Question for texture artists

[vran. 13]

Wasn't quite sure where to put this so I'm opening the thread here. CWA supports textures up to 8192x8192 resolution (Resistance half less). I'd like to try those textures out but I don't know which program to use to make them work. I use paatool and it only supports 4K texture resolution. When I try to make a 8K one, it will only show a blank image in texview and it won't render correctly in the game. I've been messing with it's .cpp files but to no effect. Is there any other program to be able to output 8K textures in CWA? Thanks in advance.

[RozekPoland 591]

Sorry for offtopic but OFP/CWA supports even higher resolutions.

Cockpit_Textures=16384;

Landscape_Textures=16384;

Object_Textures=16384;

Animated_Textures=16384;

Have you tried Texview2? It's said that it works better than the previous one.

[JdB 151]

I've been told this by students in game design who were told this by their professors and it makes perfect sense to me as I've never noticed the difference either.

Going above 2048 is virtually useless with the current hardware for most purposes. What is a typical resolution today? 1920x1080 or slightly above that for those who have more expensive screens? That means that only 1920 pixels horizontally and 1080 pixels vertically are being displayed at any one time. If you've got a 4096x4096 texture for example and you've fit the entire side of a tank on a texture that runs from the left side of the texture to the end of the texture on the right than that means around 4000 pixels. But since your screen can only display 1920 pixels width that means that the textures is only going to be displayed at 50% of it's true size. Unless you've got a 4K screen you'd never notice the difference because really you can make a 2048 texture really detailed and you would never notice the drop from 4096 to 2048 in any game, and CWA is no exception. It just means a higher strain on the system for no visible improvement. If I had a really large object that I needed to texture I would prefer two 2048X2048 textures to one 4096 texture. Going up one "notch" means increasing the size of the texture (and file) by a factor 4.

[vran. 13]

@Rožek: interesting. Which version is it? :)

Both Texviews are very unstable for me so I use AltTexview which works well for me.

@JdB: I can imagine that but in OFP/CWA ground textures get a bit stretched at close ranges. And there is a difference between 2048 and 4096 ones, the 4096 look a bit sharper up close. I just haven't seen how 8K ones look like (assuming you get the kind of sharpness 2K ones would deliver in other games). 16K ones sound a bit too large for my video memory though. ;)

[Macser 776]

I've never tried to create a texture that large.And I don't know of any program that will convert something of that resolution.Besides that,I find anything beyond 2048 to be very unfriendly to work on.Then,as JDB mentions the file size goes up dramatically.

I just tried converting a 4096 image to paa.The source file being a 24bit tga weighing in at 48mbs.The resulting paa was 10mbs in size.I know hardware has improved considerably over the years.But I doubt any programmer would consider that efficient use of memory.

Obviously the higher pixel density will give you the potential for great detail.But is it worth it?I mean,you and everyone else will look at it for a few minutes,impressed,then get on with whatever else you were doing.Also the conversion to dxt1 is still going to be lossy.Banding and other colour issues won't go away by upping the resolution.And after all that you're still left with a potential resource hog. :)

[RozekPoland 591]

noob1 said:

interesting. Which version is it? :)

The steam version. This is what the Performance Setup allows me to select. I think it depends on your graphics card.

[JdB 151]

The steam version. This is what the Performance Setup allows me to select. I think it depends on your graphic card.

I can select 16384 for both OFP and CWA. This laptop only has an integrated graphics chip and I'm pretty sure that putting it through the agony of working with such large textures would be considered torture.

[vran. 13]

Tried to convert a 16K image, the .tga file was 1 GB and paatool said quite bluntly that it's out of memory. :p

A single island would weight about 50 GB with such kind of textures. By the way, I was also doing some texture resizing (upscale + sharpen + blur) but the visual difference is too marginal to be worth it.