[Request] Higher quality commander textures

It hasn't been brought up in a while, so I'm officially requesting that higher quality textures be used in PA. Specifically the commanders textures, as he's important and stuff.

I bought the new AceAI commander, and he looks cool in the armoury, but in-game he looks like this:

This is using full graphics settings. I know 90% of the time spent in the game won't be zoomed in this far, but it would be nice for cinematic shots to not have such jagged lines.

I'm hoping for higher resolution, and slightly higher contrast textures for the commanders. It would be cool if the glowy parts could be made a bit more... glowy, too.

something is wrong. upload your dx diag and see if someone will help you.

yeah, even on my low-settings laptop commanders don't look like that...

No, burntcustard is correct. You have to reaaaaaally zoom in quite close using the Debug cam (Ctrl+M). Then you get:

You won't notice it during a normal game. Only when you are casting or trying to make pretty screen shots and zoom in really close, you will notice. At some point the commander textures were reduced to 512x512. I think they were 2048x2048 before? I'm not sure about that, maybe they were 1024x1024.

hmmm, that's odd. Is the same true for all commanders?

Yeah, pretty sure. For instance, Delta:

Odd, I'll take a look after my next lecture, but I don't recall this being the case... Our textures for the orbital warfare mod aren't that pixelated... Well maybe they are, but it's much harder to tell, if that is the case...

Yes, the shipping commander textures are 512x512 now, though we have them at 2048x2048 internally. This was done to reduce the size of the game files and the video memory usage.

Could we get an option to toggle which version we want, for those of us with higher-end PC's?

Very unlikely. Currently the papa files with the textures for all of the commanders takes up 29 MB. Going from 512x512 to 2048x2048 means a 16-fold increase. So doing so would add 440 MB. And on top of that, these are already compressed textures (DXT1), so...

oh nooo... 440 megabytes... To be fair, that would be an issue, perhaps we can allow for 2 different downloads, a high-rez and a low-rez one? Idk, I just kinda want higher rez textures if possible...

AFAIK, there could be a client mod that provides higher res textures if someone is willing to re-do them or ask Uber for the larger files.

There are 1024x1024 papas in the older PA archives. Build 54994 has them for example. Not for all of the current commanders obviously.

imperial_aceal as an example (don't know if it's a particularly big or small commander, haven't checked all of them)

Current size (512x512):
diffuse: 342KB
mask: 171KB
material: 171KB
total: 684KB per commander for textures
x 44 = 30096KB for all commanders textures

Higher quality (2048x2048):
684KB x 16 = 10944KB per commander for high-res textures
x 44 = 481536KB for all commanders high-res textures

The actual size would probably be a bit smaller, but still, a very big difference!

I max out at about 1600MB GPU memory usage when playing 4v4s on the Realm home system, which is a reasonably large system. I really don't think having a few high-res commander textures would make much difference to that.

Upping from 30MB to nearly 500MB for the high quality textures for just the commanders would be worth it in my opinion, but if Uber doesn't want to redistribute all that to everyone, then an extra mod/download to get them would be really nice.

Edit: Didn't realise @DeathByDenim already figured out the sizes, ah well!

Id love upgraded textures. Commanders are supposed to be truely unique units to represent the person who made/bought them.

With textures like this, Its kinda spitting in their owners's faces isnt it? Surely theres a way to use higher resolution images without a performance hit to other PCs.

Read above, 500mb for jus textures, and I'm doubtful you can help It, as normally you'd lower texture res to help optimize the game.

Unfortunately a big hole in our engine is the way it handles textures. All texture are loaded at full resolution all of the time, even if those textures aren't in use. Before we loaded them on demand but it was causing framerate hitches and sometimes long pauses during the game. Our engine also doesn't handle clamping the texture sizes on load, so it's always the highest resolution version. Why haven't we fixed this? Because clamping the texture sizes down was already supported and it meant our engineers could focus on other tasks. Really the only people who notice are those of you who like taking screenshots.

I talked with @jables and he okay'd me releasing the 2048x2048 commander textures (in .papa format) to be used as a mod. It could either be a single large mod that includes all the commanders or broken up into groups. With medium graphics settings and the current textures it uses about 660 MB on my computer, with the 2048x2048 commander textures it uses 1170 MB, so breaking them up might be advisable.

I don't have an ETA as to when I'll get these out.

High-res looks AMAZING! If the engine doesn't get changed to not have every texture loaded all the time, I'll be selling my kidneys so that I can afford some more memories.

That's GPU memory usage numbers btw, so you'd need a new video card.

Looks nice. So we got two of three parts of optics: Graphics will be fine with that change and the style---well, your style has always been great, so the only thing we haven´t talked about is image quality!
First of all you have a little problem on actual displayed texture quality---it´s good that texture quality is adapted if your renderer res is highered, but in my eyes it just looks like the textures @100% ResScale/1xSSAA aren´t as sharp as they could be and the ones you see @175% ResScale/3,0625x SSAA are the ones supposed to be seen regular! (so 175% ResScale/3,0625xSSAA would get even better ones)
http://abload.de/img/ssaaofrpums.png
http://abload.de/img/ssaaon8euya.png (that ice-structure looks pretty epic BTW!)

Just in general: Why is 175% ResScale the maximum to be selected in the menu? 200% would make ways more sense, as 200% is a "normal"/ "regular" Scaling Base! "Custom" (type in a value and game just applys it) would of course be the best solution!

Just another thing dealing with AntiAlaising: Are there any plans to do enhance the ingame-FXAA? It´s not really bad, but I´m sure that higher levels of quality could be easily reached. Go talk with the creators of SMAA for example, I guess that they´d be happy to get a game to try out their most recent inventions!

BTW: Thanks for your work!