Angs on 11/10/2012 at 08:16
Quote Posted by nicked
In most real levels that texture's used for floor or trim though. I think most authors are aware of what brick textures look unstable or unrealistic.
Good point, didn't even think about that. Still applies to blustn (which LarryG explicitly said is a stone wall) in a few places.
Beleg Cúthalion on 11/10/2012 at 10:54
Does anyone think it's possible at all to change the textures without touching the architecture? The issue of low-res blur being better for a dirty look and the player's imagination has been mentioned, but what about high-res textures making the bulky architecture painfully obvious? At least that's what I thought of when looking at both Gecko's and vurt's projects.
Nameless Voice on 11/10/2012 at 12:19
Some awesome blustn textures there!
I think Xorax's is the best straight-up replacement, since it aligns to the existing brick structure perfectly, but the colour tone on it is a little off. Larry's colours match better, but the different bricking style (especially how many of the bricks are piled on top of each other without any real interleave) is a large departure from the original.
Herein lies one of the problems with a terrain texture upgrade pack: it's easy to get similar textures to the originals, but to make a perfect drop-in replacement, you really need to draw them by hand from scratch using the originals as a base, and that's a lot of work.
With object textures, it's generally not as important to perfectly match the original, since it will most likely come with a new object model, and the test of accuracy then is how much the entire model resembles the old, not how closely the specific texture matches.
With terrain textures, it becomes more complicated, because you don't know how the terrain textures were used in different FMs. For example, with a brick texture, someone might have carefully lined up the terrain that uses the texture so that a surface ends with the edge of a brick in the texture, and changing the size/shape of the bricks will destroy that careful detail.
Another example would be a hole cut into a brick wall, using air brushes to remove individual bricks to align with the texture. If the position of the bricks changes, then the "missing brick" air brushes will be misaligned.
I'm not trying to dismiss Larry's work - those textures are great - but I'm asking if they'd really work as a drop-in replacement, because of the above issues, or if they'd be better suited for a nice blue stone texture family for FM authors?
LarryG on 11/10/2012 at 13:21
You are asking the right questions. Those questions are the same ones that make me unhappy with what I have done so far.
Weasel on 11/10/2012 at 14:09
This one doesn't have the prominent shadows and highlights of the original. It looks more flat.
Gecko on 11/10/2012 at 15:00
Yeah, i know it´is not perfect :) i thought it fits on this thread...
LarryG on 11/10/2012 at 16:38
I'm thinking of starting a new thread for a sign-in sheet. The first post would be a list of all the textures in T2 by family and as people posted that they were working on a canonical replacement, I would update that first post to show what was being worked on and by whom. Then when people posted the results, based on the response to it, I would mark that it was "approved". They could then post a link to the real thing and I would assemble them all into family packs and post the each family as completed. Does that sound reasonable?
But for this to work, there needs to be standards. Say all files must be PNG and be 512x512 for the square textures and 256x512 for the rectangular ones? Do we really need higher resolution?
What do you think?
R Soul on 11/10/2012 at 17:20
Quote Posted by LarryG
Say all files must be PNG and be 512x512 for the square textures and 256x512 for the rectangular ones? Do we really need higher resolution?
What do you think?
I think it's important to strive for a consistent resolution across surfaces. If the blue stone texture, which is currently 128x128, is remade at 512x512, the 4 blocks
(that EmperorSteele posted) should only be 256x256. An alternative would be to make it 512x512 but with 16 blocks instead of 4. The problem then is that it might not be a drop-in replacement because specific features, such as a slight misalignment, will not repeat as frequently.
One of the other things that bugs me about making drop-in replacements is the issue of repetition. If an original texture was a small picture of some bricks with a crack, a high-res replacement could make the crack's repetition stand out like a sore thumb. I think it's better to focus on making new textures. They can have the same style as stock textures but without the need for the creator to spend hours making sure all the gaps are perfect.