No, I saw the other thread, and some of those have already been unsharpened.
However, many of your cited examples I really believe you have to be going out of your way to find, and that the average person running through the game won't notice. Some of them, I can't even tell what you're pointing to when the images are side by side. These types of textures will not be getting unsharpened.
I think the main point here, is that DS9 is in dire need of updated (higher quality) textures.
The screenshots below were taken on May 13, 2013, after the patch to Tribble.
1. The winter jacket looks slightly worse after the texture changes. The difference is most noticeable on the lower edge of the lapel and the second buckle from the top on the left (right-hand side of the character).
Wrong. While DS9 has some low-grade textures, it is NOT the same as on live, they are worse. I posted several before/after shots myself from various places in the game. Since it seems Taco didn't see that post, I'll repost them here.
I wasn't disagreeing with you about how some of the textures are slightly worse. What I'm saying is that even if they were to reverse some of the changes, the textures would still look horrible. Especially now with the contrast to the floor. It wouldn't be enough for them to just reverse them. They need to be ripped out and rebuilt from scratch, preferably the entire interior itself.
But the first priority should be ESD. It's what gives new players the first impression of the game and primary hub for a lot of fed players. It doesn't even look like very Starfleet. It just needs to be brought up to the same standard as the fleet starbases, embasies, SFA, Bajor, Qo'nos etc.
But the first priority should be ESD. It's what gives new players the first impression of the game and primary hub for a lot of fed players. It doesn't even look like very Starfleet. It just needs to be brought up to the same standard as the fleet starbases, embasies, SFA, Bajor, Qo'nos etc.
Even though I don't play fed side that much I can agree with your view. I think it has to do a lot with it being a game and the parameters of how cryptic started off with CO and what they have to work with so far.
Although they did do a lot of work on it in the past year and a half since PWE got into the picture where it looks less cartoonish than it once was. To me though there needs to be some parameters with costumes and such is one aspect of it you have NPC's who are wearing what us in the military call a uniform code. When I do go to ESD on my feds there are small things that could be touched up on i notice like the walls, non starfleet things like weapons near the tailor, consumable, and commodity vendors. The other thing is I understand Cryptic needs to make money and costumes are one part of it but there needs to be some kind of structure when it comes to uniforms. For instance the maco looks more like a plastic type uniform and ironic that technically with the helmets they should have an EV system built into them (KDF/Omega ones too). Overall though its mostly the fed side where you have all these different uniforms to the point where it makes it feel like its not anything related to star trek.
The other angle of this is that qo'nos looks really nice where as ESD as noted needs to be up to par. The other side of the token is the federation has a lot of costumes and you can find atleast 1-5 different uniforms to your liking in most cases but is a problem with the KDF ones is they are broken and that the STF ones look a lot better, we don't have a special one like fed side has for ambassadors, and the last issue to me is that you have a lot of fed costumes that you could recognize as something someone between the rank of captain to someone who is in a position of power such as officers right under the person in charge like quinn.
Overall though if this game had a profession system or a category of uniform types for categorized instances it would improve the immersion. Just an example of something that really irritates someone who is wanting the game to give them the immersion is say you are on defera killing borg and rolling around in the mud just socking it to the borg and then Miss Universe struts by with a mini gun in her evening gown just getting adapted by the borg and tearing up that gown trying to remodulate it totally ruins the immersion and then all these things talked about the textures to the uniforms are noticed and it just starts ruining the fun.
However, many of your cited examples I really believe you have to be going out of your way to find, and that the average person running through the game won't notice. Some of them, I can't even tell what you're pointing to when the images are side by side.
Well, like you I "push pixels" (and sometimes vertexes) everyday as my job, so I can't help but notice. I could explain the differences in each image in more detail, but I didn't want to be that long-winded. It's the big blocky-ness that's been added to some textures that stand out the most.
While most people might not notice the little differences, it should still not be acceptable practice to have any texture degraded. Especially when they are just on the edge of acceptable as is.
But I'm the protectionist sort and spent most of my career looking at computer graphics and optimizing them etc. So I'm likely one of the few that will ever take notice.
I wasn't disagreeing with you about how some of the textures are slightly worse. What I'm saying is that even if they were to reverse some of the changes, the textures would still look horrible. Especially now with the contrast to the floor. It wouldn't be enough for them to just reverse them. They need to be ripped out and rebuilt from scratch, preferably the entire interior itself.
