[Kelso]

So I did a skin for the Elysium barracks for Paradise Lost. And I think it looks pretty good.

But then I put it into the game and it looks pretty bad.

Anyone know what causes this? I thought maybe it was the skins not being 512x512 or 256x256 so that was immediately fixed...I'm confused otherwise.

[mastermind2003]

The game reduces detail and such as it mip maps the images to be smaller, take up less memory, etc. It should look better as you zoom in. There isn't much to be done about it other than increase the contrast on your skins. Other more graphically oriented people can feel free to correct me, since I don't really know what I'm talking about...

[Kelso]

That's kind of what I was afraid of

[mastermind2003]

Again, I don't really know what i'm talking about, so there may be something you can do, but I don't know what it is.
:/

[Eradicator]

There is something you can do about it. Smurf discovered with the new NVidia dds tool you can manually edit the mip maps it creates.

[Straxovich]

i usually get the skin looking good and then CRANK up the contrast and saturation. it may look rediculous in renx but it looks good ingame.

either that OR

if you are making a big mod then reduce the saturation/contrast of the textures already in generals. like the terrain and buildings and trees. then your structure will look cool.

[TylerD]

Originally Posted by Eradicator

There is something you can do about it. Smurf discovered with the new NVidia dds tool you can manually edit the mip maps it creates.

I thought the new plugins just had better compression? What you say sounds real nice

A simple way of stopping the poor quality mipmaps is to not use them, just use .tga (although it will hog memory.. :drunk: )

[Kelso]

those images are with tga files actually.

[Eradicator]

This may be assuming to much or be completely wrong, but I think if you use a tga file the game will create its own mip map images and put them into memory where as a dds file already has mip maps built, which is unusual, but probably saves some time building mip maps.

[smurfbizkit]

@Kelso

Try saving it as dds first...you should see a difference ingame. Sometimes I work on a texture as tga...and it looks really messed up as tga in the w3d viewer. It seems kinda like the game was ment to use dds ingame for most textures.