels as the original 512 resolution. I'm showing under 25MB of texture memory used by LFS right now, so this might not be a problem in terms of memory usage, but it may be a problem in terms of texture throughput or processing power.

Uhhh... 512 raised to the 2nd power? Not that kind of double, just multiplied by 2 I mean That would equal 1024 then. However you say it I don't know, but that is what I meant

EDIT: You might have read "512x" as 512 times 512 ((512 x 512) which is ^2). But I meant 512x512 as the square resolution, not an equation

Cue-ball you seriously confused me now. Tweak, 512x512 would not be right because one side is 512 heigh, and 512 wide. So, 512+512 x 2 would be 1536..but then again..oh please someone help!

O M G :doh:

No, with 512x512 --- When you want to double (x2) the height, and double (x2) the width, you would get 1024x1024. That is how I interpret it anyways... I don't see how that is confusing.

Simple math! If you wanted double the amount of 6 pencils, you would get 12 in return :zombie:

double: - twice as great or many

Lets not get into this for pages and pages, I think you get the point :doh:

YES THAT MAKES SENSE! I feel less confused after reading cue-balls post Anyway, screw this convo lets continue with the high res stuff

And thats one way of looking at it, but what Cueball is trying to point out is that the GPU see's it as x4 as much work.. this is because its not looking at the dimensions of the texture but rather the total pixel count

512x512 texture has a total of 262,144 pixels
1024x1024 texture has a total pixel count of 1,048,576

so the graphis card will infact be handling 4x the amount of data, I thought he was resonably clear myself LOL but hey

BTW 2x width and 2x hieght, is 2 times twice so equals 4x simple math

And wouldn't it be more case specific where to use hi-res 1024 and where low res textures? Only use bigger textures if the difference can be seen. I'd really like to participate but I can't do nothing.

So what will be the max sizes? 1024x1024 or something else? 32bit or 16bit (I admit that I have no idea about this...)? Car interiors or track graphics, like tarmac and sand textures? Maybe start with something small and see who can really do anything and see how it goes? Maybe start with the XRT or GTi. Not too hard but still has some popularity to get lots of whining if they don't like it. Even the demo racers can dl those cars. Or...?

Well the maxsizes just depend on what the resolution of the original is versus what we want the high resolution to be.

As an example, I just proposed a 512x texture to be at 1024x... which is actually what we do with our skins on the cars, easy to understand . But not all of the textures are 512x, some are smaller, some are bigger. I would say just make every texture twice as big, and then experiment with memory usage. You can always go down to smaller increments of resolution before you come back to the original... but at the cost of losing quality.

The few things that could be improved with high quality would be track textures and car textures. Not EVERYTHING with those two things should be enhanced though. For example the trees look fine, and some track adverts... but like the road texture, curb texture, certain car interior textures.... all could be udpated to hi-quality. Sky textures have already been done, that is a check on the list (we should make a list, heh).

Not only would this be a huge addon, but it would be very tough for many people to like (specifically the car textures). Because a lot of the car textures would have to be made from scratch, and they would differ from some of the originals. And they'd have to be 'photo-realistic', that is a lot of work. But it can be done.

start with the suits, they're just 256x256 ...

Quote from Tweaker :

Just make all the textures double of what size we have right now, and we would have to experiment with affects our graphics performance.

So if you have 512x textures for road, use 1024x. You get the idea

I actually would be willing to do interior textures, but that would be sometime in 2006 I think .

I just did that for the Blackwood track textures. I noticed that the original LFS textures do not have MIP Maps. If anyone can explain the purpose of MIP maps I will be greatful because not only did I double the resolution of the textures (texture memory usage moved up to 55MB compared to the 20MB it was befire) but I got an FPS increase. Why would the original LFS textures not use MIP maps?

