255 réponses à ce sujet

[Fabijan]

After so many pages I'm very surprised that Bioware still holds this attitude. I am very disappointed that you are artificially, due to consoles, lowering quality of PC version (of game which started as PC only, mind).



Please, once again, give us all the quality we can get,, even if we can't run it right now, as someone mentioned before. With replay quality DA possess, I'm sure I'll change couple of generations of hardware and what now is not playable will become playable in future.



Other games had no problems what-so-ever in releasing entire DVD (and more) with nothing but textures, so why can't you? It will make a whole lot of people happy(er).

[Torias]

the.elles.d wrote...

After so many pages I'm very surprised that Bioware still holds this attitude. I am very disappointed that you are artificially, due to consoles, lowering quality of PC version (of game which started as PC only, mind).

No, that is completely false.

The console conversions had no impact on the pc version.

Modifié par Torias, 23 décembre 2009 - 10:34 .

[Dragon Age1103]

NewYears1978 wrote...

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.

I agree with you for the most part. I understand they put a lot of work into this game but some of teh environment detail is really low quality & as you stated blurry.
   I personally love the armor detail & facial detail but I must admit JB Textures makes the armor detail stand out even more.
 Anyways I agree we deserve a patch with some envrinnment texture pack overhaul but since I know little to nothing about progamming & game developing I really wonder how hard it would be time consuming wise, implimenting it correctly, & how costly. Forgive my poor spelling...I don't feel like a quick spell check lol

[Fabijan]

Torias wrote...

the.elles.d wrote...

After so many pages I'm very surprised that Bioware still holds this attitude. I am very disappointed that you are artificially, due to consoles, lowering quality of PC version (of game which started as PC only, mind).

No, that is completely false.

The console conversions had no impact on the pc version.

Be that as it may, it doesn't change the fact that textures look - blury. If consoles had nothing to do with it (wihich I doubt) then you have just done a lousy job, pardon me for saying. I haven't noticed it much until I tried HD mod (or whatever it is called) and I saw how game could look. You can't pull hardware issue cause they work flawlesly on my rig, which is 2 years old.

I remember one moderator mentioning that game ships with 2 texure packs - one for 256MB and one for 512MB cards. Is it too much to ask for texture pack for 1GB (and over) video cards and allow players to choose which one they'll actually use?

Modifié par the.elles.d, 23 décembre 2009 - 02:04 .

[Sir Hawkmoon]

4Aces - keep it up to Fight the good fight - respect man

Merry Christmas & A Happy New Year to all 

[4Aces]

nmemonic wrote...
4aces...your knowledge of the subject and the way you explain it amazes me. You have made what seems like a foreign language to me, all the more readable and i now understand them much better.

That right there makes it worth it.  I sometimes get caught up and start flinging the techhnicals around, but since F3 I have tried to keep it understandable.  When it is a general forum, it should be easy to undersatnd for everyone.  That way you know that I am not trying to bash the game.


As for these textures being necessary for this game to be cross-platoform successful, I would have to refer you to Fallout 3 which made approximately $350M using mostly 512 - 2048 (the latter were mostly for terrain if I remember correctly).  F3 was an open world game with roughly 5X the textures and objects, not to mention people/creatures/encounters.  All of that combined with the fact that the textures looked comparible (my F3 HiRes to my DAO HiRes Pack 1 textures) means DAO should be able to run them too.  DAO saes a lot of memory and system resources by not having an open world, having as many textures/objects, or having Dynamic Lights/Shadows.  I am not saying that they had to make DAO a clone of F3, just that considering F3 used the Oblivion engine (last-gen), this supposed next-gen engine should  be able to handle more, without costing them much in the way of profit.


As for the possible memory leaks in Denerim - I was able to play for five hours straight, without perceptable increse in load times.  They are crap (compared to the early game) when I got to Denerim, and they remained just a bad all the way thorough the Market, and most of the 'Back/Dark Alley" areas.  Since these Alley areas are so small, they should not act like this at all.  It is possible that all of Denerim is being generated, and these area are not truly independent.  By the time I had visited a ceratin warehouse and cleaned it out, the Market finally became so corrupt there were five people who were wearing chamelon suits.  Their clothing would shift to another character's clothing texture based on whom I was facing.  I checked some of my system stats out, and found a few scary things. 

First, this game takes my 3.5Ghz Dual Core and maxes out the CPU even when the game is paused!  This is unbelievable.  I have never seen anything like this in a game that was not actually ative with a figrefight going on.  I dumped my Processor Affinity to one core with no perceptable change, but I expect that this would really increase the lags (no not loading, just moving across the market sepcially in front of the Livestock merchants, or moving around Inside the Inn!).  The Inn should be its own gamespace so it should not have any slowdowns (and these happen right away, not after five hours and corruption sets in).

