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4K textures?

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Bob Maths
Federal Navy Academy
Gallente Federation
#21 - 2015-01-12 02:12:30 UTC  |  Edited by: Bob Maths
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.
CCP Darwin
C C P
C C P Alliance
#22 - 2015-01-12 08:34:10 UTC
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  •  Senior Software Engineer, Art & Graphics, EVE Online  •  @mark_wilkins
Jessica Danikov
Network Danikov
#23 - 2015-01-16 14:46:55 UTC  |  Edited by: Jessica Danikov
Additional client disk space: Some modern games run up to 50Gb+, at worst you might compete with that.

Associated delivery bandwidth on both the client and host ends: I'm fairly sure this is a problem you throw a little money at. Content delivery is not that unique a challenge, plenty of people are doing it well. Worst case scenario, ghetto it with bittorrent.

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: You already have enthusiasts with two installs so that they can go on Singularity. I don't see how a separate, independent hires texture client would bother people. I'm sure it'd make things easier internally just to treat it as a new build target rather than trying to have two modes of rendering and switching on the fly.

Changes to game-engine texture management so that new, larger textures don't kill performance: You say stations already use hires textures, so... most of this work should be done, right? Sure, it may need optimisation, but I think as an optional alpha you could skip that work just to measure interest, with a disclaimer that performance is not guaranteed and entirely down to sufficient hardware.

Changes to our process for integrating art assets into the game to accommodate any new needs established by the changes to address: Again, if it's there for hires station textures, it can't be that difficult...

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: Let's be honest, this sounds like the real reason this hasn't been done. I'm sure it's not a trivial amount of work and I don't know who gets to be the decider on these things, but it boils down to the fact that it's not something people would be happy being monetized so it has to compete with other 'free' art efforts.

There's a 150 page thread says some people will give a minimum effort attempt that may melt their computer a try. If it really does fail to perform, the ones with supercomputers will be still be posting 4K screenshots and generating free publicity that way and, a few years from now when mainstream hardware catches up, you'll be more than ready for it. Seems like something worth putting some 20% time into to see how hard it really is.

Bumping up the textures isn't an option, it's an inevitability... it'll happen eventually. That's why I don't like posing this as an 'if' question. The question is when?
TheSmokingHertog
Julia's Interstellar Trade Emperium
#24 - 2015-01-18 09:34:04 UTC  |  Edited by: TheSmokingHertog
CCP Darwin wrote:
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:


  1. Additional client disk space and associated delivery bandwidth on both the client and host ends.

  2. 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.

  3. Changes to game-engine texture management so that new, larger textures don't kill performance.

  4. 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.


Keep it up, we will keep poking until we have it ;)

Edit: cant we kickstart it with PLEX investment, so PLEX for team time?

"Dogma is kind of like quantum physics, observing the dogma state will change it." ~ CCP Prism X

"Schrödinger's Missile. I dig it." ~ Makari Aeron

-= "Brain in a Box on Singularity" - April 2015 =-
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