Grass texture inequality - what!

[Lucky_Strike]

Messing about with trying to create a generic muddy looking landscape for all the WW2 games - I started in RT. Replacing a few textures at a time to try and figure out the mod tags (that's another story ). Anyway I've gotten to a point where I think I can make it work across ALL the WW2 titles for ALL locations and ALL seasons/weather (excepting snow for obvious reasons - though slush might have to be thunk about separately), using one generic set of ground textures to look really muddy - think Spring Awakening in RT, Hürtgen in FB, Anzio bridgeheads in FI ... you know the kind of thing.

So I was just looking at some of the textures in FI, checking how the tags work when I noticed that the generic ground grass (and ground grass yellow) texture tile looked different than in other titles (BN and RT, haven't checked FB). Further investigation shows that the Italian terrain uses a higher perceived resolution of grass tile than the other titles. Grass is one of the worst texture tiles IMHO, it is a complete blurred mess at anything close up, only really resolving into a texture when looking down from quite high up, and it looks really poor next to a nice sharp AFV for example. This may not be an issue for many folks, but I like to play down in the long grass so I find it irksome seeing the ground texture. The reason that grass tiles look so blaah is because each tile is stretch across 50 x 50 m² that's 2500m² - to represent the texture correctly would require a tile of 20480 x 20480 pixels - the existing stock tiles are 2048 x 2048 pixels.

Many modders have tried to improve the grass texture over the years but really there's not a lot of point as they all just end up looking either nasty at low level or weirdly out of scale from up above, this is not a reflection on the modders but rather how the game handles the texture. However, it seems that the game engine is not so equal as I thought, and that with a little tweak from on high we could have a higher resolution. I don't notice any particular hit on my GPU/frame rate with the alternative tiles used in FI so I wonder why this hasn't been implemented across the other titles? It's not like we would need to redraw maps, or anything like that, as it's an engine based change affecting how much each tile is stretched or repeated within a specific area of terrain. Plenty of the other tiles occupy much less relative space, that is, they are stretched less and repeated more often. Here's some images from RT and FI for you consideration. The ground grass tiles have been replaced with a different texture that I was considering for a sodden ground grass texture, the doodads are the same in both games (from my Hedgerow Hell mod )

First RT from ground level, as close as possible ...

Nice grass shame about the boat race ...

Now FI, same distance:

That's better - notice how the blurring doesn't jar so much, it all just melds together better IMHO.

Now at camera Level 1 ... first RT ...

It's all kind of floaty ... Now FI ...

Again, IMHO the grass doodads seem more attached to the ground.

This is a matter of taste for sure. There are plenty who will not care, but for those that do, self included, it would be nice if all the games were created equal in this respect.

 

[Vacillator]

Totally agree Mark.  Now if you can also get rid of those 'hair transplant' lines I would be happy to pay for your next entrance at the Tank Musuem.

[Lucky_Strike]

And in case your curiosity was peaked by my mention of mud - this is somewhere in Northern Italy winter '44 ...

.. mud, glorious mud! All other textures stock ... ish!

[Lucky_Strike]

3 minutes ago, Vacillator said:

Totally agree Mark.  Now if you can also get rid of those 'hair transplant' lines I would be happy to pay for your next entrance at the Tank Musuem.

Hehe, but they match my receding hairline perfectly ...! 

[Vacillator]

3 minutes ago, Lucky_Strike said:

mud, glorious mud! All other textures stock ... ish!

I hope that Elefant isn't stuck in the mud?  There's nowt worse. 

I currently have two otherwise lovely Shermans immobilised at Chaumont (part 2) when they have a lot of work to do.  And the conditions are 'freezing'.  Hmmm...

[Lucky_Strike]

1 minute ago, Vacillator said:

I hope that Elefant isn't stuck in the mud?  There's nowt worse. 

I currently have two otherwise lovely Shermans immobilised at Chaumont (part 2) when they have a lot of work to do.  And the conditions are 'freezing'.  Hmmm...

Yep, well and truly bogged (well immobilised by me actually for artistic effect).

Not sure how much permafrost is simulated by freezing, might need to be extremely cold for iron-like ground conditions. It might also depend on ground conditions as well - freezing with snow, freezing and dry, freezing and muddy could, nay should all be different.

[Vacillator]

21 minutes ago, Lucky_Strike said:

Not sure how much permafrost is simulated by freezing

Tis a fair point, permafrost is not the same as freezing.  I could still do with those Shermans back though...

[37mm]

5 hours ago, Lucky_Strike said:

The reason that grass tiles look so blaah is because each tile is stretch across 50 x 50 m² that's 2500m² - to represent the texture correctly would require a tile of 20480 x 20480 pixels - the existing stock tiles are 2048 x 2048 pixels.

