Author: Art in Pinkerton

What are they doing? Seriously, some one tell me.

I mentioned Fate converts the textures added at install from PNG to DDS. This conversion happens upon the initial run of the game, but also again if any of the converted textures go missing (which I use when I tweak textures and such). In addition to the main texture (or diffuse map), some textures had an alpha map (for transparency such as making the black on the sails below invisible). Then there are the “completemaps” that funk up the textures in game and honestly, aren’t well done in Fate. Such as the one I posted last time. It was supposed to be a burned down building, but it looked completely black despite the original texture having detail and actual color. After I rebuilt the texture, it still looked dark in the game. There was a peculiarity with the coloring and shading/highlighting with several of the textures. It was clear my changes were in place, but something was distorting the image.

(CLICK THE PICTURES TO SEE THEM LARGER)

Original texture (resized for easy of viewing)

Partially complete rebuild

You can see in the image that my version of the boat is much cleaner (and detailed). However, when I loaded the game, my textures showed but were muddied with blemishes shown in the first texture. I thought maybe it was an engine thing (e.g. when building levels you can “paint” shadows and marks on the 3D landscape like Morrowind).

Original boat texture

New texture (but muddied by something)

I didn’t know what I don’t know

Then I discovered there was a third texture related to the boat image. However, its structure is very weird. This texture does two things that I can discern: 1. highlights or darkens areas on the model and 2. adds color tinting. So my amateur status here doesn’t know what this layer is called or how the heck they made it or relates to the model. It’s not just another variant of the boat texture, but more like a piecemeal palette of portions of the 3D model.

Trying to make it work

The lighter the color is, the brighter on the boat and the darker creates shadows. The hue tints the image of that color. But the mapping is crazy…I had to experiment just to get the white on the boat to be even. I plan to minimize my efforts on those files unless one (such as the boat) really needs it. The smelter (as it’s labeled in the filename) stays mostly red due to how its “completemap” is mostly shades of red.

After some trials, I at least got the ship to a reasonable spot. I’m not sure if I’ll come back to Fate or not, but it was a fun bit of messing around.

– Martin

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