255 réponses à ce sujet

[B33ker]

Darth_Shizz wrote...

B33ker wrote...
No clue how true it is, but if the money aspect is true, then I wouldn't expect to see EA pony up the cash now to do a wicked high resolution pack for us. Granted there are some very talented modders out there who could do it, but they've got to want to spend the time on it.

Respectable textures are all people are asking for. As it stands, it's not worth the time nor effort trying to make certain textures in the game look good. Painting a turd gold will not make it a real gold nugget 

I hear ya, but likeI said, EA isn't one for spending money, they're too busy shoving it into their own pockets to spend it on a group to do textures for the game at this point.

Just pray that DA2 gets the royal treatment of 1024x1024 or better textures by the time it comes out. 

[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 .

[Dark83]

Andreas Papathanasis wrote...

There's no known memory leak as far as I know.

I haven't followed this thread, but I caught this when I glanced at it out of curiosity.
I hope you're simply out of the loop of the team making patches, because it'll be a punch in the gut for a lot of us to be told Bioware isn't even aware of the massive loading slowdowns over time. If you just go back and forth between three areas repeatedly (trying to collect random encounters, for example), it's very noticable - especially on map travel.

The difference of 5 seconds per transistion to 5 minutes.

Modifié par Dark83, 21 décembre 2009 - 03:40 .

[B33ker]

Andreas Papathanasis wrote...

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  )

Good to know.

That's the problem though, when the devs don't speak up, people will listen to whatever else they see in print, which isn't always true, but there's no way to know 100%.

Appreciate seeing the reply here a great deal!

[yoda23]

Why doesn't Bioware simply sell a higher texture pack as a down-loadable add-in? Personally, I am running 4GB of VRAM (GTX285 FTW in Sli & a GTS 250 Running Physx) and would shell out a few bucks to really make the game scream. Don't get me wrong, the art is wonderful as is, but could be so much crisper on a higher end system. No sense dumbing down the art for legacy systems when I would wager there are several high end pc users out there you could probably make a buck off of... imho.

Modifié par yoda23, 21 décembre 2009 - 05:00 .

[B33ker]

yoda23 wrote...

Why doesn't Bioware simply sell a higher texture pack as a down-loadable add-in? Personally, I am running 4GB of VRAM (GTX285 FTW in Sli & a GTS 250 Running Physx) and would shell out a few bucks to really make the game scream. Don't get me wrong, the art is wonderful as is, but could be so much crisper on a higher end system. No sense dumbing down the art for legacy systems when I would wager there are several high end pc users out there you could probably make a buck off of... imho.

I'd bet good money that they would never recoup the cost they'd have to pay the artists to do it, even with tons of "high end PC's out there".  Hundreds of hours of texture work doesn't come cheap.

[Kelston]

Andreas Papathanasis wrote...
There's no known memory leak as far as I know.

I really hope that somewhere in the world when you posted this, that it was April Fool's Day and you were celebrating it because otherwise, this is a massive insult and clear evidence that BioWare of DA:O is no longer the BioWare we were all so fond of.

Cue Reel Big Fish's song entitled Sellout. It seems fitting now.

[orpheus333]

This doesn't completely explain the normals for larger textures being present though. Unless it was a case of some of them being created and then the project being abandoned due to time.

[Bfler]

It is sad to read such a statement saying that no memory leak is known. It is the most known technical issue of the game even confirmed in the Forum by another Bioware member.

If that should be a joke I can't laugh about it.

[phordicus]

thanks, andreas, but that doesn't explain at all why normal maps for full-size textures would exist but not the textures themselves which, for the OP and typically anyone familiar with skinning models, is a smoking gun.

[Grizzly_UK]

Andreas Papathanasis wrote...

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.

Just thought it would be worth adding a little emphasis to that statement, because without the emphasis it's a hugely disappointing statement for many players! Seriously hoping this is a personal opinion and not the way that BioWare have decided to deal with the problem! Is anyone at BioWare still investigating as to why so many players are suffering from increased load times?

[CoS Sarah Jinstar]

NewYears1978 wrote...

Would be nice to at least get official word from devs on it..not all hush or brushed off.
Because of this I have completely uninstalled DA:O and moved on. Yes I got a good 85 hours out of it and loved the game. It was amazing..don't get me wrong. But I have been severely turned off to BioWare now and have decided not to even buy Mass Effect 2 which I was previously very pumped about.

Your hang up over some not so high res texturing is the game is nothing short of astounding. You put 85 hours into the game and enjoyed it yet you're writting off the entire studio due to some low res textures? Thats an interesting form of logic there New.

