Curse

deadman_uk · Nov 17, 2007, 06:12 PM // 18:12

I posted this thread http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...php?t=10197614 a few months ago and it had lots of good replies.

For those who can't be bothered to read, basically when you are in outposts and towns (including Guild Halls), everyone's armor is blurry and low detailed expect your own. However in explorable areas, everyones armor is shown in high detail. Since this has not been implemented into Guild Wars, I was wondering if someone knew how to force high detailed armors in all areas so people like me with a good computer could view people the way they should look.

Here is an example of my paragon in an outpost and again in an explorable area .My friend took these pictures with the printscreen button, saved them as high quality JPEG's in Adobe Photoshop and sent them to me. No quality has been lost during compression, they are basically bitmap files but smaller in filesize.

Can a mod be made? Is it possible?

IlikeGW · Dec 06, 2007, 06:53 PM // 18:53

It's probably not possible. Maybe... if you deleted the mip maps of a texture... but I don't even know if that works, and if it does, how would you run a gig of revised textures through texmod it would probably just crash

T. Drake · Dec 06, 2007, 08:45 PM // 20:45

They did it for performance reasons, however the game is three years old now and new pcs can handle GW on the highest settings easily.

Maybe they could add an option to the graphics menu which can disable the texture compression?

I know it's the wrong place to ask but I'd like to see other characters in better quality and I certainly don't like to mod GW to achieve this.

Prowlinger · Dec 06, 2007, 08:47 PM // 20:47

It looks like it is a core engine element...

GW towns all default to low res armor except for the clients' own armor...

Why? At the time when GW was released... the servers and client computers
probably would tank and crash if it was unlocked to allow high rez armor visible all the time...

Now days, computers are very powerful and would not see why we couldn't
toggle this option in VIDEO settings to allow clients that wanted to see
high res who do have powerhouse computers... to do so...

I hate only seeing low res armors... if I could see high res ones I might be
tempted to play more and get that cool armor without all the guessing!

So I do not think a mod would correct this unless it was a simple toggle option in a binary file... and then it probably would take a DLL to do it
which then violates the security of GW...

We can wish for such option but I think GW1 is pretty much done for
cool wants that the community wishes for...

(Or what T.Drake said

)

sykoone · Dec 06, 2007, 10:41 PM // 22:41

The problem is the output texture generated by the client. It produces a lower quality version of the texture while in town, and the higher quality in zones. I've attempted this using a guildie as a guinea pig. The only way I've found to update it is to manually change everyone's textures individually.

The Meth · Dec 06, 2007, 11:03 PM // 23:03

Its probably possible if you went through EVERY armor piece texture in the game, copied it with texmod and forced it in place of low res textures, but that would probably be a few hundred megabytes at least. I'm gonna also guess that trying to get texmod to override that many textures is going to cause a severe performance hit above and beyond the mess created by the huge amount of high res textures. And if you did do this putting up the entire collection of armor textures on the internet is probably going to get you into trouble with Anet since you are copying a very significant portion of their artistic work.

On the other hand if there was a different program that didn't need to extract the textures before hand and then redirect the low res textures to use the high res, instead on-the-fly swapping the low res textures in game that could probably work. No-one has made such a program afaik so you are going to have to do this yourself.

imho Anet should make it a feature of the standard game, I imagine the only difference between outside areas and city areas is that the city areas have a specific piece of code that forces low res textures, and adding something to control that wouldn't be too hard.

EDIT: Just tried a test with my armor. Looks like texmod can't do it. As far as I can tell with texmod it looks like that there is only 1 high res texture and that low res are just loaded differently depending on the settings.

