High Res Texture Pack?

[ShortRound]

Does anyone know if there is a high res texture pack in the works? I'd love to see some of these textures improved.

[Kaldaien]

No, they don't need one. They need a "full mipmap" pack.

The number one thing you can do to fix texture quality problems is use TZFix and setup RemasterTextures=true in tzfix.ini . This will increase load-times, but will give much higher quality textures.

[ShortRound]

Did not know that. Thank you.

[Kaldaien]

Originally posted by Cuitarded:

Did not know that. Thank you.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=542500356

Make sure you grab version 1.3.0. Earlier versions didn't support this feature.

[-=BIA=- Capt.BlackMage]

sometimes i feel like im the only person who feels most of this stuff is unecessary. i found the textures to be fine and i notice for myself no marked difference between 30 and 60 fps in games. but then again i suppose thats just me.

[Kaldaien]

Yeah, I think it's just you :P

Most people see the non-mipmapped textures at the very beginning of the game and are very annoyed by the green static that's supposed to be grass.

[jbarksey]

Originally posted by Kaldaien:

Yeah, I think it's just you :P

Most people see the non-mipmapped textures at the very beginning of the game and are very annoyed by the green static that's supposed to be grass.

Well said. Thanks for all teh work on this. Was night and day for me once i got it working. Stupid fraps, haha

[BONKERS]

Originally posted by Cuitarded:

Does anyone know if there is a high res texture pack in the works? I'd love to see some of these textures improved.

The textures are just fine actually. Jesus man if you made these textures higher res, they'd look even worse thanks to no MIPs!

[CubeFusion]

The game looks waaay better with proper mipmaps via Tales of Zestiria Fix. If enabling them didn't increase my load times between scene changes so much, I'd keep it on all the time too (I have a tendancy to walk back and forth between rooms all the time when exploring, so it's more noticable for me).

[Kaldaien]

Originally posted by CubeFusion:

The game looks waaay better with proper mipmaps via Tales of Zestiria Fix. If enabling them didn't increase my load times between scene changes so much, I'd keep it on all the time too (I have a tendancy to walk back and forth between rooms all the time when exploring, so it's more noticable for me).

Yeah, I've been experimenting with ways to lessen the load time. I've managed to cut it in half since 1.3.0 was released, but cutting a 10x increase in half is still 4x longer than I'd really like it to be =P

What really sucks about this is if Namco/QLOC had been doing their job these mipmaps would be packed into the game's shipping files and would add maybe 15% to load time. Skipping mipmaps is not a valid optimization strategy and I wish game developers would stop doing it.

[CubeFusion]

Nice! Cutting the loads in half would be near the sweet spot for me. I'd still notice the increase of course, but it would hardly be problamatic.

I wonder if it's possible to cache the mipmaps entirely the first time they are generated (only overwriting them if something about the base texture has changed). I'd gladly give up even a large chunk of hard drive space in exchange for faster loads + better textures.

Thanks for the work you've done Kaidaien, this game is soo much better thanks to you and the folks assisting you.

[ShortRound]

So the "high res" mipmaps are present (or compressed) but the developers did not utilize the larger versions? Sorry I don't know much about mipmapping

[Kaldaien]

Originally posted by Cuitarded:

So the "high res" mipmaps are present (or compressed) but the developers did not utilize the larger versions? Sorry I don't know much about mipmapping

No, it's actually the opposite of what you're thinking, and the game is missing lower resolution versions of all of its textures.

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Mipmaps are basically downsampled lower resolution textures. They eliminate aliasing artifacts caused by textures that are actually too high resolution to properly fit the surface they are stretched over.

When they are missing, you get horrific aliasing whenever the camera moves, which resembles a snowy picture on old TVs.

---

The best way to illustrate this would be to start a new game and skip the opening cinematic. Immediately focus on the grass and how it basically sparkles. It's not supposed to do that, but it does because that texture has no mipmaps.

In properly written software, a 1024x1024 texture should have a 512x512, 256x256, 128x128, 64x64, 32x32, 16x16, 8x8, 4x4, 2x2 and 1x1 version of itself. But this stupid game is missing 10/11 of those. That is why that texture flickers insanely, 1024x1024 is not the proper resolution.

TZFix can be configured to generate the missing mipmaps to fix those problems, but it takes quite a bit of CPU time to crunch the numbers.

[Kaldaien]

I should maybe point out that the reason lower-resolution images are necessary is because texture filtering on GPU always reads 2x2 blocks of texels (pixels in a texture) and averages them to compute a pixel's color.

In a perfect world, mipmaps would not be necessary and the GPU would read every single texel that aliases to a pixel on screen, add them together and compute the average color... but GPUs need to render at playable framerates, so throw that idea out the window :P

Instead, mipmaps pre-compute these averages and the GPU selects the mipmap level that's closest in size.

[nealiosis]

Originally posted by -=BIA=- Capt.BlackMage:

sometimes i feel like im the only person who feels most of this stuff is unecessary. i found the textures to be fine and i notice for myself no marked difference between 30 and 60 fps in games. but then again i suppose thats just me.

I'm jealous of you. The difference between 30fps and 60fps for me is so substantial that I find 30fps unplayable. 30fps is just too sluggish and unresponsive. I do understand that everyone's vision is different and there are many people who cannot distinguish framerates. I'm unfortunately not one of those people.

[ShortRound]

I enabled the RemasterTextures feature and saw a big difference, but my load times aren't significantly increased. I'm running a fairly beefy rig though.