2158 replies to this topic

[Modo44]

If high-res textures only show up with the highest setting, then you do not need to worry about the user end. Choosing those options means that you are either fine with various slowdowns, or your rig is good enough. SSDs are pretty common these days.

[Lordred]

Edited because I was rather crass.
see this post

Edited by Lordred, 28 May 2014 - 09:43 PM.

[Alaskan Nobody]

Matthew Craig, on 28 May 2014 - 08:26 AM, said:

Another potential solution we continue to toy with (again nothing concrete) is the idea of having a high res texture pack available that is an optional download (potentially selectable in the patcher) so it can be avoided for users who don't think they have a GPU that can absorb the extra bandwidth or don't want the extra install size.

I would be fine with that - but I would also probably be one of the people downloading it.

[Wintersdark]

An optional high res texture pack would be awesome. Absolutely awesome.

Hell, I'd pay for that. I paid good money to build my gaming rug, I'd like to get sexy graphics to use it

[Lordred]

I am at home now and can better address the points I wanted to.

This is all my opinion and I just wish to voice it, but to preface, Matthew you have been fantastic comming in here and addressing things, so I wish to thank you.

Matthew Craig, on 28 May 2014 - 08:26 AM, said:

We actually scaled back a bit which is why you see the shift to 1k reason being we were releasing Mechs/Skins quite aggressively and were concerned about ballooning the install footprint I think we're currently sitting around the 4GB mark for a full install which we're still ok with but with many more Mechs/Skins to come (Clans) we need to be mindful of the install size.

4gb is a very small footprint for a modern game, most MMO's easily eat up 10+ gb, right now my World of Tanks install is sitting at a 'meaty' 24.2gb, but I am useing 3rd party sounds for the game that are un-compressed and at a high bit rate (sounds magnificant btw)

The 1k-2k file size difference isnt very large, and if you focus purely on the Mechs for now we are taking a possible difference of 0.5 to 1gb of file size saving, I think this was the wrong avenue to chose to try to squeeze space, but that is my opinion.

Matthew Craig, on 28 May 2014 - 08:26 AM, said:

I'm hoping to get some more time to investigate newer third party texture compression tools that are around that could allow us to potentially either halve the install footprint or use larger textures for the same cost e.g. 2k for all Mechs while retaining a similar install size. The tradeoff here is we need to evaluate texture compression times (internal build time costs) and decompression times (runtime client costs i.e. potentially slower level loads) to see if it makes sense.

I agree that I would like to see us use the higher quality textures our artists author at higher resolution so getting those in your hands is great if we can do it but so long as it doesn't come at the cost of a bloated installer or long load times etc.

This is another problem, using compression requires for the client to de-compress when they run, which results in higher system requirements to get the same job done, if you compress to far, you push your system spec requirements too high for the trade off in quality, if you use little to no compression you end up with a huge file size, but it runs very very well on lower spec systems (/cough Titanfalls 40+gb install, but runs smooth on Core 2 Duo's with older GPU's)

I would argue though, trying to save filesize at the expense of the visual quality of the game is doing it wrong, even Blizard with their ancient World of Warcraft are doubleing/tripling poly counts and bumping texture resolution across the game.

As we push foward Wargaming is re-relasing tanks with newer 'HD' models and textures, taking the jump to 4k resolution texture files, and pushing poly counts north of 50k per model. (they look fantastic btw)

Matthew Craig, on 28 May 2014 - 08:26 AM, said:

Another potential solution we continue to toy with (again nothing concrete) is the idea of having a high res texture pack available that is an optional download (potentially selectable in the patcher) so it can be avoided for users who don't think they have a GPU that can absorb the extra bandwidth or don't want the extra install size.

This idea would be fine, have the base install and then allow those who have the horsepower to run it, download and use the higher quality textures. I would support this idea 100%, as it stands the textures are allready all made, they make them @ 2k and then scale em down, and even if you pushed the native 2k file on everyone, it would not hurt the lower spec people, they already use lower settings and would beusing the lower resolution files built into the mipmap in the DDS files to begine with.



I digress I suppose, I just hate that when people ask me how I got the game to look the way it does that I have to tell them. "You should have seen it before they lowered the texture resolution on everything."



Edit:
Would there be anyway that I could get all of the orgnial 2k res RGB.DDS's to inject into my .pak folders?

I know you guys sorta frown on people mucking about with the files, and I am not asking to be an exception to any rules, but if I would be allowed to get all the high resolution files for everything, well... The screenshots could look alot prettier.

Edited by Lordred, 28 May 2014 - 06:23 PM.

