Stuff to make a HD tremulous

[jm82792]

Scale the textures up then brush them over to make them look better is what you can do.
I am downloading Xreal, I know nothing of compiling so this will be fun.
My friend knows much more about Quake3 than I do and he is trying to figure it out.
But the documentation isn't there for XReal..........

[CATAHA]

High texture resolution isnt real solution. Without good engine its just waste of memory/cputime. Old engines crop and simplify textures a bit. Im not coder, but seems its fact or something. Btw, you dont need very high-res textures for natural look. I think lowres texture with proper bump/specular maps, advanced lighting stage and post-processing gonna look like much better then just plain high-res texture.
P.S. Ye, i know that some texture sets have high quality textures, which are good without post-processing. But its exception, not rule. Not so many texture sets have such outstanding quality. And ye, just imagine what amazing result can give such textures after applying of bump/post/specular/etc stages... =}

[Tremulant]

Im not coder, but seems its fact or something.

[CATAHA]

Im not coder, but seems its fact or something.

Wut for this quote? You agree with this, disagree or forcing me ask our mod coder for details? =D
I can be wrong in some details, but i still think that mainly i was correct.

[gimhael]

Every engine from Quake I to Crysis uses downscaled textures. If you load a 1024x1024 texture, it compute 512x512, 256x256, ..., 1x1 textures called mipmaps. Then when an object is rendered it picks the texture where the resolution best matches the screen resolution. I.e. if your 1024x1024 texture appears on a 4x4 quad on the screen, it will automatically use the 4x4 texture.

This means that you can see the super-high-res textures only when you're sufficiently close. You can use the switch /r_colorMipLevels 1 in Tremulous to see the effect. All downscaled textures will be coloured differently, only the base texture keeps the original colour.

Old engines may have problems with texture sizes that are not powers of two and rescale them, which blurs the textures a bit, but most textures have power of two sizes, so that's not a big problem.

If you only want to add some noise to the textures to make them less boring at close views, you can use detail textures, i.e. you use the mid-res textures that you have now and add a noise texture in a second renderer pass. The noise texture can be repeated over the surface, so it does not need to be big for high resolution.

[Odin]

Not to mention that the Quake 3 engine builds mipmaps in software, which makes worse results than the driver solution. (iirc)

If you only want to add some noise to the textures to make them less boring at close views, you can use detail textures, i.e. you use the mid-res textures that you have now and add a noise texture in a second renderer pass. The noise texture can be repeated over the surface, so it does not need to be big for high resolution.

This is typically frowned upon by the Tremulous community(I have first-hand experience with this subject). Since r_detailtextures is defaulted to 1, and there is no menu option for it, nobody seems to know that a detail texture is even being used and don't realize they can turn if off with r_detailtextures 0 to gain their lost fps back.

[jm82792]

Interesting. I'd almost want to read a quake 3 engine manual that wouldn't totally bore me.
The only rendering I've done is with Maya and Blender so this concept is new to me.

[gimhael]

I think all OpenGL drivers use a simple box filter for mipmap generation. The feature was introduced with FBOs to generate mipmaps on a texture that you just rendered to. So the focus is on speed not quality. What the hardware probably does is gamma compensation, the quake engine does not do this, so the low mipmaps are usually a bit too bright.

To get highest quality mipmaps you have to generate them offline e.g. with NVIDIA's texture tools or AMD's compressonator. In that case you can also use s3tc compression which reduces images by 1:8 with very little loss of quality (i.e. you can double the resolution in both directions and still have only half the size of the same image in a TGA). The advantage of s3tc is that is kept compressed in graphics memory on pretty much every card since Voodoo3 times and so uses less texture ram/cache than e.g. a jpeg.

Unfortunately the common format for these textures is the .DDS file format and ioquake3 lacks a loader for them. I'm currently working on a patch to support this format, maybe they'll include it in the engine when it's done (I can already load compressed textures and mipmaps, but it fails to load uncompressed dds formats).

[jm82792]

I am the monkey who pushes the buttons and uses the packages but doesn't develop them
A patch that improves the textures sounds like a good idea.

[Tremulant]

If you only want to add some noise to the textures to make them less boring at close views, you can use detail textures, i.e. you use the mid-res textures that you have now and add a noise texture in a second renderer pass. The noise texture can be repeated over the surface, so it does not need to be big for high resolution.

Is this the kind of thing that was going on in serious sam when the camera got up close to an object? It did quite a good job on stone textures and the like.