But the first priority should be ESD. It's what gives new players the first impression of the game and primary hub for a lot of fed players. It doesn't even look like very Starfleet. It just needs to be brought up to the same standard as the fleet starbases, embasies, SFA, Bajor, Qo'nos etc.
Haha, fair enough. I mistook your meaning then. I agree with you.
I could go around and pick this texture or that texture, looking at it and dissecting it like I would do by standing in front of a piece of art. However, 99% of the people will just run through these hallways from point A to B and the quality of these textures will suit perfectly this purpose...
I would love the game World to look like it's HD movie quality, but I think my video card, while pretty descant, will melt if i beam into ESD or DS9
Good job Taco and team for making the game look good with the assets available...
I've done similar explanations before, but really, we don't think about it unless it's something like this giant update. So if there's something you WANT to know about, just ask. If we can tell you without revealing company secrets, we'll usually do so.
As soon as I think of something to ask. I'm generally quite pleased with the job you guys are doing in the graphics office these days. But I always like to get shown what's under the hood just for the sake of getting shown what's under the hood.
The screenshots below were taken on May 13, 2013, after the patch to Tribble.
1. The winter jacket looks slightly worse after the texture changes. The difference is most noticeable on the lower edge of the lapel and the second buckle from the top on the left (right-hand side of the character).
I usually run with low graphics settings. The specifics are provided in the following tickets:
ticket ID #41,044
ticket ID #41,091
I've taken some closer screenshots from the tailor. The screenshots below were taken on May 14, 2013, between 9am and 10am PST. Compared to the Holodeck image, the Tribble image is blurry near the bottom edge of the lapel and the buckles.
Any way to extract these new textures into a readable/editable format? Previously, .wtex textures were just regular .dds files with some custom header, now it seems they've migrated to a new format (.crn perhaps?) with a new header...
There is no problem in the galaxy that cannot be solved with sufficient application of firepower.
Each texture's mipmaps are automatically generated when we convert our photoshop files into something the game can understand. When we do this conversion, it's called 'Processing a Texture.' When Zer0 says we 'Updated every texture everywhere' what she means, is that we REPROCESSED every texture everywhere. It does not mean that we repainted everything by hand. We simply reprocessed them with some different configurations, to yield a different result.
Mip Sharpening
This is probably the most noticeable of our 4 reprocessing techniques. If you look back at our MipChain, those smaller Mips tend to get blurry, and lose data as they get shrunk. So, much like a photoshop sharpen filter, we sharpen up those mips a bit, to make them pop out more at a distance, and look better on lower end systems. This sharpening does not happen to the full texture, only the mips the lower mips. Now, there are some textures that look worse with this sharpening, and those textures can be unsharpened on a case by case basis (and many already have), but overall, we believe the sharpening has drastically improved the look of the game, both at a distance, and on low end systems.
If I understood you correctly, each texture has a full-size, unprocessed image that is reduced to mips of various sizes. The smaller mips were sharpened, but not the larger mips. I have a question about how the sharpen filtered was applied. I can think of two possibilities:
1. The sharpen filter was applied directly to the mips themselves.
2. The original image was sharpened and then re-reduced to create new mips.
Which method was used? Is it possible that method 2 might produce better results than method 1?
The mips themselves get sharpened. The original image remains untouched.
Would quality be improved by creating a sharpened version of the original image and then shrinking that to create smaller sized mips? Or is that unfeasible or undesirable for some reason?
Here is another texture that looks worse; this one is quite easy to see. The screenshot below shows that one of the textures for the mural in Quark's bar has wavy lines.
What graphics card and drivers are you running? I saw that with an nvidia 460 and updating to the 320.00 drivers cleared it up.
So I updated to the most recent version 320.14
Flickering on tribble seems to be gone, however on holodeck weapon effects are just magically disappearing now in heavy combat. Kinda the bug that has been around since beta which lets Eject Warp Plasma/Thetha and Gravity well keeps dissapearing.
I've been enjoying these new textures on Tribble for a while but never noticed this thread. Again, an excellent explanation Tacofangs, thanks.
