Hard Light Productions Forums

Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => FS2 Open Coding - The Source Code Project (SCP) => Topic started by: Lykurgos88 on March 24, 2014, 09:11:56 am

Title: What is the status of anisotropic filtering?
Post by: Lykurgos88 on March 24, 2014, 09:11:56 am
I did some forum searching after wondering why wxLauncher doesn't support anisotropic filtering options like the old Freespace launcher did, and I found out that the anisotropic filtering option was removed from the engine capabilities at some point (for Windows at least). It's also supposed to be reintroduced after the SDL 2 (Simple DirectMedia Layer) gets combined with the stable release of FSO. So this poses 2 questions:

1) Why was the anisotropic filtering support removed in the first place?
2) Why is SDL 2 required in order to reintroduce the anisotropic filtering?

After all, 16x anisotropic filtering gives some nice extra texture fidelity compared to the trilinear filtering with almost no additional GPU stress cost. It's a bit of shame that it isn't there currently  :sigh:
Title: Re: What is the status of anisotropic filtering?
Post by: m!m on March 24, 2014, 09:17:44 am
As far as I can tell the engine reads the value from the settings correctly and applies it to all loaded textures. You might want to ask the wxLauncher guys why it isn't enabled in the windows version of the launcher.
Title: Re: What is the status of anisotropic filtering?
Post by: Lykurgos88 on March 24, 2014, 09:25:03 am
You might want to ask the wxLauncher guys why it isn't enabled in the windows version of the launcher.

I understand that anisotropic filtering simply doesn't work atm, even if you force it via GPU control panel. So wxLauncher guys removed the option temporarily until the FSO engine gets updated.
Title: Re: What is the status of anisotropic filtering?
Post by: m!m on March 24, 2014, 09:32:19 am
Well, the engine actually uses anisotropic filtering if the right settings are set and your graphics hardware supports it which is why I came to the conclusion that it's an oversight in the wxLauncher.
Title: Re: What is the status of anisotropic filtering?
Post by: Fury on March 24, 2014, 09:55:47 am
Well, the engine actually uses anisotropic filtering if the right settings are set and your graphics hardware supports it which is why I came to the conclusion that it's an oversight in the wxLauncher.
Even if you set anisotropic filtering in the old Launcher, it does nothing in-game.
Title: Re: What is the status of anisotropic filtering?
Post by: m!m on March 24, 2014, 10:03:15 am
All I can say it that the engine loads the setting here (https://github.com/asarium/fs2open.github.com/blob/master/code/graphics/gropengltexture.cpp#L173) and then uses it for every new texuture here (https://github.com/asarium/fs2open.github.com/blob/master/code/graphics/gropengltexture.cpp#L495). I don't know if that's actually how you enable it in OpenGL or if there are other factors which prevent the usage of anisotropic filtering.
Title: Re: What is the status of anisotropic filtering?
Post by: Lykurgos88 on March 25, 2014, 06:41:12 am
This thread was inspired by this (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=82839.msg1653905#msg1653905).

That information is 1,5 years old, so I wondered if anything has changed or is there any additional information available on the subject?