Secondly, this game is not using that much RAM even with HiRes Pack 1, a Blizzard, Inferno, and Tempest all active at the same time in the Market.  So that kills my memory usage theories, though the corruption of just five of the people's meshes (so the game does not know what mesh to use) means that it could be a proper Memory Leak (sanbox corruption - or as my buddy calls it - a sandstorm - since you are caught in it and have no idea wtf is going on).   :innocent:

I should mention, that as soon as you see the clothing starting to shift, you shoud exit the Market area and save the game.  Then shut the game down and restart it.  If you save fails to load, then reload an older saved game (keep going until one works) and then reload your most recent saved game.  If you shut the game down completely, you will need to repeat this process to load that saved game again.  For some reason they appear to be saving environmental variables, so some of the corruption is included with your saved game.  By reloading an old one, the proper settings/structure is loaded into memory, so when it gets to the corruption in your saved game, it just uses the old (good) values.  Kudos if this was intentionally done!

I also should point out that the CPU being maxed  at 100% happens when the game is launched, not when you load a saved game.  Just showing us the main menu is a lot of work?  I have only seen this kind of activity when running emulators/Virtual drives.  Maybe someone more technical on the system side can explain this?

Merry Christmas to everyone (yes I do mean it)!

Modifié par 4Aces, 23 décembre 2009 - 08:30 .

[Digital Freak]

Just so I understand what's going on with textures - Bioware insists that the textures we see in the game now are the ones intended for the game and the only ones we're getting from them. 4Aces is basing his texture mod off of those. Does that about sum it up?

I gotta say there is nothing "next-gen" about this engine.  Bioware got the story & voice acting right, but failed at everything else.

Modifié par Digital Freak, 24 décembre 2009 - 12:45 .

[Dex1701]

Blue_dodo wrote...
this is also apperant on the console version,if not more so, since the charecter models are very well detailed yet, the enviroment is very blurry,this is not just a issue for pc players you know;).

with that said I don't particulerly care, it's not game breaking or annoying (like the bugged wheel ) so whether or not bioware touches this does not really matter to me.

True, but there might not be much that can be done on the console versions to change it.  IMHO it also doesn't stand out quite as much on the 360 version.

A friend of mine brought his 360 version of DA over the other day so I could see what it looks like on the same HDTV I sometimes play the PC version on (I typically play DA:O on my desktop PC rather than my media center PC).  To me, the lower-res textures aren't as noticeable on the 360 version (although some of the textures are pretty terrible) because the lack of higher-AA, texture filtering, and lower resolution make it blend a little better.  I tried running the PC version at 720p (the resolution the 360 renders at...it upscales to 1080p after the render if that's how the output is set) and turned off my forced AA and anisotropic texture filtering.  It did make the low-res textures less noticeable. 

I don't want to run the game at 720p, though.  The problem is that I hate doing that on my desktop because my monitor's native resolution is 1920x1200 and running at anything but that results in that horrible LCD pixel scale blurriness.  My TV is equipped to compensate for that, but my monitor isn't.

Running the game at 1920x1200 with 8xAA and 16xAF HQ forced in the driver makes the rest of the game look so crisp that the lower-res textures stick out like a sore thumb...they make the environment look pretty out of place and artificial in some areas.  Right now I'm just using 4Aces QnD textures, and that helps (though not as much as forcing AF did...wow).  I'm going to try some of the hi-res texture mods this weekend and see which combination looks the best.

Digital Freak wrote...

I gotta say there is nothing "next-gen" about
this engine.  Bioware got the story & voice acting right, but
failed at everything else.

What does "next-gen" mean?

Modifié par Dex1701, 24 décembre 2009 - 01:32 .

[Sledge454]

I'm running the JBTexture mod with my little old 2.4GHz Core2Duo and 2GB of RAM and other than longer loadtimes there's no performance difference except for the Denerim market which has a small slowdown.

Hopefully, Santa will bring me an AMD Phenom X4 II Black Edition, 8GB of RAM, and an ATI HD5970

Modifié par Sledge454, 24 décembre 2009 - 01:37 .

[Legacy_QuEsT]

for all the rest of us that don't have new expensive PCs, thank you for releasing reasonable graphical content on launch.



As for higher textures, selling those as a DLC option would be cool.

