Why the ridiculously low-res textures?

[brink's]

Man, you guys and your stupid criticisms, if you're not going to play HL2 again why do you care? Hey, everyone lets all ignore all that Valve has done with is game and complain about maybe the best textures to ever apear in a game cause we have nothing better to do. GJ

 

[Sharpfish]

I think anyone who doesn't understand the difference between a "Detail texture" and "Detailed Textures" should stay quiet, they are arguing an irrelevent point. I'm with Shiga, the point is, surely in such a "cutting edge" title such as HL2 you would assume they would be using detail textures? (again for those not sure, detail textures are NOT massive/highly detailed textures there are just small often repeated underlying textures that add a material quality to textures up close, like wood grain, brick work, concrete pits, scratches etc). In the UT community, if someone releases a map that DOESN'T use *Detail Textures" they are normally advised to go and revise it as it does look ugly up close, especially for those with good cards who expect more anyway.

I have spouted off in a few HL2 gfx threads and everyone got defensive towards the game, not realising I was not having a "go" at HL2, just discussing the shortcommings of a game that has apparently the best "gfx" ever, and how it could be so much improved with just small, non intensive adjustments, basically stuff you would have thought would have been there as standard from day one.. I noticed all too easily the lack of basic features such as animated sky/moving clouds in city17 - yet when I mention that I just get flamed?? I'm not saying it is a deal breaker, I am wondering what Valve were thinking including a static lifeless skybox, if they really had no way around it due to some other tech limitation then fine.. I'm just curious, when every other game (even sub standard ones) from recent history have such things, same goes with detail textures.

I am now enjoying the game, and I am seeing small examples of where the gfx are ahead of the game and apreciate it, the game is also feeling more fun now with less stuttering. The overall cohesive look of the environment is great but was less that it had been hyped up to be for those that are looking for the basics + the new stuff (not just the new stuff).

And about doom3 - and it's low res textures, remember it was made that way to bump up the speed knowing most of it was dark anyway, and the lighting was more important, which in effect cancels out the down side of the gfx in that title as it "feels" right and has some cutting edge effects going on (whether they are your taste or not is not in discussion), and they used geometry/polys for detailing to catch and cast shadows. HL2 is rather flat for the most part with very basic modeling of rooms and exterior scenes (not basic in the sense that they have a lot of things in them, just that everything has a squared off appearence - a couple more polys here or there wouldn't have killed anyone) - yes "real life" is not always curved or overly detailed, and HL2 does look realistic, but when I see archways in this day and age with visible vertices / low edge counts it really makes me realise I am "in a game" - other games have managed to avoid this for a while now.

But... I guess some will never want to understand and will flame.

I will be playing AND enjoying the game today and I am glad it was released and devs need to be encouraged to keep trying to push the envelope, doesn't mean I need to restrain my thoughts and opinions on the downsides (same with all games) as the points raised in these threads do leave a few of use wondering WHY Valve did what they did (and performance is not, imo, the reason)

 

[jacen]

The size of the textures would naturally double, but for me it would be worth it.

you name it.
the major part of the hl2 customers have about 512 system and 128 vram. (remember that steam survey?)
and with this setup u even cant play on high texture res, as your ram wouldnt be able to hold all this.

what i am trying to say is, that creating detail textures and removing errors caused by them would cost a pretty ammount of time for the texture artist team. you have to pay for the ppl you know? in the end, valve decided that its not worth the time and money, since only a small %tage of the mainstream rigs feature more then 512 ram.

it should be no heavy problem to include detail maps in a quality pack released later (remember blue shift? they doubled the poly count on almost all models, just because they had the time and most of the pc could handle it).

so even if i agree that haveing detail maps would be nice (since i got my 2nd 512 bar yesterday) im not to worried about it.

 

[Sharpfish]

"If these criticisms sound overly harsh, it's because the game comes so close to being truly phenomenal that its failing are all the more disappointing."

That quote from the HL2 review @ http://www.1up.com/do/reviewPage?pager.offset=1&cId=3136772
hit's the nail on the head - the first review I agree with about this game - still scores highly, but the flaws are noted not GLOSSED over as in every other review, it is these early reviews that overhyped the prodcut and led many of us to expect more - had I read the above review, I would have realised what we were getting with HL2 before purchase.

