Curse

X of Thulcandra · Jun 20, 2006, 06:46 AM // 06:46

This may be an echo of an earlier post(s), but I was wondering: Why do some fissure armors (especially Warrior) have to look so crappy in Towns? It may just be me, but some armors look decent, while the warrior variant looks like something out of WOLF3D. Could the outpost textures possibly be made a little clearer?

shardfenix · Jun 20, 2006, 07:04 AM // 07:04

While in town, you view the low res version of everyone's armor except your own. Only in explorable and battle areas can you see the high res armor of other people. It's to make sure you dont lag like a biyoch from the hundreds of people in towns.

Kaguya · Jun 20, 2006, 07:15 AM // 07:15

Why can't they add an option to make all armors high res in towns tho?

Make it disabled default, but those with larger numbercrushers for computers could enable it for extra eye candy.

Lexar · Jun 20, 2006, 10:27 AM // 10:27

Some armors look better in low res than others. Warrior fissure looks especially blurred though, and they should fix it to maybe be as sharp as the factions armors are in outposts. Those look pretty sharp.

Lady Lozza · Jun 20, 2006, 11:21 AM // 11:21

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kaguya

Why can't they add an option to make all armors high res in towns tho?

Make it disabled default, but those with larger numbercrushers for computers could enable it for extra eye candy.

I don't know how it works honestly, however it COULD be that high res in towns would have the poential to create serious lag. It depends on how much the server is responsible for already and whether the high res images have to be parsed back and forward between server/client.

RTSFirebat · Jun 20, 2006, 11:28 AM // 11:28

Personally I would perfer if they simply gave us the option to toggle high-res textures in town or not.

Because I know for a fact my PC could handle it.

Kaguya · Jun 20, 2006, 12:05 PM // 12:05

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lady Lozza

I don't know how it works honestly, however it COULD be that high res in towns would have the poential to create serious lag. It depends on how much the server is responsible for already and whether the high res images have to be parsed back and forward between server/client.

--- Slightly offtopic, technical blaablaa, etc etc, don't have to read unless you really want to! ---

No, the server doesn't send the textures to the players, except once when you download (or not if you installed from CDs and got the files that way).

All the server needs to send to the player is info what armor the player is wearing, and what dye mix is applied to it. I'd say it's around 15 or 16 values each player (5 armor, 5 armor dye, char height, face, skin color, hair, hair color, profession), based on which the client slaps together on the player model, and renders at low resolution to reduce client side lag in order to retain FPS in outposts with 30+ people close to eachother in a single instance for everyone, no matter what computers they have, or what detail settings they have applied themselves.

Transmitting the actual textures of players every single time with every single possible dye mix would be a massive waste of resources (the server would have to store all armor skins, and every possible dye mix to them), and the player texture stored on the client would be as useless. (You can test this by deleting the dat file, and installing 'again', when you first log in, your charas won't have any textures on them, until they are streamed to client. After this, the player skins are visible right away.)

Pure speculation, but transmitting the textures from the server would be insane, and even a half-assed programmer should be able to realize that. And I do believe that ANet has rather professional programmers there.

The method has been used for ages, for example, Doom, where players could pick a color, the sprite has special colors to their palettes, that can be changed with any color. Same way on every other game, the textures contain either an alpha channel, or special colors that the game calculates differently and recolors if needed.

Lady Lozza · Jun 20, 2006, 03:19 PM // 15:19

Kaguya, with all due respect, I am well aware of how it works. Yes presumably the server does not have to handle these things, but the implementation of it could be more complicated than we might expect.

One would HOPE that isn't the case, but I -for one- am not familiar with the system they are using - given that I can run the game ok on less than a 28k connection I would conclude that texture parsing (for armour or anything else) is NOT happening. Like I said, it COULD be that it MIGHT create lag issues. If that is not the case then I agree they should allow us to toggle the res in towns.

Kaguya · Jun 20, 2006, 03:48 PM // 15:48

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lady Lozza

Kaguya, with all due respect, I am well aware of how it works. Yes presumably the server does not have to handle these things, but the implementation of it could be more complicated than we might expect.