[Xaltar81]

For a start, what exactly is this thread about? Fixing bugs or asking for a high res texture pack? Most of what I have read here is little more than complaints about the stupid wagon and other such glitches in the game. A high res environment pack seems to be what the OP was asking for. Bioware clearly outlined why there was not such in the release version of the game. A am frankly sick of seeing DAO compaired to other titles, every title I have seen it compaired to was subject to huge outcry when released. Crysis had 12 year olds all over the world crying that they had to buy a new high end GFX card so they could play the game they just baught, Mass Effect forums were swarming with similar complaints at the time of release. Bioware obviously targeted its design decisions at the middle of the player pool, those people with 2 - 3 year old hardware that still play and actively mod NWN and KoTOR. You can't fault them for making the game available to as wide a field as possible. Just because I have a gig of vid memory and a card that crushes everything in its way doesn't mean I'm going to go asking the devs of every game I play to make a game that will use its full feature set.



Stop asking Bioware for a "Highres Patch" / pack. It won't happen, just unpacking and repacking the texture packs to fix a few bugs can take days of work let alone trying to replace EVERY environment texture in the game. Its not as simple as opening it up in Photoshop, scaling up the res, smacking it in the kisser with the sharpen tool and calling it high res. There are some texture bugs in the game but lets face it, this is the most bug free release of a game I have ever played. All the other (rpg) games I have played have actually had game BREAKING bugs at release and required waiting for weeks for a patch or console commands just to make it playable. I find it odd to see people (not only on these boards) running ancient cards like a Radeon X800XT asking for high res textures their hardware just won't handle.



Wait for the mods to come out, or make one yourself if its so easy to do.

[robotnist]

i know nothing of texture work. from what little i pretend to know, an artist creates the assets for a given item, for example "boulder_1" or "dungeon_wall_2" etc... wouldnt increasing the resolution of that given item help its res out in and of itself, and then repackaging them?



i have seen MANY mods for fallout 3 and oblivion that increased whole chunks of the games shoddy texture work for people who wanted the option to increase the look of the game.



lord of the rings online as well as D&D online had an optional high res texture pack for people to install the really cranked the atmosphere up.



it just seems odd that if its something modders can do with a decent toolkit that we dont end up getting something better than a texture that looks like its from the first xbox...



in fact, is it entirely impossible that when this game was being made over that 5 year span that certain assets were updated as the development went along while others werent deemed as necessary to update?



like tents, or the crossed swords and shields that are on certain walls that just look like blobs of black. i mean its almost too stark when looking at a characters face and armor then to see a tent in the background that looks like an asset from the lord of the rings "the 3rd age" from the first xbox...



i would love to see someone mod this into the game or bioware address it or attempt to release a more "modern" friendly texture face-lift!

[Blue_dodo]

4Aces wrote...

I was trying to be civil and give the Devs a chance to do the right thing. There is nothing to really discuss but I will outline the facts again.

Listen, this is not requesting HiRes textures so please thinking that. It is requesting the Regular sized textures, that they Do have. How do I know for sure? They screwed up and released some of them in the form of fully detailed, full sized Normal Maps. You make the Normal Map from the Texture, and you cannot increase the size of the Normal and increase detail. I have personally created about 50K normal maps (including a few K in my DA:O HiRes Pack 1), using many methods, and these were created using full sized textures.

You see, the average sized object in the game world gets a 1024x1024 pixel textures. That covers everything from tables, to double doors, to people's bodies (heads get their own). This is a standard image size that has been in use for many years, Larger, or more complex objects (the windmill in Redcliff) are supposed to be comprised of many of these textures.

Now what gets really interesting is that the textures in the /Textures/High folder are 1024x1024 on average (except weapons or gloves which are 512X512 since they are smaller objects). That is interesting since they comprise almost all of the foreground textures. They specifically chose to keep them at full size, yet they nerfed the others all the way down to 256X256! That is the typical size of a texture found wrapped around tiny objects (forks, plates, cups) not wagons and doors that are larger than a person. When you do that, they are stretched so badly that all the pixels become blurry and distorted. There are roughly 2K of these in this game. When you finally get to see it with the real textures you will be amazed at the difference..

The really amazing thing is that by going all the way to 256^2 from 1024^2 the files only take up 1/16th of the memory that they used to. Remember there are two dimension (H X W) so 1024/256=4, and 4 X 4 = 16. If they had just made them half sized then they would have looked a lot better, and still only taken 1/4 of the memory that originals did.

Now remember those fully size Normal Maps? These also indicate that this was done at the last second since it gives us proof, and wastes a lot of memory. There is no way that this was an accident with full sized Normals.

If they were honestly trying to make the game look proper instead of just shooting the best in-game trailers for game shows (aside from the CG commercials), then they would have cut down some of the lesser textures in the High/Medium packs to compensate. There is plenty of room to prune in them, but it would not look quite as good for the cut scenes.

Now I really wish I could post a link to the interview/article/or post that this originally came from, but I do not have it anymore. If anyone does please post it so everyone can see it for themselves.
According to Bioware personnel, DA:O for the PC was done back in March! That means that the memory leak is part of the engine, not a few errors in level making or mesh interaction. That means that there is a better chance that they will stop selling DLCs and just give them away as an apology, than actually fixing it for DA;0. I just hope they get it fixed for The Old Republic.