"Rise like Lions after slumber, In unvanquishable number, Shake your chains to earth like dew, Which in sleep had fallen on you-Ye are many they are few"
Firstly, your explanation is much appreciated, as well as your hard work. However, please allow me to interject my concerns in using these new mipmaps: Memory. Some of the players playing STO may not have the memory required for using a vast set of mipmaps. Generally speaking a mipmap uses a third more memory than your older textures (explanation to everyone else: notice how much larger the mipmap is -- this has to load into memory before it can be processed by the video card!).
I do not doubt your intentions, but I am concerned for those that were riding the line of memory requirements before this patch (like my daughter's laptop).
Can you assure us that the system requirements have not changed as of this improvement or is there a way to entirely turn mipmapping off? I do hope my fears are not true: were sacrifices to other aesthetics made to reduce memory load?
Said NO to Arc. Gets punished by not being given a free outfit, free lobi, and free shuttle. Now forced to use Arc's site when trying to get to STO site. Still not rewards for beta testing the Arc website by force. Bravo Cryptic.
so in light of all this have you fixed the warp plasma graphic????
I hope so, but I very much doubt it. They have been putting this particular issue under the carpet since the game was in beta stage, they never ever fixed it.
Its not even particularly Eject Warp Plasma which is the issue, its a core issue in the game's engine. It happens to EWP/Theta the most, but its definately not limtied to that.
It happens on Tykens rift, Gravity well, Tricobalt rift effect, even to Weapons on occasion.
It seems to be either a limitation or an artificial limitation set by the game so people's PC wouldn't lag too badly with all these effects going on simultaneously. I can only conclude that because it happens to EWP more often because it has alot more individual graphic effects displayed at once then with lets say gravity well.
I have very little doubt that this texture update will have nothing to do with fixing this particular issue, they did say that the textures, UI etc are alot less resource heavy now and perhaps the problem will fix on its own, but i very much doubt that.
I do hope my fears are not true: were sacrifices to other aesthetics made to reduce memory load?
I am pretty sure your fears are justified, because if you have been around in Season 4 you know what they did to the game graphics/visual wise. They totally dumbed down all of ESD's interiors with street signs and what not, they totally ruined the visuals all in the good name of 'Reducing load on systems for all the newcomers to this game for the preperation of Free2Play'
in other words they are dumbing down the game's graphics to work with all those chinese farmers with their old 486 PC's. The answer you should be asking yourself is, why the hell do we have graphics options and graphics sliders so you can manually tone down the graphics if the game runs too slow on a particular PC?
Why ruin it for everyone?
I remember how they nerfed the Icecube grenade where some people where so called complaining about how it lagged their whole PC up, and they were right. The thing did lag your PC up, AT HIGH QUALITY GRAPHICS.
I've done some experimenting myself and it only took one option (Lightning or shadows i cant remember it was either one of them) and all lag issues with this particular item were gone.
Firstly, your explanation is much appreciated, as well as your hard work. However, please allow me to interject my concerns in using these new mipmaps: Memory. Some of the players playing STO may not have the memory required for using a vast set of mipmaps. Generally speaking a mipmap uses a third more memory than your older textures (explanation to everyone else: notice how much larger the mipmap is -- this has to load into memory before it can be processed by the video card!).
I do not doubt your intentions, but I am concerned for those that were riding the line of memory requirements before this patch (like my daughter's laptop).
Can you assure us that the system requirements have not changed as of this improvement or is there a way to entirely turn mipmapping off? I do hope my fears are not true: were sacrifices to other aesthetics made to reduce memory load?
You seem to misunderstand what happened here. The game (and ALL modern games) has ALWAYS used MipMaps. This has not changed. What has changed is how we handle them, through sharpening, splitting, reversing, etc. If anything, this has reduced your texture memory, not increased it, especially on lower end machines, like laptops.
so in light of all this have you fixed the warp plasma graphic????
I don't know what this issue is, but unless it was caused by a badly processed texture, this update will not have done anything to it. Can you elaborate?
Comments
I think the main point here, is that DS9 is in dire need of updated (higher quality) textures.
1. The winter jacket looks slightly worse after the texture changes. The difference is most noticeable on the lower edge of the lapel and the second buckle from the top on the left (right-hand side of the character).
