Art In Pinkerton
(mis)adventures of Martin in Writing, Podcasting, and more
No Fate but what you make
The inspiration
This first picture shows the detail disparity between the building textures and most of the other ones. As I mentioned before, on a 4k monitor, most textures look great for being such an old game. However, the buildings look like crap. I attribute this to them using the same size texture files despite the much larger size models…that and poor planning. I could, maybe, buy that it was for frame rate purposes: lower sized texture = less needed memory, etc. However, that doesn’t explain why both Fate 2 and Fate 3 continued the same practice when the games by then hardly taxed computers. (NOTE: Both Fate 2 and Fate 3 have the areas from the previous games included).
Alpha 1
Even at lower resolutions, this blurriness is crap. So I tried to replace one texture with a high resolution one. I loaded it in Photoshop and found a semi-suitable replacement from online photos. For this mini-stone henge, I use a hieroglyphic style from some ancient tablet. I don’t actually like this one that much anymore, but it helped with seeing the impact in the game.
Tricksy hobbits
First try failed. I changed the texture, but in game; it had no effect. After trying a few things to see if I had the wrong format, I remembered that the game creates a cache file of the textures. Why? I know what it does, but I have no reasonable explanation on why they chose that method. What was the gain over just using the PNG files? All the textures that get installed with the game are in PNG format. Easy to edit, so that wasn’t a problem.
When first running the game, it creates a cache of the textures CONVERTED to DDS format and stores that cache in a folder in the ‘Program data’ (usually on the C drive.) You can either edit the DDS directly (it’s another image format), or edit the PNGs, convert and then delete the conversion if you need more work. Believe it or not, I chose the latter. DDS files are “lossy” (loose detail as you save and compress them) and I rather have the masters in PNG files. It doesn’t really make sense because if I released this, I would use the DDS files, but I feel it somehow keeps me more orderly.
There is another even more vexing graphic trick they use that I’ll cover next time…
– Martin
Art In Pinkerton 