Preserving quality when saving .tex's

Hi all,

I'm a bit stuck while trying to convert some tga's to tex format. Here is why.

Here is one of my tga's:



and here it is saved as a tex



I tried with TexResizer and Slimtex in bith DXT1 and DXT5 (Slimtex confuses me with many options which I don't really know which ones to use lol).

Can someone help me please?

Also i still havnt been able to figure out a quick way to convert all my tgas to tex's quickly. With slimtex some of the textures need to be dxt 5 (ie fences + trees etc) but with slimtex I'd have to find these manually in the batch list and change the type to dxt5?

I already went through all the textures manually (600+ :|) and converted them to tex but just some of them seem to be loosing quality as pictured above.

Any Ideas?

Thanks
Wills

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Willb Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Hi all,
>
> I'm a bit stuck while trying to convert some tga's
> to tex format. Here is why.
>
> Here is one of my tga's:
>
> [dl.dropbox.com]
>
> and here it is saved as a tex
>
> [dl.dropbox.com]
>
> I tried with TexResizer and Slimtex in bith DXT1
> and DXT5 (Slimtex confuses me with many options
> which I don't really know which ones to use lol).
>
>
> Can someone help me please?
>
> Also i still havnt been able to figure out a quick
> way to convert all my tgas to tex's quickly. With
> slimtex some of the textures need to be dxt 5 (ie
> fences + trees etc) but with slimtex I'd have to
> find these manually in the batch list and change
> the type to dxt5?
>
> I already went through all the textures manually
> (600+ :|) and converted them to tex but just some
> of them seem to be loosing quality as pictured
> above.
>
> Any Ideas?
>
> Thanks
> Wills


Lee explained a method to fix this problem:
when you have the .tga file in slimtex choose the A8R8G8B8 format instead of the DXT1\5 and set Full Trasparency

this is the thread on RSimsPitstop: [rsimspitstop.forumotion.net]

---

My GPGSL Career

the only downside to that is the much increased size of the files, which inevitable will hit loading times and probably PO

Many thanks guys

@Fongu - Most of the textures look just fine using the normal format, it's seems to be just dime where really fine detail is needed that have the issue so I'll be sure to use this workaround on only the textures that need it

Thanks
Regards Wills

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fongu Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> the only downside to that is the much increased
> size of the files, which inevitable will hit
> loading times and probably PO

doesnt touch loading times on my pc, and the po remains the same as its still drawing the same size texture,its just a different filesize thats all,ive done loads of tests and on my system and it makes no difference what so ever

RaceSimsPitstop
Game Screens



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 07/20/2010 01:32PM by LWC.

Yeah I have that issue too, like tyres, or cockpits and stuff, when I shrink it, it gets a greenish hue to it.

i make all my tyres & car textures using the same format and theyre perfect quality, exactly the same as the psd and it helps when converting back from tex to tga theres no quality loss either way,the only downside is the filesizes are big but tbh doesnt bother me that i have a 600-700 mb cars wad as long as the quality is at its best, especially when you compare a lot of rfactor/gtr etc mods are a couple of gb in size, 600 mb is nothing

RaceSimsPitstop
Game Screens



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 07/20/2010 02:20PM by LWC.

You can also rename your .tga in .tex and it might work.
That's surely the worst thing to do but at least you will keep your texture quality (Not sure game will be playable anymore though due to massive memory hit).

I thought .tex files is made of 4 .tga files, so how it will work when the game will use the 2nd, 3rd and 4th .tga files from the .Tex ?

Mitsuro Sano Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I thought .tex files is made of 4 .tga files, so
> how it will work when the game will use the 2nd,
> 3rd and 4th .tga files from the .Tex ?


I have tried game without 4 mipmaps and it works just fine

Yes, it needs 4 mipmaps...And It is strongly recommended to not rename tga into tex, even for small textures.

@ vesuvius: Yes, it works but you will get high PO peaks. Mipmaps are like "lower lods" for the textures

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Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 07/20/2010 08:52PM by Excalibur.

Tex-format is comprised of 4 DDS-Files within. TGA is just a common format for editing and saving textures, ultimately they are compressed to a more hardware-readable format. For every DirectX this is DDS and GP4 uses the DDS-Files within the Tex-texture format.

Another thing, the uncompressed textures mentioned above are heavier on the hard drive and take longer to load, but they are not bigger in memory ingame. The textures always has to be decompressed during loading ingame, so there is no difference there.

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yes maybe if all the cars example are done with just 1 mipmap but if just one then I didn't notice any PO hit. anyway using the methods mentioned above on this thread, files will look like without any texture loss

i dont think the cars would look right with no mipmaps, each one is used for distances the car is from the main focal point, the further away, the lower the mipmap, if they dont have any then the cars will look too sharp from a long distance and wont look natural, i did lots of tests with other racing games with no mipmaps and imo looks weird

RaceSimsPitstop
Game Screens

I'd go on thin ice here and say, that having no mipmaps wouldn't improve performance either. Think about it this way. You have your model in the distance and the high-res textures are applied to the car only to be discarded in ther rasterizer, due to the low amount of pixels the car actually is rasterized to. This does indeed result in worse results:
1. the rendering algorithm has to work with a lot bigger textures.
2. it heavily depends on the rasterizing algorithm, but having a highres textured applied to the model will probably result in a nearest-neighbour pixel reduction. So you have your texture and the algorithm doesn't interpolate the texture on the small model on screen. The pixels of the texture shown are just random and it may look ok, but most likely it'll be some kind of noise. Still barely noticable, but noticable.

So the algorithm should interpolate the texture that is rasterized on the model. This could happen on the fly and make hit performance pretty hard. Or it is done beforehand, that's what the MipMaps are. There is a point in having them.

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Dahie, I fully agree. Mipmaps are a very useful concept. I make all my textures with the standard 4 mipmaps, apart from the main tarmac texture which I normally make all mipmaps the full resolution version of the texture. I do this because GP4 has a habbit of badly blurring the tarmac which is still very close to you but not direcctly infront (and so it will use mipmap 1 instead of mipmap 0) so you get these hard cutoff lines where you can see blurred tarmac meets sharp tarmac. Having all 4 mimpas use the full res texture minimises this effect for me at least.

Otherwise, MipMaps have quite a positive impact on performance on lower end systems, especailly those with less VRAM.

BTW great discussion of game technologies we have going on here I Like it, carry on :D!

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you can also select how many mipmaps you use from f1graphics.cfg and indeed it had big impact when setting it to 0 and if I did set it higher performance improved a lot.

Willb Schreef:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Dahie, I fully agree. Mipmaps are a very useful
> concept. I make all my textures with the standard
> 4 mipmaps, apart from the main tarmac texture
> which I normally make all mipmaps the full
> resolution version of the texture. I do this
> because GP4 has a habbit of badly blurring the
> tarmac which is still very close to you but not
> direcctly infront (and so it will use mipmap 1
> instead of mipmap 0) so you get these hard cutoff
> lines where you can see blurred tarmac meets sharp
> tarmac. Having all 4 mimpas use the full res
> texture minimises this effect for me at least.


Can you show me how you do that with the tarmac texture regarding mipmaps?

---

My Grand Prix 4 Files
I'm a total dick. How many people can say that?

Sure, simply load the tarmac map Tex in texresizer then right click on the lod 1,2,3 previews then press "Load from Tga" do this for each mipmap and then save your tex

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