In my opinion textures are the biggest weakness of games based on the Gamebryo-Engine.

Most textures were at one time high quality images which were then compressed to such extent that thousands of them would fit on 1 or 2 discs. Another reason for the compression is that most systems aren't capable of handling ultra high-res textures. But the quality of these textures suffers from the compression.

Of course there will be texture mods for FNV but what if OE simply released their own textures in a much higher quality than the standard high quality textures? This pack (let's presume it would be 10GB in size) would be hosted somewhere on the internet, OE and Bethesda could tie a licence to it and everything should be fine.

I don't believe it would take an experienced developer more than a day to batch the images and create such a pack.

What do you think?

http://fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=12056

HUGE texture replacer. HUGE.

The full pack, which is phenomenal, is probably around 1-2 GB uncompressed.

IMO, Obsidian should make a pack similar to that(in terms of the idea) and make it an optional install.

Its vfar far better for them just to let obsessed fans make such things realy.

Ultra High-Res textures are ridiculous and unnecessary. There are formulas to calculate the necessary resolution for any texture. These take into account the model size in game, how big it is, how important it is, how close the player will get to it, and how much screen space it will likely take up. Making textures too big only slows down the framerate, and offers literally no gain in image quality unless you stick the camera right up against the texture.

Even more than polygon counts, number of textures and their resolutions are the biggest factor in frames per second, with CPU calculations a close second. High res textures cause more pop-in, as it becomes difficult for your graphics card and RAM to hold all the massive uncompressed textures in their buffer at once, and they must unload and load up new textures more often.

A good normal map can also make a lower resolution texture pop, and the normal map doesn't have to be large either. Lighting makes the biggest difference in texture quality - textures do not need to be huge, and shouldn't be unless there is good call for it. I do this sort of thing for a living, and it is irresponsible to make huge textures. Every texture should only be as large as it needs to be based on the calculations I listed above, and no larger. I guarantee that you'll have a better experience with 1024 textures and a game running at 60-80 fps, versus one with 2048 and 4096 textures running at 20-30 fps.

I find the majority of the textures "improved" in this high-res mods foolish. People slapping 512 (or higher!) maps on things like jet, or stimpaks, or even putting 2048 textures on riverbed bottoms! You can't see the difference in quality unless you squat down and zoom in on the ground or object! "Well, I like to get that close, and it helps immersion", you may say. Well it also decimates your framerate for no good reason. Even if you have the "frames to spare", you are getting no good return on your trade.

And how is Bethesda or Oblivion supposed to distribute these gigabytes worth of textures? Another disc, or hosting them for download? Both would be a massive waste of money for the companies, because they are professionals who understand the things I have stated above.

If you want different textures for an object, that's great, it is your prerogative. I have different textures on cigarettes and books and alcohol bottles. But to make use of some of the 2048 and 4096 textures I see in these high res packs, you would need to be using a resolution of 3280×2048 - which happens to be the highest resolution currently displayable on a single monitor, and mostly confined to expensive, specialized medical equipment. Anyone else using these textures are doing so just to say they are, it is the placebo effect - they believe they are getting a massive boost in image quality because they expect to with those high res textures. In exchange, they get lower frames per second, and longer loading times.

If you believe you must have "ultra" textures, go ahead, but don't expect professionals that know better to go along with the insanity.

I'm not talking about efficiency but of raw ultra high-res textures. After 13 years people still play Fallout, why not plan ahead and make these textures available? As I said: No matter if people can run it at the time of it's release

Because as a developer, you only keep certain raw high-res textures. You can easily eat up dozens of gigabytes of harddrive space when you do this job on a regular basis, and once a job is through, there is usually little use in keeping the massive raw files. Besides, the best way to make textures is actually making them at their intended resolution - so Obsidian and Bethesda may not have "ultra high res" textures because those resolutions never existed for those textures. To provide high res versions, they would have to upscale the existing textures, which fans into that sort of thing may as well do themselves in that case.

And future proofing a game 13 years out is not a good use of the developers time and resources. Bandwidth costs money. Pressing extra discs costs money. Paying artists overtime to make high res textures costs more money. Besides, people are unlikely to save a texture pack a decade and a half without deleting it, meaning those textures would just be redownloaded from somewhere off the Internet in the future, further making any developer efforts in that direction a waste of money.

You may not be talking about efficiency, but for a company and developers, everything must be weighted against efficiency.

While I agree with LateWhiteRabbit's position overall, I don't think they are ridiculous to folks that enjoy adding those kinds of textures to the game. Maybe unnecessary to some, but that doesn't make them "ridiculous", especially considering the fact that it takes such low-level hardware (by modern standards) to run them. Taking us back to an earlier thread in which I was educated on how $500 PCs can run Fo3/FNV on high settings, then certainly anyone with a Strong PC can run ultra-high level textures with _No_ impact on framerate or performance (I'm in this camp).

I do this myself (running high-level texture mods), and enjoy the fact that I can zoom-in and see as much detail as I want to see without any loss in framerate. I 100% agree that such textures are totally un-necessary to making a quality game, but there still nice to have. The gaming companies obviously agree as well, given that most of the textures in the game are not high-res but rather designed with efficiency in mind (not just texture efficiency, but model efficiency weighed against the density of objects and other stuff in a cell). As such (and this was even posted in one of the interviews) the trend now is to test and test and test to find every possible area in which frame-rate suffers, and to correct whatever problem is found. Efficient (and/or smaller) textures are one way of doing this.