[orpheus333]

Hey 4Aces thanks for the right up i'm still abit confused by it all. I get minor texture flickering. Normally on environment textures, i've never noticed it on NPCs even in Denerim. My computers Quad Core with 4gb RAM. I just can;t seem to work out why im not getting these major errors while you and others are it seems reall strange to me that this can be something hardware can have such an effect on if it is an issue with the engine.



PS I will pay for the DVDs and shipping myself for bioware to send you these textures. I really enjoyed your work on Fallout 3 and have been following and dabbling abit myself in DA modding since launch.

[enderandrew]

As much as I really want nicer textures, I'm just not horribly impressed with taking low quality textures, doing a sharpen filter on them, and saving them in a higher quality.



I'm holding out for actual new high-res textures.

[4Aces]

Digital Freak wrote...

Just so I understand what's going on with textures - Bioware insists that the textures we see in the game now are the ones intended for the game and the only ones we're getting from them. 4Aces is basing his texture mod off of those. Does that about sum it up?

No.  My HiRes Pack 1 is based off the full sized textures they used  (found in /core/textures/High).  The Core Textures are what we are discussing here.  They are the one-size-fits-all (mostly LoRes textures) that the in-game graphical setting has no effect on (those playing on low. medium, and high get the same textures).  I wanted the regular sized Core Textures so that I could convert some of them to HiRes and improve the rest (without increasing their size) as HiRes Pack 2 (of 2).  Now if my analysis of saved games is correct (and it may not be), then I could convert everything to HiRes and just limit it to those with 4GB of RAM or more.

Just to be really clear: The Medium Textures are half the dimenstions of High, and are the ones that are used for those using lower texture settings (though I am not sure what the difference is between Medium and Low) since the armor, clothes, creatures, people, and weapons found in High/Medium have no Low counterpart and they are not in what I call the Core Textures.

@adnyr1986 - I started a techincal thread about my breif investigation of the saved games. 

@enderandrew - My HiRes Pack 1  does not use the technique you mentioned.  The Core Textures (focus of this thread) are mostly 256x256 pixel textures, that Bioware has at regular size and detail level.  Anything lower than 512x512 gets very blurry, so if they were to release the (industry) standard sized textures, it would improve the look of the game wihtout any mod being applied to them (though it might make the latter game even more unstable - though I can compensate for that).

Modifié par 4Aces, 24 décembre 2009 - 04:28 .

[NewYears1978]

Torias wrote...

the.elles.d wrote...

After so many pages I'm very surprised that Bioware still holds this attitude. I am very disappointed that you are artificially, due to consoles, lowering quality of PC version (of game which started as PC only, mind).

No, that is completely false.

The console conversions had no impact on the pc version.

That's actually uh..not a good thing.  At least that theory gave an good excuse for the bad textures...but instead....there's no good reasoning for it..

[NewYears1978]

Destructo-Bot wrote...

That is why Texture options come in Low, Med, and High settings. It's a perfect solution with no drawbacks. And Steam has MILLIONS of users including casuals (peggle alert!). The sample size is enough so that the variance to reality should be very tiny indeed.

My point exactly..using "computer hardware limitations" as a reason for not including better looking textures..is pure cop-out.  That is the whole point of graphical sliders..so those that do have higher end systems reap the benefits of it...but those who do not..are not punished by not being able to play..

Pretty logicall...

whtnyte-raernst wrote...

Hey, your fine 4aces.
I thought it was incredibly rude for someone to pop into YOUR topic that you've put so much time and effort into and spout off "hey, just go d/l so-and-sos's texture pack"
I have enough system capacity to handle yours when it's ready for prime time. I'll wait for the guy that's put his time in on these forums asking people what they want!

Well, it was actually my topic, not 4aces..but he is the reason for the topic.

But you're right, those "just get this pack" aren't solutions because they do not solve the initial problem that I posted about (and that 4aces knows so much about and is working on doing what he can to make better).

Torias wrote...

This thread is for discussing Textures with a high resolution.

Any other discussion or meta-discussion is inappropriate for this thread and is derailing it. This is includes complaining or joking about other forum members, such posts are often just as disruptive as (or more so than) the original behavior.

Please, stop derailing this thread and allow a productive discussion of high resolution textures to continue.

Thanks.

Thanks for that, much appreciated.



(Sorry for double post)

Modifié par NewYears1978, 24 décembre 2009 - 07:10 .

[Xaltar81]

I keep seeing the same request popping up dispite Andreas Papathanasis giving you all a definitive answer. I am going to try and make this clearer for you all. I am a 3d artist so I know what pipeline game development follows.



