Texture Sizes…

You want to have square textures for DDS anyways, so you might as well reduce it to 2048x2048; it’ll be stretched, yes, but it’ll be better than 1024x1024.

You won’t have many people with 4096x4096. Better lose a bit of detail and stick with 2048x2048.

Remember that the engine’s old; there’s a point where a detailed texture won’t matter because the engine can’t show off all the details. This is especially true because the game doesn’t support anisotropic filtering by default, which makes textures look blurry when watched from an angle.

FL scals all textures down to 512x512 as far as i know, so making them larger make no sense.
I sometimes use larger textures like 800x300 as they come with the model, if u can try to keep all textures quadratic.

That’s totally false, sorry. There’s a major difference between 512x512 and 2048x2048 and I don’t even get how you couldn’t see the difference.

Mindhunter wrote:
FL scals all textures down to 512x512 as far as i know, so making them larger make no sense.

False

Mindhunter wrote:
I sometimes use larger textures like 800x300 as they come with the model, if u can try to keep all textures quadratic.

Failure to use square power textures will cause you to have crashes, most of the time they will crash the client every time. However, if you’re somewhat lucky the crashes will be intermittent. Use non-square textures at your own peril.

Thought i’d add my observations to this. Where TGA textures are concerned for doing things like planets etc, it depends on how detailed you want your planets. I’ve used 4096x2048 because i use cmps for planets and the higher the resolution, the more detail closeup. The comment about FL reducing all textures to 512 is rubbish, it doesn’t.

The point here is if you want detailed textures that are nice and sharp closeup on any type of model, then use higher resolution textures. The game engine can deal with it. If you have a neanderthal pc that won’t display them, tough luck, we’re in the 21st century now, get a decent pc lol

I have a dual core system with an nvidia 8800 GT video card. I run FL in 1680x1050 resolution and my mod is full of hi res textures, no slowdown anywhere.

For DDS textures, square is the way to go, 512x512, 1024x1024, 2048x2048 and so on. It’s what the game engine likes. As Forsaken pointed out, non square DDS textures might work but i’ve had issues with this as well, as soon as you square them up, problem goes away.

These images all use hi res textures. The last one of Jupiter is a 4096x2048 texture.

for WTS World’s Jupiter i made 6 512x512 DDS for the Sphere
also worked pretty fine

Do one texture, most people won’t notice but make it a reasonable texture size, imo 2048x2048 is very detailed for ships assuming the texture is high quality, you won’t need anything bigger than that for a ship at least

Gibbon wrote:
2048x2048 is very detailed for ships assuming the texture is high quality

…. I still need to work on that. Usually the texture i do in 2048 resolution could aswell fit easily in a pic with 1024 resolution if arranged properly.

Yes, do as Gibbon says. Or I’ll come over and whup yer backside for ye!!

Gorblimey, wot izzit wiv you young kidz stretching the limits needlessly anyway?

Almost every big airline and bank in the world ran online real-time connections to over 25,000 agents handling 20,000 banking or ticketing transactions per second while writing them all to tape and disk simultaneously on less than 16MB of real memory not so long ago!

Then you young ignorant plebs were born and came along wanting bloomin’ colours and graphics and resolutions!

Now a bloomin’ Cray Supercomputer wiv 9000Gigs of RAM ain’t big enuff for ye just to run Freelancer!!

Grrrrrr!! Get back to bed, all of ye!

Syd wrote:
and
greater textures –> higher filesize --> more GRAM used --> maybe less performance

personaly I use 1024x1024
I think its enoutgh for this engine…

And set the lod.

I use 1024x1024 for starsphere and 512x512 for other model. 1024x1024 is too large, really. I have 28 starspheres right now, and total 204 MB.

I disagree that 1024x1024 is too large. You lose a lot of detail closeup, i’m thinking ships and bases and it’s only when you have at least 1024x1024 or higher you really start to notice the difference. A ship with a 2048x2048 texture will look a million times better than a 512x512 version of the same texture. The point is the game engine can happily deal with it, so why not use them?

Gibbon wrote:
I disagree that 1024x1024 is too large. You lose a lot of detail closeup, i’m thinking ships and bases and it’s only when you have at least 1024x1024 or higher you really start to notice the difference. A ship with a 2048x2048 texture will look a million times better than a 512x512 version of the same texture. The point is the game engine can happily deal with it, so why not use them?

Hey Guy, In originally game. almost all model use 256x256 texture, and detail is so-so. And don’t forget you can texturing for per component not integral ship.

I mean: What size of texture you going to use that depended how you texturing it.

So, 1024x1024 &/ 2048x2048 is too large for me. but i will use it when i no idea to not use it

NeXoSE wrote:

Hey Guy, In originally game. almost all model use 256x256 texture, and detail is so-so.

The name is Gibbon, not Guy. And i think you just summed it up by saying the textures are so-so. To get better visuals you need higher resolution textures, that’s all there is to it

Sorry for the offense Gibbon.

And i agree with that point about texture.

The game’s 7 years old. I expect graphics card went up ever so slightly in performance since then?

1024^2 for models is fine, but large stuff can easily go to 2048^2 without issue. It’s worth it.

Oh also, USE DDS. A 2048^2 texture takes 2mb with it.

but only with high compression… and that means - less quality