High Definition Props and Textures - Discussion thread

jeronij · April 08, 2009, 03:08:05 AM

Quote from: A200 on April 08, 2009, 02:57:34 AM
So what, I am not allowed to comment and say that wasting 3 years in doing HD props, just as a visual eye candy, that will push out file sizes, slow the game down and just make it worse rather than better is a bad idea? O_O

Oh, and from what I have seen, there is no real improvement with these HD props

Quote from: jeronij on April 08, 2009, 02:51:25 AM

We need people contributing and giving ideas and energy here.

BarbyW · April 08, 2009, 03:17:04 AM

A200, this site does cherish our users and their opinions when they are relative and contributory to a discussion. So far you have only contributed negativity.
Your last post is insulting and completely irrelevant. If you have issues with any of the staff, please take them up in a PM and not in a thread like this.

mightygoose · April 08, 2009, 03:32:01 AM

can we get back on topic please, ennedi made some excellent points and i think we should push this into developement and test scenarios as we encounter them... test each new prop befrore release as we have always done.....

SimFox · April 08, 2009, 03:41:16 AM

Quote from: A200 on April 08, 2009, 03:11:09 AM
I am contributing. Sorry, I didn't know I was in North Korea here

No you are not... you are panicking and shifting responsibility from yourself to others. Responsibility that comes with the choice. In fact you want to be in North Korea, where dear Leader will protect you from decadent, computer destroying choices.

Quote from: A200 on April 08, 2009, 03:11:09 AM
Thankyou so much for giving me 2 negative rep points, that is so nice and undemocratic of you. I notice I cannot give any back, how lovely and for a site that is meant to cherish its users and their opinions...

And you think democracy is the place where you, by definition, can get only green points?
I think you 're mistaking democracy with tv commercial - there as a consumer you're always right, as long as you pay that is...

Quote from: A200 on April 08, 2009, 02:57:34 AM
So what, I am not allowed to comment and say that wasting 3 years in doing HD props, just as a visual eye candy, that will push out file sizes, slow the game down and just make it worse rather than better is a bad idea? O_O

Oh, and from what I have seen, there is no real improvement with these HD props

First f all it's not you time to be concerned about. How does it affect you? People doing it do not own anything to you. You don't pay them they are not your slaves (yagain I think you wish to be in North Korea in a position of Beloved Leader naturally)

I want to reiterate my point that the size of HD props/textures isn't a matter of concern as it's, by itself, is just extra bytes... If size is what you are concerned with that it isn't different with simply downloading and install another BAT. Big skyscraper will add to you Plugin folder another 10Mb... So should you go and test ANY new bat for what may happened with your game if you add it to the fully developed city. I know new BATs are tested but not from this angle, or are they? Bigger size concerns are a bit besides the point. If you fear it simply don't use custom content! Just as Jerronij pointed out don't try to load 3 tones into you 1,5 ton car...

The real impact from the HD-Props, I mean UNIQUE feature, one the sets them apart for any other bats is that fact that to display them at Zoom5 game would need to resize the FSHs.
The effort needed for this procedure is exactly that constitutes EXTRA and unique load on system.
In this respect I would like to ask wouanagaine opinion on how would it be done? By CPU or GPU, and what would be a good test for it. Would really a fully developed city that would have just few props (we wouldn't be able to have thousands of them anytime before we'll get thousands of them) of the city square filled to the brim with only HD props (may be few dozens unique ones) be a better test to seek out this extra load?

Another unique feature of HD prop that may demand additional computer resources is that fact that default slab for them at zoom 5 is not 256x256 pixel sized square (at zoom5 view, naturally) but 128x128 pixel one. this means that larger prop may have more vertecies in it's Zoom5 S3d. Basically we may have more geometry with same sized props. But I believe in Hardware mode this would be taken care by GPU... Again I think concentrated Prop-City would be able to more clearly show the "spike" than normal one...

As for the location of the cache... I think given 32Mb video card requirement it is more likely to be in RAM...

At any rate, my script is out there and had been downloaded by 25 users... so let's see what when will we see prophesied flood...

wouanagaine · April 08, 2009, 04:09:33 AM

There won't be any resizing per see, only a different texture sampling as the ratio will be 2:1 instead of 1:1
This sampling will be done natively by GPU ( for hardware rendering ) for free, for software rendering this will be done by CPU, depending on how it is coded, it can be very fast or just fast ( if the shrinking do an average of 4 surrounding texels )
As for more vertices, I don't think it really matters here. Correct me if I'm wrong but a normal S3D will have around 200 vertices, so we may end to 400 with HD props, not something your GPU will see. It is another story if you go from 10000 to 20000

Ennedi · April 11, 2009, 09:46:18 AM

I understand that most of you are interested in lot and BAT textures, but I made some experiments with terrain textures and I got interesting results. Maybe this information will be helpful.

I made a few rock mods yesterday and today (I made exactly 13 and only one deserves presentation

, I must work better

). This one on my photos is not good, but it has a version with 512x512 texture in Z4 (ie Zoom5 as most of you use to talk; I rather use names from the Reader). It has also some sharp edges and clearly visible details.

1. Terrain textures have 256x256 size for every zoom. I wanted to know if there is any significant difference in the rock texture quality between normal 256x256 texture and the "HD" one. Honestly saying I didn't expect it. The game always change the terrain texture size depending on the terrain shape. It means a loss of quality. I am also rather sure that the game has a certain amount of pixels for a particular area in every zoom (there is a special property which says how big part of the texture is equal to 100 m in the farthest zoom; it is called "Terrain Tex Tiling Factor" and it is equal to 0,17 in the game and 0,2 in Cycledogg's terrain mods). So if we have too little texture, the game will stretch it to the needed size. If we have too big texture, the game will recalculate pixels and decrease their number (sorry for unprofessional language

), so we will not have any advantage. But I decided to check it.