Holodeck:
http://i.imgur.com/rmxrgQq.png
Tribble:
http://i.imgur.com/8ts43p1.png
2. The Romulan shuttle on New Romulus looks slightly worse after the texture changes.
Holodeck (Lighting quality: Low)
http://i.imgur.com/PVtmokG.jpg
Tribble (Lighting quality: Low)
http://i.imgur.com/cC6kSKq.jpg
Holodeck (Lighting quality: High)
http://i.imgur.com/fe2dL5R.jpg
Tribble (Lighting quality: High)
http://i.imgur.com/w15KX9Z.jpg
I usually run with low graphics settings. The specifics are provided in the following tickets:
ticket ID #41,044
ticket ID #41,091
I wasn't disagreeing with you about how some of the textures are slightly worse. What I'm saying is that even if they were to reverse some of the changes, the textures would still look horrible. Especially now with the contrast to the floor. It wouldn't be enough for them to just reverse them. They need to be ripped out and rebuilt from scratch, preferably the entire interior itself.
But the first priority should be ESD. It's what gives new players the first impression of the game and primary hub for a lot of fed players. It doesn't even look like very Starfleet. It just needs to be brought up to the same standard as the fleet starbases, embasies, SFA, Bajor, Qo'nos etc.
Even though I don't play fed side that much I can agree with your view. I think it has to do a lot with it being a game and the parameters of how cryptic started off with CO and what they have to work with so far.
Although they did do a lot of work on it in the past year and a half since PWE got into the picture where it looks less cartoonish than it once was. To me though there needs to be some parameters with costumes and such is one aspect of it you have NPC's who are wearing what us in the military call a uniform code. When I do go to ESD on my feds there are small things that could be touched up on i notice like the walls, non starfleet things like weapons near the tailor, consumable, and commodity vendors. The other thing is I understand Cryptic needs to make money and costumes are one part of it but there needs to be some kind of structure when it comes to uniforms. For instance the maco looks more like a plastic type uniform and ironic that technically with the helmets they should have an EV system built into them (KDF/Omega ones too). Overall though its mostly the fed side where you have all these different uniforms to the point where it makes it feel like its not anything related to star trek.
The other angle of this is that qo'nos looks really nice where as ESD as noted needs to be up to par. The other side of the token is the federation has a lot of costumes and you can find atleast 1-5 different uniforms to your liking in most cases but is a problem with the KDF ones is they are broken and that the STF ones look a lot better, we don't have a special one like fed side has for ambassadors, and the last issue to me is that you have a lot of fed costumes that you could recognize as something someone between the rank of captain to someone who is in a position of power such as officers right under the person in charge like quinn.
Overall though if this game had a profession system or a category of uniform types for categorized instances it would improve the immersion. Just an example of something that really irritates someone who is wanting the game to give them the immersion is say you are on defera killing borg and rolling around in the mud just socking it to the borg and then Miss Universe struts by with a mini gun in her evening gown just getting adapted by the borg and tearing up that gown trying to remodulate it totally ruins the immersion and then all these things talked about the textures to the uniforms are noticed and it just starts ruining the fun.
Well, like you I "push pixels" (and sometimes vertexes) everyday as my job, so I can't help but notice. I could explain the differences in each image in more detail, but I didn't want to be that long-winded. It's the big blocky-ness that's been added to some textures that stand out the most.
While most people might not notice the little differences, it should still not be acceptable practice to have any texture degraded. Especially when they are just on the edge of acceptable as is.
But I'm the protectionist sort and spent most of my career looking at computer graphics and optimizing them etc. So I'm likely one of the few that will ever take notice.
Thanks for replying to my post, though.
Haha, fair enough. I mistook your meaning then. I agree with you.
I would love the game World to look like it's HD movie quality, but I think my video card, while pretty descant, will melt if i beam into ESD or DS9
Good job Taco and team for making the game look good with the assets available...
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As soon as I think of something to ask. I'm generally quite pleased with the job you guys are doing in the graphics office these days. But I always like to get shown what's under the hood just for the sake of getting shown what's under the hood.
I've taken some closer screenshots from the tailor. The screenshots below were taken on May 14, 2013, between 9am and 10am PST. Compared to the Holodeck image, the Tribble image is blurry near the bottom edge of the lapel and the buckles.
