5 réponses à ce sujet

[NewYears1978]

So the petition for a Hi-Res Texture pack release for modders was closed as "spam" and requested we start a new topic for actual discussion, so this is my attempt.

I have been saying from day one that something is wrong with the textures.  Poor, blurry, missing and just bad, background textures, exist all over this game.  Foreground textures are Good to Great (Such as creatures, Armor, Faces etc) but most of the environmental are bland or very blurry.   A dev here even posted that some textures appeared to not have their Hi-Res counterparts and we were assured this wasn't intentional. 

Some good examples are the wagons, for poor texture (Very blurry, definately low-res) and the missing ash texture for under campfires (for missing textures, you'll notice there is a shiny waterlike substance under the logs instead of ash)

We have been requesting at fixes, updated textures, etc since release and have all but been shunned out since some initial contact.  I'd like to discuss here peoples thoughts, opinions, agreeances or disagreeances.

Please note this is not a "This game looks like crap" or any form of bashing topic.  I want constructive and actual discussion on the matter in hopes that BioWare would release the textures that should have been included in the first place.  Hi Res ERF file so that modders can use these to correct the game and make proper mods and expansions.

It seems as though the PC version is a port from the consoles and there are several clear signs of this.  I hope for official word from a Mod/Dev on this matter to clear things up..and hopfully we can get somewhere.  It's been a very poor experience for me with Dragon Age due to these issues..and while the game itself is probably one of the greatest I have ever played, some of the hush hush on issues or lack of support or proper patches have had been quite dumbfounded and very cautious to purchase any DLC or any other BioWare product in the future.

Sorry for my rambling, please discuss.

[Andreas Papathanasis]

Just... wow, at all the speculation going on with this thread. It might be healthy to start throwing some facts in here.



The game contains two texture packs, the medium and high one. They both target specific video cards, the first target cards with 256 MB of memory and the other one 512 MB. The high resolution pack contains higher resolution textures mainly for characters and creatures. The environments don't (generally) have a higher detail version.



Why did we choose to do this? Because we decided it would give us the best visual quality given the video memory constraints (which everyone is ignoring so far in this conversation). Is this decision perfect in all cases? No, there are lots of places where environment textures could use more detail and that would result in the game looking better. Are we going back to redo all the textures for a patch? Very unlikely. This isn't a task that would take someone an evening like it was implied before, nor did we forget the high detail resolution textures on someone's hard drive and forgot to ship them. While we wish we had all the time and resources in the world to go back and ship an absolutely polished and perfect game, we do feel the version we did ship was of sufficient high quality given the hardware we're targeting, otherwise we wouldn't have shipped it.



You guys can start modding higher definition textures and they will make certain levels look better, however don't forget that this will increase hardware requirements for the game, as it will no longer run efficiently in all the range of video cards we decided to support for DA:O.



Finally note that console version textures have nothing to do with the PC version because they were mostly done later and in a completely isolated environment from the PC.

[Andreas Papathanasis]

Sammage2k wrote...

I think it's pretty clear the textures that are in the game are not high res. I think it's also clear that the reason there is silence on the issue is that there's a memory leak already and the hi res textures make it worse. My guess is that until/unless they get that fixed they won't say much on the textures.

At least that's what's clear to me. Maybe a Bioware rep can discuss it with us in this thread.

There's no known memory leak as far as I know. Even if there was I don't see how it would be related to texture resolution.

[Andreas Papathanasis]

B33ker wrote...

I seem to recall reading somewhere that they started with basic textures for everything and were working on higher resolution textures to replace them all when either EA said "times up ship it" or they ran out of money or something, so that's why the textures in game go from "pretty nice" to "pretty crappy".

Wherever you read that, I wouldn't trust that source in the future if I were you. Everything mentioned in that sentence is very far away from any touch of reality (except the "I seem to recall reading somewhere " part  )

Modifié par Andreas Papathanasis, 21 décembre 2009 - 03:34 .

[Andreas Papathanasis]

Everybody, please stay on topic and stop derailing this thread more. Since I caught up with my forum reading I understand lots of people are having issues with gradually degrading load times, but that's irrelevant for this post. Also please don't call that problem a memory leak unless it's been confirmed by a dev that this is what causes it (and I haven't seen that confirmed anywhere). A memory leak is as likely to cause such an issue on some machines as are hundrends of other reasons. Just call the issue what it is for now (degrading loading times) so we can all be sure we're talking about the same thing and prevent misunderstandings. Use the PC technical support forum to report this issue, not this thread.

[Andreas Papathanasis]

4Aces wrote...


Once again, let me state, we are not (and never have) asked Bioware for HiRes anything. We are asking for the Full Sized Core Textures (/Core/Data/Textures/erf) that they
A) Should have included with the game in the first place and
Does have (as proven by the fact that they leaked full sized & fully detailed Normal Maps which require full sized Textures to develop).

Sorry, but there's no different version of textures.erf that we held on to ourselves - why would we do that? What we released is what we developed with internally. I don't understand what you think the normal map sizes prove. It's perfectly valid for normal map textures to have larger sizes than their diffuse versions, for objects where you want higher frequency lighting than their surface detail. If you think that proves that we have larger versions of the diffuse textures, of course we do. Artists don't author their source assets in 256x256 or even 1024x1024, they author them in much higher resolutions and lossless file formats that take up a huge amount of space and are in no way suitable for use by a game engine. Those source assets are converted for in game use by a texture processing pipeline that figures out final in game texture sizes, considering hardware limitations.

It's pretty safe to assume we won't be releasing source assets, for the same legal, efficiency and practicality reasons other companies don't release all their source textures for their games (the download size alone would probably be prohibitive). What we have released is the versions of the textures optimized for use in a game environment for you to use in mods, and again, that's what the textures.erf you already have in your hard drive is.

So the gist of it is, while we do have higher versions in the form of unreleasable source assets, it's still not a simple matter to create the kind of "Hi-Res" textures.erf you want. It would be like releasing a new product, with lots of time spent on QA and hardware compatibility tests. We don't have any plans for such a product at this time.

Modifié par Andreas Papathanasis, 22 décembre 2009 - 10:56 .