That said, as a modder I'm also quite gratified that I have the ability to put the high-res textures in place, and equally gratified that the modding community puts out nice kits of high-res textures for different aspects of the game (weapons, landscape, weather, foods, etc). I've used these in Oblivion and Fallout 3, and very much enjoy them. They are not ridiculous to those of us who enjoy them, but I agree they are un-necessary in the default game as the consoles just can't handle them (yet!).

Miax

Sorry, I didn't mean to come off as completely dismissive. Some textures in Fallout 3 obviously benefit from an increased resolution, but there are limits. When I said "ridiculous" I was referring to the people making 4096 textures for rocks and 1024 or 2048 textures for tiny items like food and clutter.

It is rather a moot point anyway, as what the OP has asked for is impossible. As I pointed out in my last post, ultra high res versions of the textures in the game don't exist. They aren't magically hidden away on some developers computer and withheld because of consoles. All textures where likely made at the highest texture resolution available in the game and down scaled for the lower graphic settings. So Obsidian is shipping the highest res textures they have to players.

I'm sure people will release high-res packs for New Vegas, and people are free to use them, just as people are free to make them. Just don't expect the developer to get involved in what is essentially a modding issue.

I prefer hirez, but no more than 2048, and I agree they are not a requirement on small objects, my max resolution limited by my monitor is 1680x1050, but my system can deliver 2048 resolution textures without much problem, these kind of resolutions I prefer to see on surfaces such as roads, terrain, walls and character models, vanilla FO3 even with anistropy set to max would make me cringe when crouching near a rock or hiding near a corner wall where you could see the low res textures.

Another reason for compression is loading speed. In some cases a compressed texture can load and decompress into RAM faster than the uncompressed version can retrieved from the disc.

Obsidian did something really really cool some years back. They released High Quality versions of all of the Kotor 2 cutscenes for those with PC's that could handle it.

I suppose its a possibility, but its also possible that they want to retain the full quality versions as in-house assets
(IE. that are not available to anyone outside of the company; and also verifiable as the originals ~I know that's what I would do :shrug:)

Fallout New Vegas is not a game that really needs great graphics. A game like Uncharted 2 needs it becuase its one of its selling points, but for FO, people like gameplay, stroy and the RPG. Sure graphics are nice, but for FO its not a neccesity. It would be a lot more work and a lot more money...

How would it be a lot more work?, textures are initially created hirez, in fact there is a little extra work needed to compress them, the initial textures are probably something like 8192.

The textures you get with the PC version are the highest res textures we make.

My rig would be unable to handle it. That being said I'd be all for it.

However, Obsidian has spoken. Doesn't look like they'll make a hi-res texture pack above-and-beyond what they already have.

What? That's insane. :facepalm: Best practice for texture artists is to create the textures at the same resolution they plan on using for the final asset. If they were displaying textures made for IMAX they'd do something crazy like 8192 or higher. If you start more than twice the size of your final texture, and scale down, you get just as much artifacting and loss of visual fidelity as if you had taken a texture and scaled it up to more than twice its initial resolution. Also, compressed doesn't mean the texture has changed resolution. A 1024 or 2048 texture can be compressed and still be 1024 or 2048.


Thank you. I suspected as much.

Thanks for the response, are we looking at 512 or 1024 on max settings?

Depends on the model being textured. I'm sure some textures are even 2048. Some will be 256 on max settings. That's not really a question with an answer.

So in the end, Official = No

Mod = Yes

Also, even bigger = http://devnull.sweetdanger.net/obliviontextureoverhaul.html

THIS!!

Rock textures and some exterior textures in Fallout 3 were 2048 x 2048, I think that was the largest I have seen on a regular basis in the game, though 1024 x 1024 and 512 x 512 are the most common resolutions period (again from Fo3). I suspect they will be similar in size for FNV.

In that case there's nothing more to say. It's great having the devs on the forum

I disagree here. Its long been common practice for commercial artists to reduce their work. Reducing tightens lines, and literally reduces the scale of the flaws.

Reduced artwork generally looks better. The second benefit is that image apps like photoshop do a better job on the image quality if there is more data to work with (especially when rotating sections of the art). When I make something, I generally work above the final scale of the finished result (unless its a painting ).

Downscaling doesn't always improve the appearance of a texture. Depending on the detail in the texture, elements that read well at high-res can read very poorly or be completely absent even when the texture is quartered once. Additionally, downscaling normal maps can produce some bad/unexpected results since many of the normals are UVed close to poly edges.

fallout textures wernt very impressive but now games are getting to ''real'' like surreal sense of lets make this game have the sharpest quality and make the texture look cut out like a razor i just am not a fan of that like lost planets texture are to good red dead redemtions graphics are to good i just dont like the whole greatest looking ever i mean spend that time for the story

Depends on the method used. If you just resize something and have single pixel lines in it, you will likely loose some of them. A good artist will even leave slight gaps between perpendicular lines (that are lost when reduced). In general all drawings tighten up a bit for being reduced. Also, in my experience... when you rotate the image (or pieces of it), you lose quality in it (even if just a bit), but working above the final scale can compensate for this.


I was not thinking about Normal maps earlier. I don't resize those at all.