One would HOPE that isn't the case, but I -for one- am not familiar with the system they are using - given that I can run the game ok on less than a 28k connection I would conclude that texture parsing (for armour or anything else) is NOT happening. Like I said, it COULD be that it MIGHT create lag issues. If that is not the case then I agree they should allow us to toggle the res in towns.

My post didn't mean any disrespect to anyone, more of a general post on how it most probably works, and ruling out the odd server sending textures, it just isn't a viable way to do it.

All I am saying that the method you described is very, very unviable. It would stress the server too much, create unneeded bandwith usage etc, I was mainly addressing the point that it shouldn't cause any additional network lag whatsoever, so future arguments on that would be null and void.

pork soldier · Jun 20, 2006, 04:28 PM // 16:28

It's a pretty straightforward system from what I can tell - all art assets are local to the player's machine, the server simply sends data about what equipmen each player is wielding and what color it should be. Everything is then rendered locally.

I'm pretty sure low-res textures are used so that large scale events don't lag like crazy, think about how badly lagged you'd be during a halloween scale event 0.o

RTSFirebat · Jun 20, 2006, 04:36 PM // 16:36

Like I said, a High-res toggle would be the best solution, then people can choose if they want to see high-res textures in town or not.

Some of us have PCs which could handle it, some don't.

Zakarr · Jun 20, 2006, 04:50 PM // 16:50

And this doesn't mean that EVERY character on the screen should have high resolution textures. Only those close to you. No one can see details from the distance anyway.

All graphics related stuff is always client side. Server side checks would be completely useless because it is possible to manipulate graphics drivers a way that it renders something differently than application commands. It is invisible process. No server can detect it.

Carinae · Jun 20, 2006, 05:34 PM // 17:34

Here's how it should work:

Yourself and the person you have targeted should be displayed in the highest detail, everyone else should be low res.

Lady Lozza · Jun 21, 2006, 04:10 AM // 04:10

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kaguya

My post didn't mean any disrespect to anyone, more of a general post on how it most probably works, and ruling out the odd server sending textures, it just isn't a viable way to do it.

All I am saying that the method you described is very, very unviable. It would stress the server too much, create unneeded bandwith usage etc, I was mainly addressing the point that it shouldn't cause any additional network lag whatsoever, so future arguments on that would be null and void.

*sigh* I was never suggesting that they were parsing textures, nor even that any online game parses textures. What I was saying is that depending on how the server/system/programming has been done it COULD create lag. How?

Well let's say that Anet has labelled the texture files really descriptively, like they are teaching students to do in class these days, and they are parsing the file name between server/client. These long, descriptive file names require more processing, more space and take longer to send.

However they MIGHT be running the program with lookup tables, and are only parsing integers, which doesn't take the same amount of time to parse as those long descriptive file names. It is then the client's responsibility to use the lookup table and display the images correctly.

These are just simple examples of what they MIGHT be doing. I honestly don't know how the system is setup, I said that in my first post. The first instance may create extra lag if they have labelled the textures texture1/highrestexture1. The second instance will not.

There are a number of things that potential lag depends on and these factors mostly depend how the fields being sent between sever/client have been defined, with a secondary concern being the labelling of the files themselves. It may be a small amount of lag, it may be a large amount of lag, there may be no lag at all. We simply do not know.

If there is no lag involved at all, I do believe that a toggle switch would be a nice addition to the game, for all of us running beefy CPUs and GPUs.

Whiplashr · Jun 21, 2006, 06:41 AM // 06:41

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kaguya

Why can't they add an option to make all armors high res in towns tho?

Make it disabled default, but those with larger numbercrushers for computers could enable it for extra eye candy.

I'd love to have this option, as well as an option to disable the damn LOD'ing.

I HATE IT. I hate when things pop up and change and morph in the distance. I really, really hate it. It breaks immersion for me. And the game runs so fantastic as it is.. it's not like the engine is a big system hog. I'm fairly certain I could run at a respectable frame rate without the LODing.