255 réponses à ce sujet

[DragonRageGT]

Sorry Torias, I'll behave, promise! (couldn't help it though)



You know, game did seem to run a lot better (loading time) when I had no mods/dlc... I played from nov/3 to nov/18 like that until CE was released here and only then I got some mods too. Only then I started having longer loading times after many hours in game and now it feels like it doesn't need the alt-tab for it to happen too.



And my card is 512MB indeed, DDR3 PCIex... hope it can handle high res textures while keeping at least some 25 FPS.

[Xaltar81]

If the pack you use is done properly and only uses the texture sizes needed to give the best quality to performance ratio you should be fine so long as you don't use any AA or AF. If it hits you too hard you could turn off frambuffer effects and get a bit more of a boost. The key though is making the assets as efficient as possible while retaining the best possible quality. Unfortuneately, most of the people skilled enough to do this already have a job in the field and won't waste time making something they won't get payed for.

Modifié par Xaltar81, 22 décembre 2009 - 11:03 .

[Photon_Man62]

Get JBtextures. Problem mostly solved.

[Darth_Shizz]

Photon_Man62 wrote...

Get JBtextures. Problem mostly solved.

Whilst I appreciate what he's doing, I found most of the textures to be over the top. So no, problem isn't mostly solved. The problem will exist until either BW release non-crappy textures as a modders resource, or someone starts rebuilding the existing textures. 

[Kelston]

Photon_Man62 wrote...

Get JBtextures. Problem mostly solved.

Except JBtextures still has not completely fixed texture shimmering issues.

And I gave up on JBtextures during the time when he had the thing split into some 8 different zip files with inconsistent nomenclature so you had no freakin idea what order in which to install them and he was constantly changing it all on a daily basis. It was just absurd.

[4Aces]

Photon_Man62 wrote...

Get JBtextures. Problem mostly solved.

I do not see how replacing my 2.41GB of files with his 3.29GB of files (all packs and patches) is going to solve anything when it is acknowledged that larger texture mods casue memory problems (especially in the Denerim Market).  I am not talking about load times either.  The JBTextures do cover a lot of files from the Core textures, so they do improve more than what my pack has.  It is just the simple math, that if you add more then the game becomes more unstable as it uses more RAM.

I apologize if I mislead anyone about my re-wroking the Core Textures (from scratch).  I have to actually count all the files that need replacing, to get a sense of how long it will take me.  I also need to find out where the terrain textures are hidden (I do not remember seeing them in the Core Textures - and I know they are not in High/Medium).  I will at least be doing some of them, but I cannot commit to all of them at this time.

Thanks to a miscommunication with the company that was hired to host our forums, we have temporarily lost them.  They went down today (permenantly) and we are making arrangements to install a backup from two days ago onto our own server.  When that is done, I will be hosting a thread on my re-texture mod for core files. 

Hopefully Bioware will release the full sized Core Textures before that.  Christmas is coming after all.

[whtnyte-raernst]

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!

[Dauphin2]

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 could be that person, Like me, didn't know the OP made a texture pack (and really don't care if they do or not). And probably didn't realize the thread was to promote said texture pack instead of discussing how to satisfy those who want higher rez textures.   

Or in short, it wasn't rude at all, but instead it was an attempt to be helpful. However comments like yours, and ironically mine, aren't helpful at all.  

The long and short of it is, if you want higher rez textures you have 2 choices:

1) make them yourself
2) Download someone elses


Bioware isn't going to release any, and I certainly don't blame them. They have clearly outlined the reasons for their stance, and I don't see there is any further constructive debate on the issue. Bioware is simply letting this thread run because they know if they close it, certain people will just open it again to further their own agendas.

[4Aces]

Hey, this is not my thread. It was my petition though. NewYears1978 is the actual OP. He was more diligent than I was, in monitoring things around here.



I do not mind comparisons, so there is not animosity for mentioning the JB (HD) mod. It does improve the textures more than my QnD (though when it was initially released QnD covered a lot more of them - and I did not know about HD in the 12 hours it took me to knock out QnD).



This thread is not to discuss the texture packs themselves, though we did get off on a tangent there,



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).



They have 'em, and we want 'em. They advertised a game that is

"quite amazing in its level of quality and polish," said Dr. Ray Muzyka, General Manager and CEO, BioWare and General Manager and Vice President, EA."

(http://www.destructo...9--120497.phtml)



"we want to ensure we deliver a blockbuster, AAA BioWare-quality title - as the game is shaping up so well already. An incredible amount of time and effort has gone into Dragon Age: Origins and this extra time will ensure we deliver the quality kind of launch you have come to expect from our games."