EDIT: I did some of my own research - basically smaller textures are generated from the big one. Level 0 is the original texture (for instance a 1024x1024 texture). The next level has each of the dimensions halved so Level 1 would be 512x512 and the process is repeated for each next level down to 2x2. Farther away textures use the smaller texture size so that the texels (texture pixels) match the pixels on the screen and there is no moire effect, and at the same time it requires less processing. This is a form of Anti-aliasing but it improves performance too. The problem is that the new Blackwood textures are 64MB compared to the 12MB of original textures. I think this was done to keep the size of the LFS zip file down in the original release. I'm not sure if LFS automatically uses the MIP maps either, but farther objects seem to use a smaller resolution texture. My information comes from here.

Well when exporting to DDS they should have MIP maps on them... the exporting thing does that automatically. If I remember right, when viewing the DDS file the mip maps are not visible in the editor, only in the export tool or something. Maybe I'll have another look at it again, but I could swear that by default the maps are set to be made once you export the file.

Because yeah Mip Maps would normally look something like this: http://www.caligari.com/gamespace/images/gSLE_mipmap.jpg (had to deal with them a lot when making Quake and HL levels

Yes, but PSP would ask me if I would like to view the mip maps when opening the file if there were any. Also when saving it would give me the option to use the existing MIP maps rather than generating new ones. It also gives me the option to not generate MIP maps at all (however, generating them is default) so it is possible not to have them.

so is it done yet :P

Quote from axus :

not only did I double the resolution of the textures (texture memory usage moved up to 55MB compared to the 20MB it was befire) but I got an FPS increase.

This is very interesting. I would never have imagined that having more than double the texture memory in use would have given an increase in frame rate.

edit: I wonder if Eric could tell us what textures, if any, are being redone for the next major patch. I'd hate to see people spend a bunch of time increasing the texture size and quality for billboards or driver suits only to find out they'll all be replaced with better versions in the next patch.

Quote from Cue-Ball :

This is very interesting. I would never have imagined that having more than double the texture memory in use would have given an increase in frame rate.

edit: I wonder if Eric could tell us what textures, if any, are being redone for the next major patch. I'd hate to see people spend a bunch of time increasing the texture size and quality for billboards or driver suits only to find out they'll all be replaced with better versions in the next patch.

It wouldn't be wasted if Eric updated all the graphics/textures with better ones. They will probably still be lo-res (like now). So the need for bigger/sharper textures is still there. Of course if he is going to make the bigger ones available too, but I hardly see it happening.

So, what kind of sizes we are going to use? Double the width x height (to 1024x1024 from 512x512)?

The texture size should depend on the res of the original texture. The old S1 ones use smaller res textures than the new S2 ones. So I'd suggest to double the res for the S2 textures and use 4x textures for the S1 ones.

For example:

256x256 gras texture of S1 track -> 1024x1024 high-res
512x512 gras texture of S2 track -> 1024x1024 high-res

Quote from Barroso :

so is it done yet :P

yeah where is the link?

Actually I'm not really surprised you get an increase in fps. Let's just ask this question: Your process goes as follows, right?
- open dds in photoshop
- resize image
- save dds in photoshop

If so I bet you checked the box "generate mipmaps". IIRC there are no mipmaps in the original dds files of LFS. So if that creates an fps increase and looks better when near, it's all good.

Quote from Nick_ll :

Actually I'm not really surprised you get an increase in fps. Let's just ask this question: Your process goes as follows, right?
- open dds in photoshop
- resize image
- save dds in photoshop

If so I bet you checked the box "generate mipmaps". IIRC there are no mipmaps in the original dds files of LFS. So if that creates an fps increase and looks better when near, it's all good.

Yes, that is exactly the reason as I explained above. Some people just didn't read the follow-up in the edit. So we could up texture size and increase frame rate. But as someone said, it would go to waste if the final S2 release contains higher resolution textures anyway. The support for MIP maps seems to already be there so that is one big hint that the final textures will contain higher resolution MIP mapped textures, but we cannot be sure without confirmation from one of the devs. I would really like to know if this is in the works for S2 final and weather we will be wasting our time working on such a project.