Holodeck:
http://i.imgur.com/WDoIujy.jpg
Tribble:
http://i.imgur.com/TVYPu76.jpg
ticket ID #41,181
My character Tsin'xing
I upgraded my graphics driver too no help
If I understood you correctly, each texture has a full-size, unprocessed image that is reduced to mips of various sizes. The smaller mips were sharpened, but not the larger mips. I have a question about how the sharpen filtered was applied. I can think of two possibilities:
1. The sharpen filter was applied directly to the mips themselves.
2. The original image was sharpened and then re-reduced to create new mips.
Which method was used? Is it possible that method 2 might produce better results than method 1?
What graphics card and drivers are you running? I saw that with an nvidia 460 and updating to the 320.00 drivers cleared it up.
Would quality be improved by creating a sharpened version of the original image and then shrinking that to create smaller sized mips? Or is that unfeasible or undesirable for some reason?
Sharpened mips frighten me.
Master using it and you can have this!
Be black on the right side. Add properly colored Cheron to the game today!
I have the exact same problems. Nvidia GTX 670 here.
Not only faces are flickering black, Earth and some ship parts flicker as well.
314.22 driver. Ill try updating if there is a new version.
(Note, using Direct3D11)
I have the same card, I updated to the Beta drivers, seems to be working with no more Blackface :eek:
http://i.imgur.com/YoACBd7.jpg
ticket ID #41,720
So I updated to the most recent version 320.14
Flickering on tribble seems to be gone, however on holodeck weapon effects are just magically disappearing now in heavy combat. Kinda the bug that has been around since beta which lets Eject Warp Plasma/Thetha and Gravity well keeps dissapearing.
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Nothing to do anymore.
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Firstly, your explanation is much appreciated, as well as your hard work. However, please allow me to interject my concerns in using these new mipmaps: Memory. Some of the players playing STO may not have the memory required for using a vast set of mipmaps. Generally speaking a mipmap uses a third more memory than your older textures (explanation to everyone else: notice how much larger the mipmap is -- this has to load into memory before it can be processed by the video card!).
I do not doubt your intentions, but I am concerned for those that were riding the line of memory requirements before this patch (like my daughter's laptop).
Can you assure us that the system requirements have not changed as of this improvement or is there a way to entirely turn mipmapping off? I do hope my fears are not true: were sacrifices to other aesthetics made to reduce memory load?
I hope so, but I very much doubt it. They have been putting this particular issue under the carpet since the game was in beta stage, they never ever fixed it.
Its not even particularly Eject Warp Plasma which is the issue, its a core issue in the game's engine. It happens to EWP/Theta the most, but its definately not limtied to that.
It happens on Tykens rift, Gravity well, Tricobalt rift effect, even to Weapons on occasion.
It seems to be either a limitation or an artificial limitation set by the game so people's PC wouldn't lag too badly with all these effects going on simultaneously. I can only conclude that because it happens to EWP more often because it has alot more individual graphic effects displayed at once then with lets say gravity well.
I have very little doubt that this texture update will have nothing to do with fixing this particular issue, they did say that the textures, UI etc are alot less resource heavy now and perhaps the problem will fix on its own, but i very much doubt that.
I am pretty sure your fears are justified, because if you have been around in Season 4 you know what they did to the game graphics/visual wise. They totally dumbed down all of ESD's interiors with street signs and what not, they totally ruined the visuals all in the good name of 'Reducing load on systems for all the newcomers to this game for the preperation of Free2Play'
in other words they are dumbing down the game's graphics to work with all those chinese farmers with their old 486 PC's. The answer you should be asking yourself is, why the hell do we have graphics options and graphics sliders so you can manually tone down the graphics if the game runs too slow on a particular PC?
Why ruin it for everyone?
I remember how they nerfed the Icecube grenade where some people where so called complaining about how it lagged their whole PC up, and they were right. The thing did lag your PC up, AT HIGH QUALITY GRAPHICS.
I've done some experimenting myself and it only took one option (Lightning or shadows i cant remember it was either one of them) and all lag issues with this particular item were gone.
What can I say, gg.
You seem to misunderstand what happened here. The game (and ALL modern games) has ALWAYS used MipMaps. This has not changed. What has changed is how we handle them, through sharpening, splitting, reversing, etc. If anything, this has reduced your texture memory, not increased it, especially on lower end machines, like laptops.
I don't know what this issue is, but unless it was caused by a badly processed texture, this update will not have done anything to it. Can you elaborate?