Just What Is Going On With the Varying Texture Resolution??

This has been bugging me for a while and just wanted (if possible) an official response. Im just wondering about the difference in what appears to be the varying texture resolution of assets on a table that range from passable to super high and on the majority of tables.

I shall use Class of 1812 as an example here, the textures of almost all decals (sling shots, plastics etc) seem to be super high resolution yet the main attraction (the playfiled) is of a much lower resolution, this is really noticeable and wonder what the reason behind this is!?

Surely when FS start to take resources from a table they are all taken and reproduced at a super high resolution and then down sampled?, but this does appear to be the case, any ideas on this???

I've posted about this a couple times here: http://digitalpinballfans.com/showthread.php/5445-Low-Quality-Playfield-Art-(AFM)

Typically the slingshots look fantastic but the playfield itself looks really low res.

Yeah seems very odd. I can maybe understand it for current gen consoles and mobile devices due to memory constraints that they might have to use a lower res for a image as large as a playfield might be, but there's no need to this on the PC surely

I fear we are going to get the same treatment on the PS4.
So far all of the table art textures look exactly the same as the PS3 versions and those are varying quality.

I think Farsight considers the resolutions to be secondary to everything else unfortunately.
Either way I hope they can improve all of this.

Yeah that's what I think, i just hope they had the foresight to capture all the assets of tables at a stupidly high resolution and are indeed just down sampling them atm. But I fear this is not the case and have been taken at around the 480p-720p range which is just a shame if this is the case

Interpolation issues? Larger surface area would give the GPU more leeway for change.

Hard to believe all art assets wouldn't be derived from the "master files" in the same processes.
I get the feeling it's also very hardware/driver specific (said the AMD user...) and each platform get's it's own level of "stripping" to get the file size manageable.

In high-end graphics a lot of this stuff is hands-off once you send the raw vertex data to the buffers and let it rip....

I personally believe (hope) that once FS gets a handle on their current to-do list, they'll be able to go back and optimize a bit more to help the overall situation (I know from experience it can take a LOT of tinkering, trial and error, and no small amount of luck to get this stuff to hit just right) possibly as the much-hoped-for lighting options come around.
I'm not making any excuses, the more options that are exposed, the more each user can tweak for their own exact setup, but there are limits if indeed it is a behind the scenes function of the hardware.

But ya....it would be nice for an actual FS statement on the matter too.. Not just my random speculation since I don't even own the program yet ;P

Yes I agree... I really cant wait for this to come out but the playfield images look really low res.. I even notice it on my ipad. Once they get blown up on a big screen (pincab) they will look even worse. I really hope they put in higher res playfields for the pc release it would be a shame to do all this work and they not look good. If we wanted low res we could just stick with the free VP versions..

I would assume that this is UV-layout/mapping issue. Their 3d artist didn't cut the playfield texture into smaller chunks to distribute it evenly and proportionally with other details, but applied the whole image to a single texture space. As a result, small details which use the same amount of memory/texture space as a big playfield map, look sharp, while the latter look washed.

tldr: 3d stuff

There is probably still hardware around that requires power of two textures (128x128 / 128x256 / 256x512 / 1024x2048 / etc). So you would most likely use 1024x2048 for the main playfield texture nowadays and depending on how they map the plastics it would be a case-by-case decision - might use 256x512 for a slingshot plastic for example which is a higher texel density when compared to the main playfield but if you were to use 128x256 it would be too low res - they probably target a certain max. required amount of video memory so they will have to sacrifice details here and there. However on the pc higher res assets should at least be optional if the source material is available.

lio said:

There is probably still hardware around that requires power of two textures (128x128 / 128x256 / 256x512 / 1024x2048 / etc).

Click to expand...

All video hardware does. If it seems to you that it doesn't, it's a software workaround