@myfist

I'll wait. But if you want to contribute, why not send a download link of those files to yarlen?

Why do questions, or discussions about TSOP almost always degenerate into an LAA argument, or about some hack to increase ram usage instead of fixing a perfectly good, but broken game?

The quality of the textures in TSOP was NOT reduced. Only converted from TGA to DDS format. No ship, or planet textures were touched. Ridiculouly high resolutiion textures for the particles were reduced in size by 1/2, because there was no need for memory hogging 512, or 1024 res particle texture when a 256, or 128 resolution texture looked identical in game in every way. Even close up.

Ironclad will merge elements of TSOP into the 1.2 patch. This is confirmed. TSOP is an open community project. For this purpose is why TSOP was made. Which elements of TSOP Ironclad will use is their decision. Plus i will help them with any questions they ask about further optimizing the game at the graphic artist level.

*.window are just like all the rest of the reference files requiring notepad. They are text ways of telling a curtain portion of a window in-game like the bottom hud how big it will be and where it is on the screen and what brush to use. A brush is just a text link to a texture with coordinates and size.

Step aside... The guy that thought it all up, and took the initiative to do it is the 1st in line

Another note about the "graphic reductions" everyone seems to be so afraid of. The particle textures that were reduced in size were for graphics (the particles) in game that were extremely small to begin with. For example the Kol's guass gun effect (The 3 side guns. not the ability) is a very tiny effect in game. Yet it used a texture that was 64x64. When reduced to 32x32, and converted to DDS with mip mapping. There was absolutely no visible side effect, because the particle mesh used for the effect was scaled very small to begin with. The advent malace, and fighter push ability is another story. It uses a 512x64 texture for the hands (2 of them. One for the left, and one for the right hands). When reduced by half there indeed was a very visible difference in game. Same was true with the Vasari beam effects. So those textures were left alone with the exceptions of being converted to DDS. I personally tested each, and every effect i changed in TSOP to make sure there was no visible change in game from vanilla before i commited it.

We did change the planet textures early in TSOP's development. This did not reduce the resolution or the quality of the planet textures themselves, because in game the planets resolution is 2048x1024. However the planet texture is 2048x2048. UV mapped cylindrically at the equators, but planiar mapped at the poles to prevent the pole pinch effect of spherical UV mapping. The vanilla method wastes 1/2 of the planet textures space. We tried to redo the vanilla textures to 2048x1024 spherical maps. However we ran into the pole pinch problem ourselves, and we could not fix it. So we reverted the planets back to the vanilla cylindrical/planiar standard.

You dont have to take my word for it. Play vanilla, and play TSOP. Compare them for yourself. Almost 800 megs of in game memory savings cant be wrong. If there is a difference between Vanilla, and TSOP in graphic quality it is so minor that no one notices. Which was the whole point of the project.

Combine that with what Ironclad did for the 1.2 patch, and Sins will indeed become a lean, mean machine. With lots of room for expansion, and modding.

I still am not comfortable with reducing texture sizes.

First, do textures really make a difference in the system ram? wouldn't all the textures be on the g-card? if so, then I dont see this as addressing the issue where systems slow due to the 2gb limit. If that's not why you want to do this, but because not everyone has a spiffy g-card, then add the lower res textures to the lower video settings. IIRC, there are several texture resolution settings, so just stick the lower res textures in one of those settings, problem solved.

Second, just because you cant see a difference in certain textures doesnt mean someone else cant and/or future hardware might not make it very visible. There are plenty of old games that I play where certain textures were low resolution, and now when I play them those textures stick out and are very distracting because I am playing at resolutions way higher than the designers intended. Now, if all textures were of the same quality, then on the higher resolutions at least everything would look the same as opposed to certain things sticking out.

Third, I'd like to read the post where IC said they would integrate TSOP into the patch, can you send me a link?

P.S. If anything I say here comes off as instulting somehow, I'm sorry. I understand other's views on this subject, especially the mod makers who put in blood, sweat, and tears. I simply disagree, and am trying to help you understand my view.

It's my understanding that this isn't possible. Lower texture resolution settings aren't often separate textures in the game files, they're just downscaled from the maximum-resolution file when they're loaded.

Didn't read some of the thread because you guys started writing books, but I will say that our work thus far on 1.2 could be described as work parallel to TSOP from an engine standpoint, but not intersecting with it yet. I'd love to incorporate the plethora of data optimizations from TSOP in the coming months as we move forward with Rebellion. The more memory we can free up the more fun stuff we can do with that extra space after all.

This is only true for non-compressed dds textures. Once you convert a texture to DXT3 or DXT5 you will experience artifacts in the image that reduce the quality.

The loss in quality is not near as noticeable if at all on the particle effects and model textures are already stored in compressed dds.

However, static elements like the UI in TSOP are much more noticeable. For example if you open the Buttons_Research_Normal.tga and compare it with TSOP's version you will notice the artifacts due to the compression.

Don't get me wrong though, I fully support TSOP and recommend anyone having issues should run with TSOP (my mod supports this currently). I would however not want UI elements converted to compressed DDS unless absolutely necessary.

Zombie can you show us examples of these artifacts, because i see absolutely nothing when i compare them. Unless you are reffering to the mip mapping feature of DDS. In that case i can see what you mean by artifacts. However i did not mip map the UI textures because it was unnecessary. If i saw something that degraded the texture i would have tried a different method of converting it.

I am also assuming the average user would not notice any minor degredation. However a graphic artist who is very particular might. Ironclad may have a way to convert every texture to the DDS standard without any loss in quality at all.

TGA format does not benefit from lowering the texture resolution in game. Only the DDS textures do. TGA remains the same resolution no matter what the setting.

How about making it like an install switch? I remember alot of older games giving you choices of what texture packs to install. I'd again like to emphasize that the textures are my only issue here.

And I do respect the work you all put in, but I know of several mods going on to other games to upgrade the textures and usually some models too (which usually means completely new textures, but there are some that dont), why go backwards when eventually someone will have to undo that? I dont know about you, but I expect to play this game 10 years from now.

Like I asked above, do textures really even affect the 2gb limit? Shouldnt they be on the g-card and not the system ram? The 2gb limit should only be addressible system ram, not video ram.

The confusion arises because people take the term memory to mean RAM, and this can lead to some expensive mistakes as people buy PCs loaded with 4GB or RAM and a 32-bit OS, only to later realize they can’t make use of all the RAM they bought.

The 4GB limit refers to total addressable memory space and not just the RAM installed. It’s a total made up of system RAM, graphics RAM, PCI memory range, ACPI and a few other bits and pieces. And if you think that your system RAM is the only significant factor, think again. You can buy graphics cards fitted with 1GB or RAM, and if you wanted (and had the spare cash!) you could fit three of these into a system. There’s not a 1 to 1 relationship between graphics memeory consuming system RAM, but the larger the memory, the more the card sets aside for itself.

From Clearing up the 32/64-bit memory limit confusion

The worst I found for compressing to dds 5 is the fleet tree icons and the zoomed out icons and the race icons. Basically all the icons that hold your colour.

I also think there may be a slight difference between the photoshop DDS plugin and the Gimp DDS plugin. I will look at this soon but I did hear the NVidia plugin for photoshop is a better quality compressor.

I agree the IC should not compress all the textures but there is much much room for improvement and they should have a least learned from there mistakes is texture waste. Hopefully they learned not to fill a 50 car parking lt with 10 cars all over the place.

ICs Texture Guy

   Sorry I could nor resist that 1