Bad texture quality

ejik · Post by **ejik** » Mon May 25, 2009 7:36 pm

Hello!

I am new to Irrlicht and I am writing a small FPS simulator.
The problem is that texture details of objects are very bad starting from some (not very big) distance from the camera.

My hardware is DELL Latitude D630 laptop with graphics card based on Intel 965 chipset, 1GB of RAM, 2GHz of CPU speed.
This was enough for playing such games as Medal of Honour Pacific Assault with pretty good video quality, or MSFS2004...

My code of creating device:

Code: Select all

dev_params.AntiAlias			= true;
	dev_params.Bits					= 32;
	dev_params.DriverType			= video::EDT_DIRECT3D9;
	dev_params.Fullscreen			= true;
	dev_params.HighPrecisionFPU		= true;
	dev_params.Vsync				= true;
	dev_params.WindowSize			= dimension2d<s32>(640, 480);
	dev_params.Stencilbuffer		= true;
	dev_params.WithAlphaChannel		= true;
	dev_params.ZBufferBits			= 32;

	device = createDeviceEx(dev_params);

640x480 is prerequisite for my application. However I tried to use higher resolutions but result was same - bad texture details for distanced objects.

The application starts and bevahes normally, but in the console window I can see following message:
Anti aliasing disabled because hardware/driver lacks necessary caps.

So, is there any chance to improve graphics quality in my situation?

Thanks in advance

Cloudef · Post by **Cloudef** » Mon May 25, 2009 8:11 pm

32 bit textures higher resolution on textures, correct uvw on models, mipmaps and AF.

CuteAlien · Post by **CuteAlien** » Mon May 25, 2009 9:43 pm

Use another texture filtering. You can enable the material flags for EMF_TRILINEAR_FILTER and EMF_ANISOTROPIC_FILTER to improve texture rendering (costs certainly some speed).

Acki · Post by **Acki** » Tue May 26, 2009 12:49 am

this is what comes first to my mind when I read "Bad texture quality":
are you using POT textures !?!?!

ejik · Post by **ejik** » Tue May 26, 2009 8:22 am

CuteAlien wrote:Use another texture filtering. You can enable the material flags for EMF_TRILINEAR_FILTER and EMF_ANISOTROPIC_FILTER to improve texture rendering (costs certainly some speed).

These parameters are set via irrEdit. But even with them I have bad quality.

ejik · Post by **ejik** » Tue May 26, 2009 8:24 am

Cloudef wrote:32 bit textures higher resolution on textures, correct uvw on models, mipmaps and AF.

Textures are true color high resolution BMP.
Object is a simple rectangle with one face. coordinates of textures are correct. BTW, where can I see/correct mipmaps or AF?

ejik · Post by **ejik** » Tue May 26, 2009 8:27 am

Acki wrote:this is what comes first to my mind when I read "Bad texture quality":
are you using POT textures !?!?!

Sorry, I don't know what is POT

But I use BMP texture. One of them is 1841x1839 BMP file 24bit color depth.

loki1985 · Post by **loki1985** » Tue May 26, 2009 8:31 am

ejik wrote:Sorry, I don't know what is POT
But I use BMP texture. One of them is 1841x1839 BMP file 24bit color depth.

POT: power of two (as in 2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256 etc).

neither 1841 nor 1839 is POT, as Acki said that is a potential problem (and probably the issue).

Cloudef · Post by **Cloudef** » Tue May 26, 2009 12:42 pm

Even your bmp(God who uses bmp's still?) is 32 bit you have to set texture creation flag to 32 bit. There is also texture quality flags if i remember right (Optimize for speed, optimize for quality) And even your object is simple triangle, its uvw's can be so that it makes your texture look really fuzzy. So try to scale uvw down.

Nox · Post by **Nox** » Tue May 26, 2009 2:52 pm

Thats not really correct. For BMP 1, 4, 8, 16, 24 oder 32 bpp are allowed. And by the way. BMPs are not bad at all. Just try to compress 10 images as png. Then save these images as BMP and compress them. In my test the archive with the BMPs has a better ratio.

Sylence · Post by **Sylence** » Tue May 26, 2009 3:02 pm

Yes of course. Because PNGs are already compressed.

ejik · Post by **ejik** » Tue May 26, 2009 3:23 pm

I have done like all you guys said, i.e. forced 32bit textures and modified texture to be POT (I made it 512x512 JPG) and it seems to be better.

Thanks!

Nox · Post by **Nox** » Tue May 26, 2009 3:35 pm

@Sylence you got the point

thats why BMPs are not bad at all. Its a nice "straight forward" format.

loki1985 · Post by **loki1985** » Tue May 26, 2009 8:08 pm

Nox wrote:@Sylence you got the point thats why BMPs are not bad at all. Its a nice "straight forward" format.

so BMPs are "not bad at all" because they are uncompressed?
BMP is a shitty format, mostly because a lot of different incompatible versions exist (per definition and implementation, not widespreadness). not very straightforward. if you want straightforward, use (uncompressed) TGA.

and PNG is kinda like TGA with compression in an container format which supports thirdparty extensions and metadata.

and best of all: it is standardised.

Nox · Post by **Nox** » Wed May 27, 2009 8:34 am

Well, im not very experienced concerning the formatdefinitions and standards. BMP has its disadvantages too thats right i.e. missing alphachannel. But i only know that loading a BMP is very easy and i had never problems with BMPs. Im sorry that i dont blame a format for being not under public control or whatever. Im more the "userguy". If it works, is easy to use for my purpose and is not to restrictive i normally have no problem to use it. By the way i use png, jpg, gif, tiff, tga etc. too....