Ahhh this explains why some modders don't bother with Hi-res grass textures (or even downsize their textures).

To make a decent resolution grass texture of that size would require 1.2GB (2.4GB for the green & yellow combined) & that's assuming CM would even load such a huge texture* .

Either way, I can confirm that there's a clear visual difference between how the grass textures are rendered in FI compared with RT.

Here's a 3x3 action square coloured grass texture in RT...

Here's the exact same texture in FI...

@BFCElvis is it possible that FI recieved some kind of upgraded graphics as part of the v2.0 engine upgrade of that time?

An upgrade which was forgotten about & subsequently never transferred to the other titles?

 

*An interesting aside, it appears that CM will load 256-colour 8bit BMP's (an interesting feature which could shrink the size of a LOT of mods).

[Lucky_Strike]

1 hour ago, 37mm said:

To make a decent resolution grass texture of that size would require 1.2GB (2.4GB for the green & yellow combined) & that's assuming CM would even load such a huge texture*

Yep, couple of years back I was looking at the grass texture in BN trying to figure out how big it would need to be for parity to some of the more detailed textures. Started scaling it, gave up when I got to about 400MB tiles. They were still not big enough, but besides that I just couldn't find any actual images of grass that were big enough to fill the space - 50m x 50m is about half a football (soccer) pitch. I ended up with a high res image of grass that was repeated multiple times over, looked like a carpet in the end and was no improvement at all.

1 hour ago, 37mm said:

Either way, I can confirm that there's a clear visual difference between how the grass textures are rendered in FI compared with RT.

Here's a 3x3 action square coloured grass texture in RT...

Nicely done ...

1 hour ago, 37mm said:

@BFCElvis is it possible that FI recieved some kind of upgraded graphics as part of the v2.0 engine upgrade of that time?

An upgrade which was forgotten about & subsequently never transferred to the other titles?

It's an odd one, I really thought all the games were using the same engine now. Would be nice to have this applied to all the titles especially as it doesn't seem to affect frame rates etc. 

1 hour ago, 37mm said:

*An interesting aside, it appears that CM will load 256-colour 8bit BMP's (an interesting feature which could shrink the size of a LOT of mods).

Very interesting - there are definitely some textures that would be fine as 256 colours. Wonder what it would do to frame rates etc. Someone needs to convert everything to 8 bit to see what it's like.

Edited October 30, 2022 by Lucky_Strike

[RockinHarry]

6 hours ago, Lucky_Strike said:

And in case your curiosity was peaked by my mention of mud - this is somewhere in Northern Italy winter '44 ...

.. mud, glorious mud! All other textures stock ... ish!

I need these for my CMFB autumn battles! Badly! I´ve as well tinkered with some textures to have more of a wet or muddy looks. Bits of darkening down helps a little already. Would adding puddles beeing an option? Off course they don´t get any shader FX since ground textures don´t apply to them (beside lit and non lit slopes). A Pity. Some the textures would benefit much if a bump/normals map could be applied to them. Another big resource eater I guess.

Edited October 30, 2022 by RockinHarry

[Lucky_Strike]

6 minutes ago, RockinHarry said:

I need these for my CMFB autumn battles! Badly!

Man, getting these to work reliably has been a nightmare, I thought I could just use a [muddy] tag and the game would pick up on it, nope! Took me days to work out a tagging system that will work for everything across all the WW2 titles, and mean players don't have to swap mods in and out just to have some mud.

Not sure when I'll get these ready. Ideally I'd have a full set of ground and road textures. Good thing is that with a single mod tag we can update any scenario to look muddy. A few tweaks to the ground and weather and everyone will be in bogging hell.

14 minutes ago, RockinHarry said:

Bits of darkening down helps a little already.

FI is an interesting game. I hadn't really looked at it closely previously, but the engine seems to handle the FI lighting a little differently. There are more noticeable shifts in the hues of colours depending on weather conditions. The very dark mud texture I've been using varies in colour quite significantly, I suspect that it's down to the massive regional and atmospheric variations that the game has to cope with, near desert to alpine mountains and everything in between. This is what also makes it a vast game to mod.

22 minutes ago, RockinHarry said:

Would adding puddles beeing an option?

Maybe on some of the roads; what I'm always aware of is the repeat pattern that can happen (think ploughed fields) because of how regular texture tiling is in the game.

28 minutes ago, RockinHarry said:

Off course they don´t get any shader FX since ground textures don´t apply to them (beside lit and non lit slopes). A Pity. Some the textures would benefit much if a bump/normals map could be applied to them. Another big resource eater I guess.

