Pascal DI FOLCO Posted February 16, 2001 Share Posted February 16, 2001 Even with HiRes mods, I still feel grass is too much pixelated and somewhat spoil the quality of other terrain and units... I was thinking of doing a "SuperHiRes" grass by just doubling the grass BMPs images'size and putting in 4 times the original image... Files will go up to 1.6Mo each (!!), I wonder if any of the ol'modders here ever tried that, what it looks like and if it's slows down the game to a crawl Perhaps it just doesn't work though.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Olle Petersson Posted February 16, 2001 Share Posted February 16, 2001 I think the slowdown will be very noticeable unless you have some graphics card with at least 64MB VRAM, preferrably twice as much or more... Another option for you if you don't like the pixelation is to take your regular Hi-res grass textures (BMPs #1550-1569) and copy these to the other grass textures as well (#1500-1569, IIRC), then change your display setting to 640x480. I promise you won't notice the pixelation. Cheers Olle Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pascal DI FOLCO Posted February 16, 2001 Author Share Posted February 16, 2001 Originally posted by Olle Petersson: I think the slowdown will be very noticeable unless you have some graphics card with at least 64MB VRAM, preferrably twice as much or more... Another option for you if you don't like the pixelation is to take your regular Hi-res grass textures (BMPs #1550-1569) and copy these to the other grass textures as well (#1500-1569, IIRC), then change your display setting to 640x480. I promise you won't notice the pixelation. Cheers Olle Hey man, I know you, you're the one selling NO-res grass !!! Now you want ME playing in 640*480 ? NO WAY man !!! I've only 32Mb VRAM, but I'll give a try at SuperHiRes, should be useful for screenshots anyway BMP 1500-1519 are Horizon tiles, it changes nothing but slowing the game to make them HiRes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LuckyStrike Posted February 16, 2001 Share Posted February 16, 2001 Run a blur filter across the grass .bmp, it has the effect of reducing apparent pixellation by smoothing color gradation between adjacent grass pixels. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Olle Petersson Posted February 16, 2001 Share Posted February 16, 2001 Originally posted by Pascal DI FOLCO: Hey man, I know you, you're the one selling NO-res grass Wow, I'm famous! A real celebrity! Seriosly speaking, graphics card usually use half of the VRAM to store textures, and the rest for calculations and stuff. Grass textures at 1.6MB each will require about 20x1.6MB=32MB from your 16MB available memory. To make this work you'll need to play games with fairly flat terrain, and better use low res textures for everything else... Cheers Olle, "The Master of no-res mods..." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pascal DI FOLCO Posted February 16, 2001 Author Share Posted February 16, 2001 Originally posted by Olle Petersson: Wow, I'm famous! A real celebrity! Seriosly speaking, graphics card usually use half of the VRAM to store textures, and the rest for calculations and stuff. Grass textures at 1.6MB each will require about 20x1.6MB=32MB from your 16MB available memory. To make this work you'll need to play games with fairly flat terrain, and better use low res textures for everything else... Cheers Olle, "The Master of no-res mods..." Oh yes, you're famous, aren't you a marketing type ? As for texture VRAM use, I think that only ONE grass file is used for a given scenario : the twenty of'em are for various seasons/lightning conditions, no ? So effect willbe limited in this case...but I'm a kid for those graphics tekkie things, so perhaps I completely err... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest KwazyDog Posted February 16, 2001 Share Posted February 16, 2001 Pascal, I think you will find it dramatically slows down CM. This isnt just becuase of the VRAM issue, but it is also to do with the size of the textures. Current video card technology is very fast at moving around a lot of smaller textures, but if you start to give them extrememly large textures to play with, they are much less efficient. Mind you, for CM2 we are looking at other ways we may improve the terrain Dan Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pascal DI FOLCO Posted February 16, 2001 Author Share Posted February 16, 2001 Originally posted by KwazyDog: Pascal, I think you will find it dramatically slows down CM. This isnt just becuase of the VRAM issue, but it is also to do with the size of the textures. Current video card technology is very fast at moving around a lot of smaller textures, but if you start to give them extrememly large textures to play with, they are much less efficient. Mind you, for CM2 we are looking at other ways we may improve the terrain Dan Thanks Dan, It seems that higher-res textures are a dead-end, another case of "small is beautiful" Has it just to do with "file" texture size or with "surface size"? In the former case the file can be reduced in size by for example reducing nr of colors (its mostly green anyway ) In the latter I'd just wait for CM2... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bruno Weiss Posted February 16, 2001 Share Posted February 16, 2001 I've tried it, but didn't inhale ofcourse. ------------------ "Gentlemen, you may be sure that of the three courses open to the enemy, he will always choose the fourth." -Field Marshal Count Helmuth von Moltke, (1848-1916) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Olle Petersson Posted February 16, 2001 Share Posted February 16, 2001 Originally posted by Pascal DI FOLCO: I think that only ONE grass file is used for a given scenario : the twenty of'em are for various seasons/lightning conditions, no ?No, there's one texture for each elevation level (0 through 19), that's why I suggested using flat terrain; the fewer elevation levels in use, the fewer grass files. Coming to think of it; if it's really pixelation that bothers you, why not try textures where all pixels look exactly the same? And if they look the same, why have many of them when a single pixel will do as well? It won't look like grass though, rather like a very smooth painted flat surface... I know, 'cause this is exactly what I've used in my Fastmods... Definately no problem with pixels there! Cheers Olle Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pascal DI FOLCO Posted February 16, 2001 Author Share Posted February 16, 2001 Originally posted by Olle Petersson: Olle, you're really a marketing type.. I hate'em Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wolfe Posted February 16, 2001 Share Posted February 16, 2001 Richard Tremblett's Bumpy Grass is nice. Pretty big files, too (512x512 textures). I downsized them to 128x128 for speed, and they still look reasonably good. The smaller textures still have the hint of bumpiness and still contain the color gradients, but don't sparkle as you move across the terrain. Although I am using 2xFSAA with my Voodoo5, and that also helps cut down on the pixel-popping a good deal. - Chris Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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