 

[Revenge]

The technology is there already and fully functional. A while back on the forums for the Half-Life mod Natural Selection the forums got worked up into a big frenzy because somebody discovered the console command r_detailtextures 1 (and r_detailtexturessupported 1, which only actually appeared if your video card could support detail textures). We then got on a big texture make spree and got this HL1 mod looking really cool with custom detail textures up until somebody from Valve claimed that a lot of the info we had been given by one forum user was leaked info, and then the head mod designer Flayra put in some lines of code that disabled us from using detail textures in Natural Selection.

The detail texture code suddenly appeared in the half-life engine before WON shut down, but longer after steam was released, which indicates to me that they were definately experimenting with detail textures. I wouldn't be surprised if detail textures still worked now in Half-Life 1, and I wouldn't be surprised if they worked in Half-Life 2. While none probably exist at the moment for HL2, it seems that it would be easily modded in.

 

[Sharpfish]

About my pet peeve - the skybox - I think it may not be animated due to them using fake/3d boxes which means it is not just a sky texture but distant buildings etc - prob would have been a bit tricky to have the clouds moving but not everything else if it is all just one "pretty picture".. would have been good, but, I'll just keep looking at the scenery around me which I admit is improving on every level.. the atmosphere from water hazzard onwards is a vast improvement on the dreary early levels. If Valve had paced it better at the start, I wouldn't have felt like I was being led by the hand quite so much (and it did go on for ages like that).. I would like to have been dropped in somewhere FULL of atmosphere like the crane/dock near the start of water hazzard - it would have set the scene nicely (obv back story would have been needed I guess) - basically Exteriors = Great - interiors = Dissapointing - the first part of the game is all interiors or interior type outdoor sections (caves/sewers etc).

 

[L337_Assasain]

No offense Shigawire...but you bitch alot...
This is a great game, very well made, I don't care if it looks crappy up close, I don't care if the combine are waring pink hats, and fuzzy underwear, IT'S A GOOD GAME, NOW DON'T WRITE A TWO PAGED ESSAY ON A ****ING FAN FORUM AND GO LIVE YOUR LIFE (OR PLAY HL2, WHY AM I USING CAPS?) !!!!!

 

[$pazmatazz]

No offense Shigawire...but you bitch alot...
This is a great game, very well made, I don't care if it looks crappy up close, I don't care if the combine are waring pink hats, and fuzzy underwear, IT'S A GOOD GAME, NOW DON'T WRITE A TWO PAGED ESSAY ON A ****ING FAN FORUM AND GO LIVE YOUR LIFE (OR PLAY HL2, WHY AM I USING CAPS?) !!!!!

Wow..

My only complaint about low-res textures is when you're at the top of the citadel. The city below looks all stretched and blurry. This part was still very cool, but they could have used something better for the ciry in my opinion.

 

[trylle]

I agree with shigawire that the missing detail textures is a bit disappointing, but, at the chance of straying a bit off-topic (this has nothing to do with detail textures), I thought the textures were rather poor in definition as I played the game.

I tried to change texture filtering methods, trilinear, 16x anisotropic, and still textures such as clothes on people looked rather bad, textures on junk were almost just a random jumble of badly interpolated pixels (chinese food boxes). I thought it had to be due to low memory on the graphics adapter (I have 128mb), until I disabled texture mipmapping. Boom!

Much more crisp textures (except for some expected aliasing on distant objects, though). I almost wonder if the mipmap bias is completely messed up in the game. I believe the transition from enabled to disabled mipmap is also too fast for the engine to have any chance to remove mipmap textures (the change occurs instantaneously), thus freeing up space for higher definition textures, so I think all the mat_mipmaptextures flag does is simply disable the mipmap renderstate.

Anyhow, played the rest of the game with mipmapping disabled and was more satisfied (the aliasing effects might be objectionable for some, though).

 

[Ultimape]

trylle, wanna give a pic of what you mean of the diffrence?

 

[vocalvoodo]

Much more crisp textures (except for some expected aliasing on distant objects, though). I almost wonder if the mipmap bias is completely messed up in the game. I believe the transition from enabled to disabled mipmap is also too fast for the engine to have any chance to remove mipmap textures (the change occurs instantaneously), thus freeing up space for higher definition textures, so I think all the mat_mipmaptextures flag does is simply disable the mipmap renderstate.

This is a nOOb question but how do I disable mipmaping?

 

[vocalvoodo]

how the hell do i delete?

 

[vocalvoodo]

Anyone? Little help please?

 

[Beazil]

Valve DID say something about releasing the "radeon levels" where a higher end vid card would be required.