[Request] Higher quality commander textures

I wish I had a GTX 980 or whatever is required to play at solid 60FPS @1920x1200 175% scaling w/ FXAA (but 200% would be better ;P )

It's not the extra detail I want, but the smooooooothness of a nicely anti-aliased image. Sure, I would rather just have an 8K monitor where I can't actually see the pixels because they are so small, but until that's possible I want some tech to help me stop seeing tiny squares everywhere.

Also nice image @nick2k , would be cool to see more people post before/after shots of their commanders.

@raevn
That's fair, I removed it just now because someone thought Uber broke something. I left it initially because when it's in sight, it's not out of mind. Plus it's fun to break stuff

Thanks man. I'll do one of the alpha later, if no one gets to it before me.

supersampling looks amazing in my opinion

@trialq So there's no big pack up on PAMM anymore? Also the descriptions on PAMM for the individual commanders say things like "Not recommended for systems with less than", because the description is a bit too long! Maybe get rid of the "to 2048x2048"?

You can still get it from bgolus' original link though.
( https://github.com/bgolus/pa.commandertextures/archive/master.zip )

But other people too lazy I want them to see the fancy commander I bought in HD, not just their own ones ^^

@bgolus Maybe a stupid question ....
But why haven't you used a monolithic texture atlas for the unit textures which used the same virtual texturing approach you have used for the terrain?

Loading textures on demand is off limits for you, I understand that, especially when disk IO and alike can stall your pipeline. But you have no such stalls with the virtual texture - there's always a low res version available and the LRU ensures most efficient use, no matter how many different unit types it should ever need to handle. Unless of course the texture lookup is significantly more expensive, but I somewhat doubt that this makes a difference, considering how complex the shader is in total.


Apart from that: Restored compatibiliy with GPUs with less than 512MB VRAM available....

You described the way virtual textures are used in Rage and Brink, but it's not how they're used in PA. In PA the virtual texture is in memory + all of the terrain textures at full resolution, all of the time. This is because the virtual texture is generated in real time by compositing the terrain textures together. I've discussed this before on the forum someplace so I won't go through the full explanation, but suffice to say making units use the virtual texture in the current system wouldn't save any memory just use more, or use the same amount we already do but make the terrain and units look worse (because they're now sharing the virtual texture).

Also the Rage style of virtual texturing system requires an asynchronous streaming texture system running in the background, which is exactly what we are missing.

I deliberately paid extra for a mac mini with a discreet graphics card. But it only has 256MB of ram (
AMD Radeon HD 6630M 256 MB). I half-suspect it would run better had I just gotten one with an Intel 4000.

The game runs pretty nicely on a 13" mid-2014 retina with intel iris graphics, though.

Well it's hardly going to trend the other way, is it :-D

I think it comes down to if you think you'll make the jump to 4k or not.

No but people don't seem to realize 2 gb cards were stagnant for a LONG period of time (longer than other periods) and we are finally starting to see cards break the norm. I think a lot of it was DDR5 costs.

Adaption rates with video cards are a bit chicken and the egg. Game developers want to sell as many units as possible but also know good graphics is a selling point. They often won't push the envelope to require higher end video cards. On the flip side graphics card manufacturers won't come out with much faster products and milk the market as long as they can until consumers need more power.

@burntcustard
I removed the big pack when the big pack that required all the little packs went up, then took that one down because it broke the internet. If you want the original pack up you just have to flip the switch, it has a different identifier to the other full pack.