(http://ve3d.ign.com/...ragon-Age-Delay)



Texture size is relative to object size, so if it takes a 1024x1024 for a man-sized object (as the industry standard for the last 5 years), then stretching a 256x256 over a wagon (twice the size of a man) is clearly far below AAA Bioware quality. Then take into consideration that there are about 2000 of these 256x256 sized textures and you will be amazed at what the game looks like when the real sized textures are used (if the game will run with them, that is - but that is another topic).

[Bibdy]

Quite presumptuous and demanding, aren't we? Taking a few quotes from media sites and convoluting them to think they mean that they will include the kind of things on your own personal agenda doesn't help it at all.



Quite deplorable, the level you're stooping to get your hands on these textures.



Is a simple "Can we have these textures, please?" too difficult? Is it truly necessary to stoop to such childish, baseless tactics to get what you want?

[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 .

[phordicus]

Andreas Papathanasis wrote...

that's the best explanation so far.  thanks, but why the delay in providing it when clearly this info would have solved the mystery?

Modifié par phordicus, 22 décembre 2009 - 11:05 .

[Kelston]

Andreas Papathanasis wrote...

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.

I am fairly certain that the overall feel of the community is that the game could look better on PC rather than suffer from the same limitations of console versions.

As far as I was aware, there had been repeated mentions that on the old forums, BioWare had admitted that the texture pack released with the PC version were incomplete and did not include another step up in quality. Whether this statement was made, I couldn't say, but it seems a lot of people feel that it was.

In the end, it probably is also a bit disheartening when PC hardware limitations are brought up as part of the reason a higher quality texture pack wasn't made available. After all, bigger names like John Carmack had no problems releasing a game with levels of quality that were impossible to run at the time of the game's release (Doom 3's highest settings). Why not leave this up to the player? Why assume that everyone is happy with settling for compatibility over pure quality? If 1024x1024 textures are available, why limit what the players could see by only giving them 256x256?

[Destructo-Bot]

The environment textures are comically blurry. I would like to see better texture options. How much quality testing does downsizing source assets require? It seems relatively straightforward if you release downsized (2048x2048) textures as a modders pack and skipping any kind of QA is ok.

I'm not a game artist but if you have a hi-res file and batch it through something like irfanview or photoshop what is the problem with downscaling assets and releasing them as is to modders?

Modifié par Destructo-Bot, 23 décembre 2009 - 12:01 .

[Besetment]

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".

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.

Someone from Bioware feel free to correct me if I'm wrong but I've worked sound production projects to deadlines and the simple fact is you have to set yourself a date and draw a line in the sand or you risk letting your inner perfectionist take over and you will never finish anything. In projects like this you have several people working on for example just the sound design aspect and by itself its also a learning process so you get better as you go along. But you still need to keep to that line in the sand and not go back and redo your early stuff because that quickly becomes a cycle you never get out of. According to a recent article in Wired this appears to be one of the major reasons why 3D Realms went bust and Duke Nuken Forever had 12 years of development and no finished product to show for it.

Ultimately, I think anyone who has participated in any large scale creative project will understand that the work is never truly complete. You can always look at what you did and find ways of improving it but sometimes its best to leave well enough alone. I know that I have done that whole thing where I listen to old songs I wrote and produced and I go back and start tweaking and tweaking and tweaking until its dead to me and everything that was spontaneous and alive about it in the beginning has gone because I just tinkered it to death.

Also, there is absolutely nothing stopping you from making your own high resolution textures using your own stocks. I don't mean taking 512 x 512s and upscaling them to 1024 x 1024 and unsharp mask in Photoshop.

Remember Qarl from the Oblivion modding scene? He retextured like half of the game's surfaces from scratch and admittedly they were better than most of the ones Bethesda created for the game but bear in mind that his work is an optional add on. His textures were huge (many of them 2048 x 2048) so the memory usage was insane. Going by the Steam computer specs survey I remember noting that most people would not be able to use those texture packs because they just didn't have the physical memory to make the game more than a slideshow.
 

Modifié par Besetment, 23 décembre 2009 - 12:03 .

[Bibdy]

Besetment wrote...
 also a learning process so you get better as you go along. But you still need to keep to that line in the sand and not go back and redo your early stuff because that quickly becomes a cycle you never get out of. According to a recent article in Wired this appears to be one of the major reasons why 3D Realms went bust and Duke Nuken Forever had 12 years of development and no finished product to show for it.

Too true...I haven't made any real progress with my little addon in about a week because I keep returning to the first level I made to tweak it and get it 'just right', at the expense of starting a new area and making progress on that. You have to stop somewhere and tell yourself you'll do better the next time around.

[ChickenDownUnder]

phordicus wrote...

Andreas Papathanasis wrote...

that's the best explanation so far.  thanks, but why the delay in providing it when clearly this info would have solved the mystery?

