RE: [GD-Consoles] Textures vs. Polygons

[Alistair M. <kr...@kr...>]

That's huge!  We're normally using a single 512x256 texture for our main
characters, which can sometimes take up to 50% of screen space when you get
in close, and they still look magnificent.  Lighting has a lot to do with
it, adding subtlety and tint where none exists, and the fact that we're on
PS2 displaying through a TV helps a lot too!  On some of the more
"background" filler textures, we were surprised that 4-bit palettised
textures with dithering still looked really nice with a good quantisation
algorithm and judicious use of lighting.

The image-splitting trick you mentioned in a previous email also looks
great, but we haven't used it in-game yet.  If you reduce the colour map to
25% (1/16 area, that is), then use 2 bits per pixel for the detail map, you
can get it down to 4 bits per pixel, which is nice.  You could even reduce
that further by palettising the colour map, but that can start looking
messy.  The really neat thing about this method is that you can get
continuous level of detail by controlling the alpha value when
multiplying-in the detail map.  Fade out the alpha for further-away objects,
and you have a visually seamless cut-off point where you don't need the
detail any more.

Alistair Milne
Dogfish Entertainment Ltd



> -----Original Message-----
> From: gam...@li...
> [mailto:gam...@li...]On Behalf Of
> Tom Forsyth
> Sent: 21 November 2001 12:08
> To: R & D (GameBrains); gam...@li...
> Subject: RE: [GD-Consoles] Textures vs. Polygons
>
>
> There is no typical size! We've tended to use 512x512 for a whole
> person in
> the past, but that was for StarTopia, which is very RTS-like in its
> viewpoint - you're high up, and there's lots of small people
> running around
> on the screen. For Blade2 we have something like eight 256x256 textures to
> cover the main character - Blade, but that's for a console title,
> where you
> just don't have enough pixels on the screen to see any higher
> detail. For a
> PC version, we'd probably upsample a few of those, because people
> will want
> to run at 10x7.
>
> Tom Forsyth - Muckyfoot bloke.
>