This is 256x256 texture in Z4, hardware mode.

And here is exactly the same texture but 512x512, hardware mode too. Look at these pictures carefully. It is the easiest to see differences when we switch between pictures forth and back, but we can't do it here.
a) The quality isn't improved - as I expected. (Edit: Maybe a bit? Judge it yourself)
b) There are not significant changes in the rock texture itself (I marked some details by gree arrows to compare with the first pictures), but
c) There are significant changes in the rock texture surrounding. Terrain textures are blended one to another, and the only reason of changes in another textures is another way of blending, when the texture has different size. Why? I don't know. You can see the difference yourself. Look at the snow (left red arrow) and the grass below the right red arrow. There are more differences, but these two are easy to see.

2. Now I changed the rendering mode to software, exit and opened the game again (to activate the change). What we see now?

This is not the same texture. This is a texture from the next zoom (Z3). I checked it very carefully.
Conclusion: We don't got a CTD when we use bigger terrain texture in software mode. But the game doesn't use it in this case, and it uses the texture from the next zoom.
I don't know if it corresponds with other people's findings, but maybe you can make use of this information?
Edit: Now I'm looking again at the third picture. It seems I can be wrong. I must make a texture with bigger difference between Z3 and Z4. Looking at details positions I see that it is possible that it is the same texture, but much worse quality. Sorry, I must check it again.
Edit2: I checked it. The texture you see on the third picture is the same texture as on the second one ie. 512x152 texture from Z4. But its quality is much worse in the software mode as you see.
I will check if I can use bigger textures in other zooms and if it improves the quality. But we clearly seethat only hardware mode would be apropriate if we would like to use HD terrain textures (I don't know about other ones.
There are also other methods of improving terrain textures quality, but - as always - they have both good and bad sides.
Btw My graphic card is NVidia GeForce 7900 GS.

Adam

mightygoose · April 11, 2009, 01:37:51 PM

thanks very much for your research ennedi now i we can see some coroboration from rayden maybe we can get a definitive answer on implementation effects in game as far as terrain mods go.

Pat · April 11, 2009, 04:47:34 PM

Adam that loooks real great there now what about water mods I wonder hmmm???

SimFox · April 12, 2009, 04:25:43 PM

I have integrated HD export/Preview into GMAX BAT:

No need anymore to move / rename any script files. Simply select desired option and voilá you get both preview and actual export in the chosen format.
No need to restart program either, the change is dynamic, e.g. you can change any number of time in the same session.

how should this addition/function be distributed?

PS
did the same for BAT4Max:

mightygoose · April 12, 2009, 04:54:36 PM

now thats handy...

MandelSoft · April 13, 2009, 12:00:23 AM

Clever, Simfox! That's just the thing we need

buddybud · April 13, 2009, 11:25:25 AM

Thankyou very much Simfox

Bud

SimFox · April 13, 2009, 12:01:47 PM

Thank, you thank you...

I'm attaching to this message scripts for GMAX BAT. This is a full and complete set of scripts used by GMAX BAT.
Installation instructions are very simple - replace with these all the scripts in gmax\gamepacks\BAT\scripts

After installation you'll find new option in Preview frame found in same named roll-out:

options are very simple - SDoutput that stands for traditional/default way Zoom5 is rendered and HDoutput that 2x sized FSHs and half-sized S3d slabs (cuts of the actual model) for Zoom5 while leaving the over-all model size unchanged.
Selecting either option affects both the export and preview

this is full working (as in I didn't notice any problems) beta.
I would ask people using it pay attention to it's working and the logic and report problems or suggestions.
I'm particularly interested about you opinion on the placement of controls. Do you think they are in the right place? Or should they be in Export roll-out? Somewhere else?

3ds Max companion scripts will be available shortly in my Bat4Max thread on Simtropolis as part of the update to Bat4Max 2.5 (may be to 3.5

)

Khiyana · April 13, 2009, 12:18:45 PM

Wow, thank you so much for your work!

I never thought that it would be so easy to make HD Props! Thank you again

jeronij · April 13, 2009, 03:36:31 PM

Thanks for implementig this in a pro way SF

On a side, but related, note, I was wondering.... it is a nightmare to create 3d models (the puzzle pieces type) because if we export a model from GMAX/MAX like a 3DS file, which can be imported into the Reader to be modded and skined, the groups and rotations are "upsidedown" and so is the model once imported. Actually to solve this external tools are needed, but perhaps a clever modification somewhere would make the trick and make the creation of such models much easier and enjoyable

Just something to think about

SimFox · April 14, 2009, 03:37:15 AM

Hm...
I'm not familiar with the problem ... could you feed me more info on that? preferably with some graphics to illustrate it? May be you can point me to the thread where this issue is discussed?

jeronij · April 16, 2009, 02:23:23 PM

uff.. it took me a while to find some (hopefully) useful information

How-To. From .gmax to .3ds

OK Vester, here's my tutorial on how to pass .gmax files into .3ds files

Originarily, Discreet made one script to pass 3ds files to gmax files, but they weren't interested in making a script for doing the inverse process, so we must follow these steps:

.gmax files < .obj files < .3ds files

We will need these programs and scripts:

gmax2obj script

3D Exploration

We make our models in the gmax and we place them VERTICALLY. Go to utilities < maxscript < Open listener