[CP5670]

Is it possible to add in a "detail texture" display system into FSO? I am not sure if this has been brought up here before and it's really an idea for the future with all the stuff in progress right now, but I wanted to throw the idea around and see whether this would be feasible or not.

Basically, when the viewpoint is at a certain distance from a textured polygon, such a system would make the game display a stencil-like overlay called a detail texture on the main texture. As the viewpoint reaches a second, smaller distance from the polygon, a new instance of the same detail texture would be rendered on top of the existing one (and the main texture), but at a smaller size. This is repeated two or three times, with the last distance being right next to the suface. The detail texture itself is similar to a grayscale bumpmap but does not bear any resemblance to the main texture and is shown differently at different distances. If all that doesn't make any sense, here are some screenshots of this effect from Deus Ex for example:

http://www.3dap.com/hlp/hosted/procyon/misc/shot0000.jpg
http://www.3dap.com/hlp/hosted/procyon/misc/shot0001.jpg
http://www.3dap.com/hlp/hosted/procyon/misc/shot0002.jpg
http://www.3dap.com/hlp/hosted/procyon/misc/shot0003.jpg

http://www.3dap.com/hlp/hosted/procyon/misc/shot0012.jpg
http://www.3dap.com/hlp/hosted/procyon/misc/shot0013.jpg
http://www.3dap.com/hlp/hosted/procyon/misc/shot0014.jpg
http://www.3dap.com/hlp/hosted/procyon/misc/shot0015.jpg

If you look closely, you can see the same detail texture being used at different sizes based on the distance from the surface.

As far as I know, the first game to use this system was Unreal, where it looked absolutely stunning back then, but surprisingly there still relatively few games that use this and many of those are ones that run off the Unreal or Unreal Warfare cores. It makes even small textures look extremely detailed at close distances without big performance costs and it works very subtly in all the games I have seen it in. This would take some work to put into FS2 since apart from coding and optimizing the whole effect, it would be necessary to specify what detail texture corresponds to a given polygon (something that would probably have to be specified in the pofs; maybe it can be texture-specific), but given FS2's small textures I think it could provide a huge graphical quality boost to the game.

[Bobboau]

this is something I've wanted to do for a while, but I want to wait untill we reorganise the way textures are handeled into a material system so maximum controle is given to the artist.

[Lightspeed]

Don't think it'd be worth the performance loss in FS2. But I could be wrong

[CP5670]

this is something I've wanted to do for a while, but I want to wait untill we reorganise the way textures are handeled into a material system so maximum controle is given to the artist.

ah, you have already considered this; that is good to know. It would take some work as I said, but I'm willing to wait.

Don't think it'd be worth the performance loss in FS2. But I could be wrong

sorry, but that was a slightly funny comment coming from you. Actually, it causes pretty little performance hit in all the Unreal games at any rate, since the detail textures are only rendered at certain, fairly small distances. In FS2 we have the problem of most textures being quite small and having no easy to way to make them more detailed directly, which is why this would really help immensely. The larger non-FS1 ships in particular would have the most to gain from this.

[Bobboau]

yeah, it sort of works like a texturizeing filter, you give it a noise texture and it adds it to the texture on the poly before lighting, so as you get closer to the polygon it never starts looking burry, the implementation CP mentioned sounds like they also used some sort of mip mapping thingy, the effect would be no more intinsive than glowmapping, though it would require another texture stage.
I supose it could be hacked in the same way glow and shine maps were, texturename"-detail", but as I said, our texture handeling system is getting realy messy, I want to organise it before we start adding any more stuff like this.