All of this combined, with the fact that the Bioware Reps. were pulled from these topics and Bioware has not answered my, or anyone else that I know's emails about anything (not complaints, but technical questions about the textures, which we eventually figured out ourselves), so I am starting to think about abandoning this game. If this is the the new Bioware, then I will mourn the old (DA:O + Mass Effect = 2 in a row that were disappointments @ Bioware's Tier).

Cheers everyone!

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.

[Xaltar81]

etherhonky wrote...

i know nothing of texture work. from what little i pretend to know, an artist creates the assets for a given item, for example "boulder_1" or "dungeon_wall_2" etc... wouldnt increasing the resolution of that given item help its res out in and of itself, and then repackaging them?

In a word no. Basicly all you will be doing is scaling the existing texture. Say a 256x256 "upresed" to 512x512 still only contains the detail of a 256x256 only now its blurred and crap looking. What most amatures do then is throw massive ammounts sharpening on the image to make it look sharp again. This does not look good nor is it a high res texture.

To truly upres a texture you have 2 choices:

1. Most common, make it from scratch with a new source image being sure it tiles correctly and looks close enough to the original that it does not conflict with the existing assets.

2. Not as applicable to environment work, up the resolution of the existing texture to the size desired and then basicly paint in the details again with pixel brushes and the like or, use overlays to add detail to the texture that looks good.

As you can see, both of these options are time consuming. Bioware might well release a higher res version of the game in years to come, maybe a GOTY enhanced edition or the like but you have to understand that its not cost effective to simply release it as a patch or DLC.

I hope this makes a few things clearer for those of you that don't know much about the guts of game design. I say again, the mods will come and DAO will get a facelift, just give it time.

[Xaltar81]

MrHimuraChan, that is a prime example of overuse of the sharpen tool. As you can see in the comparison images, the "high res" textures just look like pixilated oversharp versions of the originals. No offense to the author, kudos for taking the time to try and share it. That however is not what the game needs. I'll whip up a small pack myself to demonstrate in a few days.

[ChickenDownUnder]

Yes, it is like Xaltar says. The bigger the texture map, the more detail you can actually put on an object. It also determines how effective bump/spec maps work on any object as well. If Bioware had also made bump/spec maps that were also 256x256, things in the game would really be starting to look ugly.

And not only are those screenshots showing an excessive use of the sharpen tool, but it also makes Bioware's use of the burn tool and black shadow blobbing very obvious as well. Still, that any effort was made to make the game better is applaudable.

EDIT: I'm such a slow poster.

Modifié par ChickenDownUnder, 21 décembre 2009 - 08:27 .

[NewYears1978]

CoS Sarah Jinstar wrote...

NewYears1978 wrote...

Would be nice to at least get official word from devs on it..not all hush or brushed off.
Because of this I have completely uninstalled DA:O and moved on. Yes I got a good 85 hours out of it and loved the game. It was amazing..don't get me wrong. But I have been severely turned off to BioWare now and have decided not to even buy Mass Effect 2 which I was previously very pumped about.

Your hang up over some not so high res texturing is the game is nothing short of astounding. You put 85 hours into the game and enjoyed it yet you're writting off the entire studio due to some low res textures? Thats an interesting form of logic there New.

Might sound silly..but there's logic to it in my mind.  It's not about the enjoyment I did have with the game but about the trust issues I have with the company over the shoddy-ness and bad support that has been plaguing this game..

Anyone in their right mind who looks at those 256x256 textures such as the wagon..and say they look fine..is simply crazy.  It's clear there is a flaw in the engine if it can't handle at least some average textures on the environments...

Too late to really debate it..but I have my reasons and they are valid..I'm not the best debater..but I know what I am thinking.

Simple fact is some textures are even MISSING.  Take for instance the one under the logs in a campfire..it's missing from the pack.  Then you have the 256x256 ones such as the wagon, many wood textures..etc that are clearly being overstretched,blurry and poor.    Then I have a devway back who admitted there was missing textures and that there seemed to be a problem with the textures that were released..who then went hush hush after that (because was probably instructed to do so and because the textures thing wasn't a concern)..

Anyways..Im typing incoherently..it's really too late..but yes, I have good reason...my enjoyment of the game was severely damaged due to the memory issues and the textures and there's really no reason for it in a game in production for 5 years.

[JackDresden]

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 would like you to list all these signs that the PC version is a console port as I find that accusation just silly, I've been playing PC games 25 years and this feels very much like a PC game to me, the controls don't remind me of a console game at all, it doesn't feel lacking in content or complexity or dumbed down. The character graphics are good as well this very much feels like a classic PC roleplaying game to me. I mean Oblivion could have been accused of this the whole UI was designed around the console and was clunky & chunky on the PC, and character textures where very, very low res, I did us a player made high res character texture pack on that.

Ok now I've given you my take on that, I have to say I focus more on the characters than the backgrounds and don't really look at backgrounds close up a lot. If a modder produces a hi-res texture pack free I'd use it, why not? But I really don't think this game needs it.