CCP Darwin
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Posted - 2015.01.09 14:49:04 -
[1] - Quote
Quadima wrote:Bienator II wrote:4k textures would take up 16x the size as current 1k textures. i don't think thats realistic. Even the jump to 2k textures would quadruple model size No it won't. Texture compression becomes more and more efficient as the size of the texture increases. 4k x 4k would probably be only 3-5 times bigger in size than 1k x 1k.
Because this statement didn't sound right to me, I checked with CCP Mankiller, who pointed out that while that may be true for some compression schemes, it's not the case for Microsoft's DirectDraw Surface (DDS) format, which is how we deliver our textures. Generally, doubling the pixel resolution of a texture in .dds format will require 4x the space.
The main issues that would have to be resolved to deliver higher-res textures are:
- Additional client disk space and associated delivery bandwidth on both the client and host ends.
- Putting in place a scheme to allow some assets to be delivered optionally so that players who can't use the new feature don't bear the burden.
- Changes to game-engine texture management so that new, larger textures don't kill performance.
- Changes to our process for integrating art assets into the game to accommodate any new needs established by the changes to address (3)
All of this is a lot of work.
We're currently working on a package of changes to how we're delivering textures for PBR-shaded space objects that should provide some obvious quality improvement with a lot less low-level re-engineering of our graphics engine than what I just described, because we think the "bang for the buck" is a lot greater.
That said, everyone on the team knows that there's a lot of player interest in increasing our raw texture resolution, and we continue to discuss what has to be done to make it happen. It's just not so far been where we've felt we can most efficiently improve the look of the game.
CCP Darwin GÇó Senior Technical Artist, EVE Online GÇó @mark_wilkins
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CCP Darwin
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Posted - 2015.01.09 15:05:18 -
[2] - Quote
Komodo Askold wrote:Nice to see you're working on this! EVE looks amazingly pretty; can't imagine how well could it look with these textures. Thanks for the info!
I should clarify: The art/graphics team is not right now working on the engineering to support higher-resolution textures because we've decided that certain other changes will be a better use of our time. However, it's still a possibility for the future.
CCP Darwin GÇó Senior Technical Artist, EVE Online GÇó @mark_wilkins
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CCP Darwin
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Posted - 2015.01.12 08:34:10 -
[3] - Quote
Bob Maths wrote:We're not talking universal 4k textures plus a few entities could do with a graphical enhancement (cough stations) or anything so massive that it stretches the textures but better methods could be employed (cough asteroids) so that they don't look like ugly demon childs that you find in heavily polluted areas.
Worth pointing out that we already use higher-res textures for some station models. Like I say, we're aware of people's interest in increasing texture resolution and we're also aware of how it would improve the look to be able to do it. It just hasn't yet come to the top of our priorities when evaluated for benefit vs. the resource investment involved to get the work done.
CCP Darwin GÇó Senior Technical Artist, EVE Online GÇó @mark_wilkins
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