IlikeGW · Dec 06, 2007, 11:15 PM // 23:15

yeah they could just throw in a LOD type thing too that renders the 10-15 armors closest to you in high res but leaves distant ones lower (you can't tell anyway that's the beauty of level of detail systems)... there's a lot of ways but I don't think it's on their to do list and probably isn't going to happen mod wise without some new tool and new way of replacing the textures

The Meth · Dec 07, 2007, 12:20 AM // 00:20

Quote:

Originally Posted by IlikeGW

yeah they could just throw in a LOD type thing too that renders the 10-15 armors closest to you in high res but leaves distant ones lower (you can't tell anyway that's the beauty of level of detail systems)... there's a lot of ways but I don't think it's on their to do list and probably isn't going to happen mod wise without some new tool and new way of replacing the textures

The thing is though making an LOD option would probably take a lot of time coding, just making a toggle that turns off the forcing of low res textures in town would probably be an order of magnitude easier to implement. Anything that takes too much effort to cook up is probably going to get the "Were working on GW2 now, sorry" excuse.

deadman_uk · Dec 07, 2007, 06:07 AM // 06:07

I actually emailed Anet about this and they replied too... about 3 months ago. They said my suggestion will be passed on to the development team and to post my idea on the GW fan forums like Guildwars Guru. Whether the person was seriously sending my suggestion to the development team or just trying to shut me up... I do not know.

I suggest anyone who likes this idea, to email Anet about this, the more people ask, the more Anet will take notice. If they receive just one email... that's as good as no email at all.

icedwhitemocha · Dec 07, 2007, 06:43 AM // 06:43

Needs more Kuntz tbh

deadman_uk · Dec 08, 2007, 06:31 AM // 06:31

Quote:

Originally Posted by icedwhitemocha

Needs more Kuntz tbh

What do you mean by this?

TheLordOfBlah · Dec 08, 2007, 07:40 AM // 07:40

i think he made some uber pro mods or something

icedwhitemocha · Dec 08, 2007, 10:12 AM // 10:12

Quote:

Originally Posted by deadman_uk

What do you mean by this?

Pretty sure he knows more about the mechanics of the GW client than the vast majority of Anet; he was the first to experiment with modding the client.

Brett Kuntz · Dec 08, 2007, 09:16 PM // 21:16

I can look into this, should be pretty easy.

Snograt · Dec 08, 2007, 09:49 PM // 21:49

Wow, you're still with us

Brett Kuntz · Dec 08, 2007, 09:59 PM // 21:59

Since the game already contains the code to create the larger, more detailed textures for your own character, all I'm looking to do is hack the game into thinking every character is your character.

I'm going to a movie, but I'll probably have lots of time tonight to get this working. I'll probably package it into ksmod with an options.ini file, and some other graphics hacks to improve or change performance.

Josh · Dec 08, 2007, 10:03 PM // 22:03

Quote:

Originally Posted by kunt0r

Since the game already contains the code to create the larger, more detailed textures for your own character, all I'm looking to do is hack the game into thinking every character is your character.

I'm going to a movie, but I'll probably have lots of time tonight to get this working. I'll probably package it into ksmod with an options.ini file, and some other graphics hacks to improve or change performance.

Nice one, looking forward to this.

Cheers.

Brett Kuntz · Dec 09, 2007, 03:33 AM // 03:33

Well I tried for about 3 hours, but I wasn't able to complete it. What I found out was what I pretty much already knew:

-CreateTexture is called at a smaller resolution, mip mapped
-All levels of Texture are locked and low resolution images are loaded from file and copied onto the surfaces

Which is where I ran into problems. I found the whole copy proc, it's pretty straight forward, but everything I modded ended up in quite possibly the most disturbing rendering I've ever seen from a game. It was too difficult to backtrack from there to find the other code set that loads your own armour/Textures at a higher resolution. It'd probably take less time just bugging Anet into adding the option, couldn't take that long.

deadman_uk · Dec 09, 2007, 04:25 AM // 04:25

Well I know that your own armor texture is displayed at high detail (if you have it set in options) and everyone elses is at medium detail in outposts.

I suggest we all bug Anet http://www.guildwars.com/support/ I have sent 2 emails just now... one to UK support and one to USA support. Thanks for trying Kunt0r! Is it possible to get Sir Jim's help and have another go?

dont feel no pain · Dec 09, 2007, 11:25 PM // 23:25

Im not very smart them with comes to this but good luck all this would be SWEET!