I don't know if normal maps eat much resource in modern GPUs. They are very simple, quite easy to produce. What I can't remember is whether ground tiles benefit from them, I'm sure I tried them once, but for the life of me can't really remember. I'll have to go and try again. Heck it might even have been back in CMx1 days - did we have normal maps then?

[RockinHarry]

14 minutes ago, Lucky_Strike said:

Man, getting these to work reliably has been a nightmare, I thought I could just use a [muddy] tag and the game would pick up on it, nope! Took me days to work out a tagging system that will work for everything across all the WW2 titles, and mean players don't have to swap mods in and out just to have some mud.

Not sure when I'll get these ready. Ideally I'd have a full set of ground and road textures. Good thing is that with a single mod tag we can update any scenario to look muddy. A few tweaks to the ground and weather and everyone will be in bogging hell.

I can well imagine. Yep, avoiding hard coded tags is way to go obviously. Or combine it with your own one. And bits of adding dirt&mud to some selected vehicle textures and pixeltroopers. At least I found some dirty german ankle boots over at FGM repository (or GAJ?) Ah... I can drop your texture set in when finished. Or need some tester? In meantime I get along with some my own tweaked ones which do their purpose ATM.

19 minutes ago, Lucky_Strike said:

FI is an interesting game. I hadn't really looked at it closely previously, but the engine seems to handle the FI lighting a little differently. There are more noticeable shifts in the hues of colours depending on weather conditions. The very dark mud texture I've been using varies in colour quite significantly, I suspect that it's down to the massive regional and atmospheric variations that the game has to cope with, near desert to alpine mountains and everything in between. This is what also makes it a vast game to mod.

Hm... did you try copying over the shader files (*.vert, *.frag) to the other games already? Might be just some changes in there causing the visual differences. Btw. just managed tweaking the precipitation shader file to have rain look less obtrusive.

23 minutes ago, Lucky_Strike said:

Maybe on some of the roads; what I'm always aware of is the repeat pattern that can happen (think ploughed fields) because of how regular texture tiling is in the game.

Yes, I´d guess it´ll all look little convincing so might be not worth any efforts made on it. Sure would be cool to have nonetheless.

25 minutes ago, Lucky_Strike said:

I don't know if normal maps eat much resource in modern GPUs. They are very simple, quite easy to produce. What I can't remember is whether ground tiles benefit from them, I'm sure I tried them once, but for the life of me can't really remember. I'll have to go and try again. Heck it might even have been back in CMx1 days - did we have normal maps then?

Not entirely sure about that. Think I´d tried adding a normal map to heavy rocks (rubble) but it had no visible effect in game. In CM1? I don´t remember, but I believe we had not. Made some small ground texture mods that times as well, but that was long before I bothered working with normal maps. For current CM engine some the rough terrain sets would benefit from them IMO. Everything rocks, rocky or even marsh terrain maybe.

[Lucky_Strike]

13 hours ago, RockinHarry said:

I can well imagine. Yep, avoiding hard coded tags is way to go obviously. Or combine it with your own one. And bits of adding dirt&mud to some selected vehicle textures and pixeltroopers. At least I found some dirty german ankle boots over at FGM repository (or GAJ?) Ah... I can drop your texture set in when finished. Or need some tester? In meantime I get along with some my own tweaked ones which do their purpose ATM.

Hehe, will for sure need testing. Reckon I can do a few at a time and slide them your way.

13 hours ago, RockinHarry said:

Hm... did you try copying over the shader files (*.vert, *.frag) to the other games already? Might be just some changes in there causing the visual differences. Btw. just managed tweaking the precipitation shader file to have rain look less obtrusive.

I haven't, but I will, it seems to be linked much more to regional variations so doubtful it will work in the other games. Yeah rain is tough, it's too 'big' in game and looks best with a bit of mistiness, the latter is better achieved in ReShade.

Definitely will try puddles, maybe even use that water shader thing which is used for ponds and the like, if I can figure out how to.

Also will try some normal maps on a couple of ground textures, would really boost the mud look. 

[Lucky_Strike]

16 hours ago, 37mm said:

*An interesting aside, it appears that CM will load 256-colour 8bit BMP's (an interesting feature which could shrink the size of a LOT of mods).

Gave this a shot. Tried several different ways of converting to 256 indexed colours in PS - Local adaptive, Local perceptual, exact for Windows, exact uniform -it produced some weird colouring, a mud texture came out looking like dark blueish coal ... there may be other factors at play that I'm not aware of but I couldn't get naturall colouring to work.