Important texturing info!
Commando
Join Date: 2002-05-22 Member: 657Members, NS1 Playtester
Join Date: 2002-05-22 Member: 657Members, NS1 Playtester
<div class="IPBDescription">Really... it is important!</div>(Borrowed the URLs and ideas from the AHL message boards)
Ok, this article contains a lot of important information on how to make your textures look the best <a href="http://www.planethalflife.com/chaincraft/resources/explanations3.htm" target="_blank">Chaincraft</a>.
Whilst it may start of being obvious you may be amazed how the engine deals with textures and how you can decrease w_polys just by resizing textures.
As well as this it also shows how you can increase texture sharpness just by resizing a texture.
<img src="http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~mblevins/remote/texturesizing.jpg" border="0">
Ok, this article contains a lot of important information on how to make your textures look the best <a href="http://www.planethalflife.com/chaincraft/resources/explanations3.htm" target="_blank">Chaincraft</a>.
Whilst it may start of being obvious you may be amazed how the engine deals with textures and how you can decrease w_polys just by resizing textures.
As well as this it also shows how you can increase texture sharpness just by resizing a texture.
<img src="http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~mblevins/remote/texturesizing.jpg" border="0">
Comments
Death to blurriness.
/me is confused
/me needs to get beta whatever
oh and good info commy, you done your good deed for the day :)
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<b>Overlapping world brushes is the most damaging method for framerates and compile times.</b>
CSG will use the subtract method until there are no world brushes overlapping. This is the same method used by the carve tool.
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So those of you that just throw brushes around inside the map to make the innards, you are really just hurting yourself. Make sure you take the time to do it write, and never, ever have overlapping brushes unless you are 100% sure you know what you're doing, and that it won't b0rk everything. I've seen a lot of maps guilty of this one, including some professionally made maps (*cough* valve *cough*) and the results are still good maps, but unnecessarily high r_speeds...
The only times I ever overlap brushes is if there is no choice (due to space constrictions), or if I'm doing something very organic, eg, alien slime. I usually turn my slime brushes into brush entities though, so it doesn't split everything up.
Concerning texture sizes...
NS's next texture pack should be much better with far less of these odd sized textures. I've given Cory the run-down on the way HL manages texture sizes, so expect our next generation of textures to be far more mapper-friendly.
Here's a rather harsh example of a good NS texture gone bad: (Take note - Worldcraft/VHE *also* reduces the detail of odd shaped textures. This is why so many Halflife textures look so bad.)
One last thing before I attach the pic; If you add the command <b>gl_round_down 0</b> to your autoexec.cfg, or add <b>+gl_round_down 0</b> after your HL.exe execution line, then HL should bypass its rounding down of textures and they should look how they are meant to.
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[EDIT] Which would logically cause it to look just the same, it will just take up more memory than you intended. Why not just make it a 128x128 texture in the first place and make use of the detail you are wasting with 112x112. [/EDIT]
I ran a test on this a while back; I took a number of 9-sided cylinders and placed them in various locations relative to a block - some laying flat on top, some cutting through, etc.
No difference in poly splits or poly count from one to the next, the exception being the one where the top of the cylinder was level with the top of the box, at which point the sides of the cylinder were culled.
[EDIT] Which would logically cause it to look just the same, it will just take up more memory than you intended. Why not just make it a 128x128 texture in the first place and make use of the detail you are wasting with 112x112. [/EDIT]
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erm, thats not quite true, gl_round_down 0 does round up to the nearest power of 2 size, but rounding up by the negine looks a -lot- better than rounding down does, try it out.
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Except that if you use lots of individual brushes, you can get some horrible defects in the collision detection. While the geometry is supposedly identical, it can create some unpleasant effects where you can stand in impossible places, and stick your head through walls...
Overlapping brushes are fine - it's what the Quake compilation tools were built for, after all. Just make sure the outside of the map is nice and tidy (reducing plane counts), there are no little gaps in the geometry, and major vertices are lined up, reducing needless face splitting.
Oh, and I'm glad people are discovering <b>gl_round_down 0</b>. Now do a <b>gl_texturemode GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR</b> as well. <!--emo&;)--><img src="http://www.natural-selection.org/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/wink.gif" border="0" valign="absmiddle" alt=';)'><!--endemo-->
By 'looking just the same' I meant looking like the original 112x112 texture. There would be NO quality drop from the 112x112 to the stretched and rescaled 112x112. It would be good quality, just extra memory. I didn't mean it would look the same as the crappy rounded down texture.
The scaled-up texture will look kind of lumpy, due to the poor-quality nearest-neighbour scaling, but it's still preferable to the blurred, scaled-down version...
All new textures should be powers-of-two, but it's useful for improving old maps using original textures. It's a miniature HD-pack!