He probably wanted to confirm a few points with other Bioware workers, since whatever he says could be seen as representing Bioware's stance as a whole. Didn't want any foot-in-mouth type of trouble for saying something that may prove untrue.

Anyways, BOO tiny texture maps.

I wonder if there is any chance of getting a peek at their 3d environment artists' stock texture folder.

[Besetment]

Bibdy wrote...
I haven't made any real progress with my
little addon in about a week because I keep returning to the first
level I made to tweak it and get it 'just right', at the expense of
starting a new area and making progress on that. You have to stop
somewhere and tell yourself you'll do better the next time around.

^ Good luck with your mod but yeah I totally recommend setting yourself date to get level 1 done and finished. And then when that day arrives you just scramble for last minute adjustments and then thats it. Its done. Its over. Move onto level 2. For better or worse the feedback alone will tell you where you can spend your time better.

One of the funny things doing things like that is that I used to do it a fair bit on music production forums and the feedback I would get was very negative. Usually there was a pattern to it: "you have 15 seconds of a good song but wheres the rest of it? You have a good loop but it doesn't build up to anything". After a while I came to realise that I would spend inordinate amounts of time tweaking tiny little details that don't matter to the majority of people and don't really affect the listening experience. For instance, I would spend days just getting a bass drum to sound right which is pure insanity when you stand back and look at it like that. But you learn and you don't make the same mistakes again, you loosen up and don't spend so long tweaking bass drums and in the end its good for you and makes you a better producer.

I guess I'm likening this to Bioware texture artists not making a wagon super detailed so the player wants to walk right up to it and inspect the woodwork. In terms of time constraints yeah I would also sacrifice the wagon if I was in that position. Most people won't look at it close up and most people wont care. And you can tell where Bioware put the bulk of the efforts - on the parts of the game that get looked at by most players (and rightly so). Particularly those areas directly related to the main quest. The Alienage for example has some astounding texture work and it runs baby's butt smooth.

Modifié par Besetment, 23 décembre 2009 - 12:30 .

[ThePeregrinati]

ZeroMystic wrote...

One thing I want to mention is that anyone who has loading time problems or CLAIMS there is a memory leak, has either

1. Pirated their game
2. Digitally downloaded their game.

Well some research proved that it turned out that every single person who reported the quote MEMORY LEAK ISSUE or whatever you want to call it, were either people who digitally downloaded the game, or pirated it.

Co-incidence, I think not.

I've got the Steam version (obviously paid-for and digitally downloaded) and, as I said earlier I've never noticed a slowdown in load times, even playing for 6+ hours and going back and forth between the same two or three areas repeatedly. I've got a mid-range laptop (was excellent a year an a half ago) that I play it on, with most settings at medium. I think my worst load time was about 30 seconds or so. Maybe the problem only happens when some graphics feature is enabled that I don't have on?

[4Aces]

Color added for readability.

[quote]Andreas Papathanasis wrote...
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.
[/quote]

Alright, some advancement.  We have established that you have the game industry standard sized Diffuse Textures which you used to make the Normals.  The reason for using the Normal Maps (NM) as the primary example is that you claimed earlier that there were no better Diffuse Textures (DT) for the Core Textures.  There has also been no other official response on this since Andrew the Forum Rep who was looking into it disappeared a month ago. 

Now we can move on to why you will not release them.  I am not asking for your 'source assets' at a full 4096x4096 (or whatever you used).  I am asking for the textures that should have shipped with the game (max size 1024x1024).  It was advertised as being AAA, Next-Gen, and a number of other descriptors that means it should be to industry standards.  That means 512x512 for anything between breadbox to human sized, and 1024x1024 for anything human size.  That is a generalization, not a hard rule of course as some will be
larger if more detailed, and other can be smaller if they are undefined with contiguos colors.

Why you would use a 256x256 DT for an object twice the size of a person, and then slap a NM on it at 1024x1024 is still not clear.  A 512x512 only costs 171 kb (or 342 kb if it has an Alpha Channel) while your 1024x1024 NM costs 1,366 kb (since they all have Alpha Channels).  If you had used a 512x512 DT and a 512x512 NM then the memory saved would be significant, and the look of the game would be much better (in my experience).  A 512x512 only costs 342 kb (683 kb with Alpha) so even if you use the worst case of all the DTs having Alphas, the DT+NM would add up to the cost of the Normal Maps that you used (save 171 kb to 342 kb per DT).  Now add in the fact that you also used Full Sized Specular Maps (same cost as the NMs) and things get really interesting.
Since that was a worst case senario, the more accurate is that you could have saved a few hundred MBs of file size, which would quate to smoother gameplay.  I extensivey used these techniques in Fallout 3 to compensate for the 2048x2048 DTs (NM @ 1024 and SM @ 512).