Andreas told you that bioware has the source textures used to create the ones currently in game but they are too large for upload even if it were legal to do so. Lets look at this statement in more detail for you.



When I am working on an asset I usually texture it at 2 - 4 times its required resolution, thats fine, 2mb - 12mb texture size right? Wrong, on a single 1024 source texture it is possible to have up to a hundred layers, particularly for env work where the same source texture might be used to create multiple game textures, overlaying rocks on a dirt texture or grass or debris etc etc. So, in other words, if you want Bioware to RECREATE the existing low res textures at 1024 or above then someone there will likely have to load up hundreds of textures like this and basicly redo all the work done leading up to release. It really would be like making a new product rather than simply zipping up a bunch of textures laying about on dev drives. You are aware that in all likelyhood, Bioware has someone or a team that did nothing more than what you are asking for right, that team needs to be payed and doing something like this for free will not pay them, that is assuming they aren't already reallocated to a new project (most likely).



As to the source textures, these are the property of Bioware and are most likely used on any number of different projects. They will never be released as they are an internal development tool not a dragon age specific asset. Game development is a streamlined machine, there is a process that is followed to insure deadlines are met and part of that is reuse of source assets so it should be easy to understand why these assets are not released to the public.



I hope this clarifies things a little for you all.

[Destructo-Bot]

That is why it should have been done right the first time. The textures seen in game can be comically poor, almost like looking at a game from 1996. It's bizarre.

The only people Bioware can blame for the unsettled masses in this thread are Bioware themselves. It may not be a huge deal, but it doesn't look very good.

Modifié par Destructo-Bot, 24 décembre 2009 - 08:23 .

[Kelston]

Torias wrote...

no, it doesn't.

(if the numbers are accurate)

it says 70% of the PCs of people who have steam installed on their pc and actively use it, have 512 MB or more of VRAM

The sampling bias of any survey is critically important to understanding it's results.

Steam users don't represent the average computer user. They're more likely to have a high end system suitable for FPS games (given Valve's background, the bulk of Steam users come from their own games, at least they did in the beginning and still make up a very large chunk of the steam using population).

I personally love steam, but the stats aren't representative of all computer users.

And bioware expressly said they were aiming to have a game which runs great on a very wide variety of hardware (which is a key to profitability).

And in terms of high res textures, yeah, it'd be nice if the game looked even more amazing... but everything in development is a trade off I guess.

However, in recent months, if you were to go by industry sales figures, estimates place around 50-60% of game sales to occur through digital downloads (Steam + Direct2Drive).

Whether that holds true for DA:O, I couldn't say, but if it did, a fairly sizeable portion of the PC playerbase is more than capable of running hi-res textures (nearly half of the playerbase at the positive extreme).

But in the end, the question remains: Why does it matter what the end user can run? Why not give them the option? After all, what liability would you have if you offered an Ultra setting that only the high end computers could run and made it clear that that was BioWare's viewpoint?

iD/John Carmack did the same thing with Doom 3. On release it had an Ultra quality setting and he stated quite bluntly that he didn't believe there would be a system that could pull it off even a year after Doom 3's release.

Why couldn't BioWare do the same? Do it as a "look what we can do" setting. Your PR department did pile on the boasting about it after all.

Modifié par Kelston, 24 décembre 2009 - 09:35 .

[Martin E]

You know what ? I played the game, and sure I noticed some of the textures were probably on the low-res side, but that was pretty well it - a passing thought whilst I got on with the rest of the game.



I plan to do some modding for DA when I get some freer time in the new year - and I'm sure at that stage I will be confronted with the OC textures in their current state - and may have other ideas.



Out of curiosity I've tried the HD texture set - and whilst I applaud the work, for me it didn't really improve things that much (then again maybe my system isn't really up to it - it's hardly state of the art).



A developer has only so many zots to expend on a game - and it is a careful balancing act - personally I feel that BW played it about right. Their view has always been that gameplay > graphics, and their games have always lagged behind the forefront of the graphics vanguard.



Martin

[AngryFrozenWater]

I love the gameplay, the characters and the story, but I have to agree that the graphics look dated. Especially vegetation and things like the open books. Those books appear in close ups and make the game look like it was created in the 90s.



The only argument to use low resolution textures is disc space. On the PC it has nothing to do with "running the game on a wide variety of graphics cards". The player can select it in the options (much like it is now). On consoles there are memory constraints as well. I suspect that those cannot be circumvented easily, but that doesn't mean the PC has to suffer. As a dev noted the graphics are created in a much higher resolution and they are shrunk while converting them to textures in an automated pipe line. It would be nice if higher resolution textures would be available as a download. The community could also create them, but the graphics are already there somewhere on BioWare machines. It takes much effort for the community to create them without the originals. Wouldn't it be nice if BioWare made the textures available for us?