[Koniving]

Matthew Craig, on 28 May 2014 - 08:26 AM, said:

Another potential solution we continue to toy with (again nothing concrete) is the idea of having a high res texture pack available that is an optional download (potentially selectable in the patcher) so it can be avoided for users who don't think they have a GPU that can absorb the extra bandwidth or don't want the extra install size.

That's actually not a bad side solution. There's games that actually offer that sort of thing as a separate option.
...then there's games like Skyrim that say "Here! Mod it to your heart's content. Enhance the textures and spread 'em around!" o.O;

Banshee's awesome texture quality but on all mechs!

Edited by Koniving, 28 May 2014 - 07:25 PM.

[Wintersdark]

Koniving, on 28 May 2014 - 07:18 PM, said:

That's actually not a bad side solution. There's games that actually offer that sort of thing as a separate option.
...then there's games like Skyrim that say "Here! Mod it to your heart's content. Enhance the textures and spread 'em around!" o.O;

Sign me up!

heh my Skyrim install is _enormous_. But they'll never let us mod MWO - it presents too many balance issues being a competitive multiplayer game after all.

Still, a high red texture pack... While I think that's really something that ought to be free, I wouldn't object to dropping some coin on it. You could make a good argument that its free in games like Skyrim because you paid for the box, but that its a paid cosmetic add-on for a free to play game. I've no objections at all.

They already have the textures, so it would just be a packaging issue really. I'd pay $20 to upgrade my game to use uncompressed 4k textures.

[Koniving]

This is kinda related but kinda not.

Spoiler

Now, my biggest performance hit and I think this goes for everyone... is the lack of a BACK to every Battlemech in the game.

Watch this where it is time skipped. See that obscenely bright flash? That's the sun, behind me, going THROUGH however many inches thick the armor is supposed to be, pushing past the closed hatch, going through my body and creating shadows inside my cockpit all over the place. Why? Because someone forgot to close the door!

Except... this has been with every mech. And a year ago, "we'll be closing the backs of the mechs." But brand new mechs roll off the assembly line with holes in their cockpits. And on the Vblog we see TrackIR is being worked on but...still no backs to our cockpits.

Every time the light flashes inside the cockpit, there's a plethora of draw calls to do shadows inside. I'll actually have different frame rates looking at the sun than away without much other notable reasons. I'll even get better frame rates in third person view. Although on maps with no sun, I haven't got an issue unless I go near an area light source with it to my back (lamps, river city). The reasoning stems from the same issue, no back to block the light, requiring shadows on the dashboard's geometry.

[Shlkt]

Lorded, would you mind sharing your current method(s) for disabling motion blur? Sorry if this information has already been posted; I can't figure out how to search a specific thread.

[Imperius]

Matthew Craig, on 28 May 2014 - 08:26 AM, said:

We actually scaled back a bit which is why you see the shift to 1k reason being we were releasing Mechs/Skins quite aggressively and were concerned about ballooning the install footprint I think we're currently sitting around the 4GB mark for a full install which we're still ok with but with many more Mechs/Skins to come (Clans) we need to be mindful of the install size.

I'm hoping to get some more time to investigate newer third party texture compression tools that are around that could allow us to potentially either halve the install footprint or use larger textures for the same cost e.g. 2k for all Mechs while retaining a similar install size. The tradeoff here is we need to evaluate texture compression times (internal build time costs) and decompression times (runtime client costs i.e. potentially slower level loads) to see if it makes sense.

I agree that I would like to see us use the higher quality textures our artists author at higher resolution so getting those in your hands is great if we can do it but so long as it doesn't come at the cost of a bloated installer or long load times etc.

Another potential solution we continue to toy with (again nothing concrete) is the idea of having a high res texture pack available that is an optional download (potentially selectable in the patcher) so it can be avoided for users who don't think they have a GPU that can absorb the extra bandwidth or don't want the extra install size.

+100 on this I like this idea a lot!

[Itsalrightwithme]

I'll share one more thing here. While TXAA/MSAA remove motion blur, it screws up heat vision. Instead of mechs showing up white and thus easier to see, mechs show up black ... or rather a darker shade of black ... thus becoming hard to see.

So I gave up and went back to PostAA.

[Lordred]

Itsalrightwithme, on 31 May 2014 - 09:16 AM, said:

I'll share one more thing here. While TXAA/MSAA remove motion blur, it screws up heat vision. Instead of mechs showing up white and thus easier to see, mechs show up black ... or rather a darker shade of black ... thus becoming hard to see.

So I gave up and went back to PostAA.

It's hit and miss at the moment, but with No AA, and DX9 mode being used you can get Motion blur on items in motion to turn off by setting Post Proccessing to 'Low' but this will only work part of the time.