I appreciate your reasoning, but without the base texture there is no reason to have such high quaility NM or SM.  You know that 256x256 is actually the point where pixellation begins to bread down detailed images like these.  The only things they are valid for are contiguous colors, so the mangled pixels are not noticeable.

Normally the Diffuse texture is twice the dimension of the Normal Map, and can be up to quadruple the dimensions of the Specular.  That is the order of importance over every game I have ever seen (and worked on).  So to see Normals, and Speculars are more important than a Diffuse by Quadruple Dimensions (or 16X in file size) means that I can fix that with the full sized textures.

[quote}
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).
[/quote]

I know you will not release source assests.  I do not want them.  They would lilely be to large to work with efficiently.  I just want the full sized ones (same size as the NMs and SMs).

You used the same size textures to make the NMs and SMs, that I used for my QnD (Quick and Dirty mod).  That is where I upsized all the DT to the same size as the NMs (but I did it in 12 hours - so it was not all that good hence the name).  Since I am about to start privately hosting all my mods (7 GB+ for F3 and DAO) are you saying that Bioware does not have the ability to hire addition servers for a few months?  With the profit from the DAO I think they can afford it (GOTY and all).   The Core Textures are only 630M right now, and as proper sized Diffuse only patch (since they are the ones that need replacing) you would only be hitting about 1.6M (since there are only 2000 textures in the Core Pack to upsize).  My HiRes Pack 1 is nearly that big by itself so I do not think it is nearly as bad as you think.

[quote]
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.
[/quote]

I know.  That's why I asked for them as a Modder's Resource.  That way you cannot suffer any fallout when they start to overload the game.  I will take care of the tuning of the file sizes, and you can mandate the warning that has to be applied to any mod using them.  A policy of total cooperation with no liability.  Good for PR too.  :innocent:

[quote]
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.
[/quote]

Once again (not aimed at you), they are not Hi-Res.  They are regualr (industry standard) resolution.  Hi-Res is when someone like me puts a 1024x1024 DT on a set of gloves.  Asking for wagons, double doors, walls, and other objects in the game that are very large or very detailed to have 512's or higher is not asking for Hi-Res. 

Please see the comment above about Modder's Resource.  I had assumed that you had seen the original Petition, but I am starting to doubt that based on your comments.  That would mean that you do not have to test anything, or even support them.  It would also mean that you do not have to worry about your server capacity since there would only be a few dozen people downloading them to mod with.  That is what I asked for in the Petition, so would you reconsider?

I appreciate your taking the time to explain your reasoning, and look forward to your answer on the Modder's Resource question (even if the answer is no).

Modifié par 4Aces, 23 décembre 2009 - 04:12 .

[nmemonic]

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.



Kudos to your determination and perseverance. I hope its worth it! I know it will be!

[Facemelt3r]

There are far too many textures (props, terrain) within Dragon Age: Origins that don't appear to have a "High" counterpart. The resolution on those specific objects is something I'd expect to see playing an MMO like World of Warcraft (Released in 2004) that was designed to run on a Pentium 4 2.4ghz with onboard vga (intended exaggeration)... being that it's an MMO it gets a certain amount of slack in my eyes for its unusually low texture resolution.

Dragon Age: Origins however really failed in the prop/terrain texture department, and I would be extremely excited if someone like 4Aces went through and re-did the terrain textures and some of the prop textures. No point in retexturing a spoon... but a shield mounted on the wall in the grand hall of Castle Cousland, as one example, ought to look better than it currently does.
 

Eager to see what comes of it, and if I had the means to contract someone to do the work -- hell yeah I would!

4Aces: Thanks for the texture pack(s) I'm getting a lot of extra enjoyment out of my game now.

Modifié par Facemelt3r, 23 décembre 2009 - 06:39 .

[Destructo-Bot]

Besetment wrote...Going by the Steam computer specs survey I remember noting that most people would not be able to use those texture packs because they just didn't have the physical memory to make the game more than a slideshow.
 

The Steam hardware survey says 70% of PCs have 512MB or more of VRAM.

Modifié par Destructo-Bot, 23 décembre 2009 - 07:48 .

[Torias]

Destructo-Bot wrote...

Besetment wrote...Going by the Steam computer specs survey I remember noting that most people would not be able to use those texture packs because they just didn't have the physical memory to make the game more than a slideshow.
 

The Steam hardware survey says 70% of PCs have 512MB or more of VRAM.

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.

Modifié par Torias, 23 décembre 2009 - 08:51 .

[Destructo-Bot]

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.

Modifié par Destructo-Bot, 23 décembre 2009 - 09:22 .