[gimhael]

Is this the kind of thing that was going on in serious sam when the camera got up close to an object? It did quite a good job on stone textures and the like.

Example screenshot:
This shows a small 128x128 noise texture with horizontal blur that I made in 2 minutes added to the left texture. The shader scales the detail texture by a factor of 9, so that it has an effective resolution of 1152x1152 pixels:

Code:

textures/utcs/eq2_bmtl_02
{
{
map textures/utcs/eq2_bmtl_02.jpg
}
{
map $lightmap
tcgen lightmap
blendfunc filter
}
{
detail
map textures/utcs/detail.jpg
tcmod scale 9 9
blendfunc GL_DST_COLOR GL_ONE
rgbGen const ( 0.66 0.66 0.66 )
}
}

The current engine can only draw two textures in a single pass, so that this change requires an extra pass, i.e. it will reduce FPS. However it can be disabled for old chips with /r_detailtextures 0.

[jm82792]

Very interesting.

[freezway]

Yo. I'm in that kind of mood again and so decided to do some concept work for a higher detail goon. My suggestion is that higher details beg for a new more interesting texture. Let me know if you like the direction I've taken and should continue it!

NICE!

[CorSair]

Nice work Nux! 
That leg looks there is *some* muscle in it, not just a solid stick leg.

[swamp-cecil]

a shadow dragoon??

[Pazuzu]

Love it. +1

[your face]

That looks great, please continue!

[rotacak]

This is not HD graphic but it is ATCS map in better HD capable engine (Unreal Engine 3). Map is 99% finished, some energy fence and skybox missing yet. I rebuilded it piece by piece. Textures are ugly ATCS default without any effects.

[Demolution]

Heh, that's awesome.

[Tamaru]

hey lonly, you just saw real development on tremulous 

[freezway]

cool, better shadows are one of the things trem needs...

[Pazuzu]

Wasn't too impressed at first. Then I saw the second screenshot.
Can has new engine nao plzkthx?

[harraps]

This is not HD graphic but it is ATCS map in better HD capable engine (Unreal Engine 3). Map is 99% finished, some energy fence and skybox missing yet. I rebuilded it piece by piece. Textures are ugly ATCS default without any effects.

I didn't know you can run quake 3 mod on Unreal engine 3 ?!

Unreal Engine is really cool but can you give us it for free ? That's the question.
It's really cool BUT ... you didn't use bump maps.
Anyway that's awesome and it's a good beginning full of sucess.

[Odin]

cool, better shadows are one of the things trem needs...

derp

lightmapscale <float>

The big difference here is, Q3map2 raytraces the lightmaps. UE3 bakes shadowmaps into lightmaps(iirc).

[UniqPhoeniX]

If anyone is wondering, the huge contrast in light/shadows in outside area is due to no skylight, just the sun. Also, the direction of the sun is much higher, and the sun & some of the lights have slightly different color/intensity. It'll look a lot more bland/like the atcs we know once those differences have been removed

[freezway]

still looks better

[Tremulant]

Example screenshot:
This shows a small 128x128 noise texture with horizontal blur that I made in 2 minutes added to the left texture. The shader scales the detail texture by a factor of 9, so that it has an effective resolution of 1152x1152 pixels

This seems to have some potential.

as for UE3, wow, what a spectacular waste of effort, i guess distant textures look a bit clearer but that's about it(granted that's no surprise considering the same old assets are in use). Are you getting a massively improved framerate?

[freezway]

Unless its free, UE3 is a waste of time, even if it makes you computer shit lollipops.

[jm82792]

XReal seems most realistic in getting it there.
From my testing of XReal it looks decent and with a some brain cells being placed into a good map and good materials then we will be set.

[rotacak]

This is not HD graphic but it is ATCS map in better HD capable engine (Unreal Engine 3). Map is 99% finished, some energy fence and skybox missing yet. I rebuilded it piece by piece. Textures are ugly ATCS default without any effects.

I didn't know you can run quake 3 mod on Unreal engine 3 ?!

Unreal Engine is really cool but can you give us it for free ? That's the question.
It's really cool BUT ... you didn't use bump maps.
Anyway that's awesome and it's a good beginning full of sucess.

Unreal Engine 3 is free and you cant run there Q3 mod. It need to remake tremulous from begining. I not used bumpmaps because I want to only make it work like old tremulous - then I can start to improve. But I dont know If I am able to finish it and now I not have even time for it.
UE3 can do nice results: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGf0oGGGQqQ