As also mentioned if you have an Nvidia 600 series or newer, you can enable TXAA, or for everyone else you can enable MSAA, saddly these are very resource intensive for the quality return they provide.

you can try
r_MotionBlur = 0 (Default = 1) No apparent effect.
r_PostAA = 0 (Default = 1) No apparent effect.
r_motionblurshutterspeed=0.001 (Default = 0.016 {Works like a Camara Shutter}) No apparent effect.
r_MotionBlurMaxViewDist = 1 (default is 100, 'Low' is 16.) {May not work}
r_PostAAEdgeFilter = 0 (default for engine is 1) {May not work}


Given all the people I play games with, I have one of the most powerfull systems in my circle. There are others with more powerfull systems, but there alot more with less powerfull systems then I.

But just as a reminder this is the powerplant being used to deliver the screenshots.

AMD-8350 Octo @ 4800mhz
Nvidia GTX680 4gb Edition @ +100/+500 (1211 core / 7004 memory)
8gb of 2133mhz memory.

The system was made to play hard, is over a year old and 'may' be getting a Titan in the near future if I can work out a deal with some one.





I chose the 680 Classified over the Normal 680 4gb due to the considerably more robust voltage regulation, and considerably larger heatsink area.

Normal 680


Classified 680

Edited by Lordred, 31 May 2014 - 03:16 PM.

[Vassago Rain]

Matthew Craig, on 28 May 2014 - 08:26 AM, said:

We actually scaled back a bit which is why you see the shift to 1k reason being we were releasing Mechs/Skins quite aggressively and were concerned about ballooning the install footprint I think we're currently sitting around the 4GB mark for a full install which we're still ok with but with many more Mechs/Skins to come (Clans) we need to be mindful of the install size.

I'm hoping to get some more time to investigate newer third party texture compression tools that are around that could allow us to potentially either halve the install footprint or use larger textures for the same cost e.g. 2k for all Mechs while retaining a similar install size. The tradeoff here is we need to evaluate texture compression times (internal build time costs) and decompression times (runtime client costs i.e. potentially slower level loads) to see if it makes sense.

I agree that I would like to see us use the higher quality textures our artists author at higher resolution so getting those in your hands is great if we can do it but so long as it doesn't come at the cost of a bloated installer or long load times etc.

Another potential solution we continue to toy with (again nothing concrete) is the idea of having a high res texture pack available that is an optional download (potentially selectable in the patcher) so it can be avoided for users who don't think they have a GPU that can absorb the extra bandwidth or don't want the extra install size.

High-res texture pack is a good idea.

Fully approve, and do want.

[Koniving]

Lordred versus Koniving
Dire Wolf versus King Crab.

Annihilator versus King Crab.
Check it out!
Note: Megamek transcript.

[Blood Rose]

Loving the shots!

[Bront]

Matthew Craig, on 28 May 2014 - 08:26 AM, said:

Another potential solution we continue to toy with (again nothing concrete) is the idea of having a high res texture pack available that is an optional download (potentially selectable in the patcher) so it can be avoided for users who don't think they have a GPU that can absorb the extra bandwidth or don't want the extra install size.

As someone who can barely run the game, I still think this is an excellent idea. It gives folks who can run the big pack something cool, means you don't have to install it for folks who don't/cant, and allows you to make the game look even better without too much of a hassle.

[Itsalrightwithme]

Thanks, Lordred. I went back to DX9, with settings you recommended, and to be honest I wonder why I bothered with DX11 at all.

Those are indeed nice parts you have, as you recall you gave your blessing to my chosen setup of GTX780 :-D.

At any rate, I look forward to MSAA/TXAA being implemented properly. And in the meantime, thanks for your help in making the best out of what we have.

[Koniving]

Comparisons of 1k and 2k mechs coming shortly!

[Lordred]

1k Res Vs 2k Res

This is to show why I want 2k reso across the board (4k would be great)


Centurian
Tiger 1k vs Yen-Lo-Wang 2k

Spoiler

Dragon
Cobra 1k vs Fang 2k

Spoiler

Highlander
Heavy Metal 1k vs Tartan 2k

Spoiler

Jagger Mech
Standard Paint 1k vs Firebrand 2k

Spoiler

Thunderbolt
Standard Paint 1k vs Phoenix 2k

Spoiler

Edited by Lordred, 01 June 2014 - 07:19 PM.

[The Shepherd]

Locust, come down from there.
You don't have jump jets. Stop pretending.
Silly Locust.


*ahem*
A well illustrated point gents. I'd always wondered why my Phoenix mechs seemed to look that much better