[4Aces]

Xaltar81 wrote...

I keep seeing the same request popping up dispite Andreas Papathanasis giving you all a definitive answer. I am going to try and make this clearer for you all. I am a 3d artist so I know what pipeline game development follows.

Andreas told you that bioware has the source textures used to create the ones currently in game but they are too large for upload even if it were legal to do so. Lets look at this statement in more detail for you.

You are only telling half the facts if you are a proper 3D Artist.  What you left out is that Layers are Grouped.  That is like putting a bunch of files into a Folder.  That means that it is easy to manipulate hundres of layers since each feature is its own group. 

If you have read all the posts then you also left out, that if you create a 1024x1024 Diffuse Texture (DT) to build into Normal/Spcular Map, then you archive that 1024x1204 DT so that if it reuires tweaking you can easily do so, instead of the slightly longer process of loading the 4096x4096 with 100 laters in 10 groups and resizing it to work with.

Now something you do not know, they are not working on the textures properly.  There are many idential areas of textures that should have been idential if they were following your decribed proper workflow methodology, but they are not.  For example, there are many clothing textures that have idential areas of skin attached to them, yet the skin is all different quality and hues, which is not as noticeable in-game since they use a tint overlay to hide it.  If they were using proper masked templates then they would have all been the same.

As to the source textures, these are the property of Bioware and are most likely used on any number of different projects. They will never be released as they are an internal development tool not a dragon age specific asset. Game development is a streamlined machine, there is a process that is followed to insure deadlines are met and part of that is reuse of source assets so it should be easy to understand why these assets are not released to the public.

Did you miss my previous post where I clearly state that we do not want the source textures?  I want the original texutures used to create the Normal and Specular maps only.  This 'deadline' you are speaking of was completed in March/April of 2009.  I think they had the time to get it finished since then.  They were working on a number of console issues, and held the finished PC version back to do a simultaneous launch.  We want them to be released as a modding resource only, and only at industry standard sizes (based on mesh size).  I definately do not want a 4096^2 with all layers.  I would not know what to do with it all. 


Martin E - Try mine.  Get it on the Nexus.

Modifié par 4Aces, 24 décembre 2009 - 03:40 .

[MorseDenizen]

Hey Andreas, I dont pretend to know anything about engines or textures, or anything like that I'm a simple if enthusiastic gamer so since you have replied to this post can you put a couple of points to rest on the matter for me? when I completed my origin, I was sent to a certain fort, at this fort a guard kindly offered to give me some directions. the first thing I noticed was that there was a glaring difference between the guard and the wall not 2 feet behind him in terms of visual quality, I also saw the same in a number of other areas in game.

I have heard the there was some form of packing error or whatever but, i class it as a rumour, thus I Is this texture mismatch a packing error as I have read on the forum or it is by design (keep it simple keep it light type of approach), I'm more than happy to keep playing the game regardless, but to be honest I'm getting sick of the rumour train, and would just like to know should I hold off my next playthrough or hold tight for a while?

[MorseDenizen]

Legacy_QuEsT wrote...

for all the rest of us that don't have new expensive PCs, thank you for releasing reasonable graphical content on launch.

As for higher textures, selling those as a DLC option would be cool.

Mate that just isnt cricket

[Xaltar81]

4Aces: lol, yeah, I could have discribed the entire pipeline but I was trying to keep it simple and easy to understand for those less informed. There are standard workflows but most, if not all devs will diverge from them from time to time. I think its safe to say we can't really speculate as to how Bioware's pipeline functions or how it evolved over the dev period for DAO. I would also love a good dose of the textures you are all after but I just doubt it will happen and don't see any point continuing to ask for them when Bioware clearly has no intention of releasing them (in whatever form they may be). The assets are theirs to do with as they are permitted and no matter how much we ask they are still subject to the powers that be. Bare in mind, the DAO team is just one branch of a large dev company and things like this are subject to company policy. Its good to voice our requests though, that may prompt something to happen in this regard in the future, possibly an "enhanced" edition of the game or the like but for now, I am certain we will not get what we want. Keeping our requests civil will ensure that Bioware will notice and possibly keep them in mind.

[ModForFun]

enderandrew wrote...
I've also never once had a crash with Oblivion.

I dont usualy do this But I have to call BS here, unless your playing the console version.