Great.
2. Now I seem to recall that you can fix that issue by disabling mipmapping support in OpenGlide:
EnableMipMaps=0
As an early Christmas Present, I've released a BETA version of the first proper texture pack: The Caves. 😁 This version has all the walls replaced with new, high definition textures. Items, characters and sprites have not yet been replaced.
Why not check it out by downloading it now?
I downloaded and installed it, and nothing changed.
First, make sure you've follwed the instructions on the website about modifying the INI file. Then, in the game, try pressing F4 -- the high quality textures are loaded when MipMapping is toggled, so you can use F4 to switch between old and new graphics. Hope that helps!
Whoa F4 works!
Amazing. Great job, and please continue!
I love it.
Absolutely awesome! Love the new passport. Love the doors. And the switches - the bridge - everything. Its just gorgeous.
One thing. Such high def textures go all crawly at a distance unless you have mipmapping. So the thing to do is edit the file OpenGLid.INI and set EnableMipMaps to 1. Makes it look even better, although it give little black bits in the floor, which I don't understand.
Anyway, that the best thing that's happened this year. Makes me hopeful for 2004.
Thanks for the comments guys! I enjoyed doing the passport: It even has Lara's correct birth date and everything! 😁
The caves level has become quite boring for me now -- you wouldn't believe how many times I've played it to test the textures! Must be hundreds! 😵 I'm looking forward to getting all the other bits done to complete it, though it's actually a lot of work and I'm not sure I'll get it done before Christmas. Most of the sprites/items should be quite easy, but updating Lara is quite hard, especially her eyes, because of the weird rotation that the lower half uses...
However, the rest of the Peru levels should be significantly quicker, because a lot of stuff is repeated. This'll make things easier!
🤣, Gambit, you're such a pedant 😁
Yes, it’s my fault.
If you only knew.... 🙄 😳 🤣 I prefer the term 'perfectionist' 😉
I think i have found a but in the latest release of title pack:
Textures from 6018E6431FA65017D0F703FC8E60D589 folder seems not to work in game. Other folders works great. (the result is that only the two last passport pages are new, the rest is old).
btw - nice work with letters, i remember you said it will be the last thing you will do 😉
Edit:
I have tried another tomb raider version and it works fine (this version was added to a paper games magazine and it has no audo tracks)
The problem with some textures not appearing is because there are different versions of Tomb Raider. Eventually, I hope to find a way of addressing this. Paul has said it may be possible to address this direclty in Glidos. But for now, the textures will only reliably work with PHD files dated 25 October 1996.
Can you tell me the dates/times of your PHD files please, and on what version of Tomb Raider you're testing (for example, is it a budget re-release)?
The lettring WILL be done last -- I just wanted to test out how difficult it would be! 😀
I think this will be the most usefull:
dir /on /s > c:\dirinfo.txt
Edit:
This command is more clear:
dir /oge /s > c:\dirinfo.txt
Thank you for doing that -- I see from your lists that you have two versions. One of them has files dated 5 November 1996 -- I imagine that this is the one that didn't work? (OTHER.TXT)
Would you be willing to email me a RAR of the TITLE.PHD from this version so that I can see the differences.....??
Cool, I've got a bunch of things to report 😜
Superb artwork, Matt. It really whips the Llamas' arse! Everything's just gorgeous and yet it stays true to the original TR spirit. A bit of constructive criticism though...
The only gripe I had with your pack was the generic floor texture, which -- I have to admit -- took me a while to get used to. I found it too much on the greenish/slimy side and the pattern too repetitive (especially when applied to the walls and ceilings, which you can't do anything about it), whereas the original texture was more like grey stone and worked better on the walls and ceilings. After a while though, the new texture made more sense and I even found it appropriate, but I still wish it was a bit more on the grey side.
About your new title logo: your previous one was better IMO. The new TR logo in gold letters doesn't look very good (compared to the stone-like previous one) and the tagline under it ("high textures for Glidos") is unecessary and redundant. I mean, we know what the texture pack is all about, that's why we installed it in the first place 😉
Besides, this logo takes too much space on the upper title screen and makes the new font (which is very nice btw) unreadable when the menus overlap with the lower part of the logo. Look again at the original logo and you'll see that it was located higher for this purpose.
All in all, this is impressive work. The best part is yet to come -- Qualopec, St Francis and Egypt, yoohoo 😁
While I'm at it, you seem to be someone who could be interested in TRe3D. It's a powerful level editor developed by Turbo Pascal. Its main features are the support of *all* TRx maps, 256x256 textures in TR1~5 and angled walls in TR3~5. Give it a try, it might ease your work and give you new ideas 😎
wrote:One thing. Such high def textures go all crawly at a distance unless you have mipmapping. So the thing to do is edit the file OpenGLid.INI and set EnableMipMaps to 1. Makes it look even better, although it give little black bits in the floor, which I don't understand.
Paul, that sounds strange. The highres textures don't "crawl" that much on my modest system (a bit of occasional jerk at times, nothing serious), and they load up very fast too. On my config, EnableMipMaps=1 don't improve the performance at all, it makes the textures very blurry at a distance and produces weird dark lines between some polygons and light lines around Lara's head. EnableMipMaps=0 works much better here.
Gambit's efforts convinced me to bite the bullet and give a try at retexturing Lara's home. There's really nothing to fancy about, but who knows, by the time Matt will be finished with the game I may have become proficient with Photoshop (^^;
Anyway, I discovered some interesting behaviours in the process.
1. Custom 8-bit textures are not recognized by Glidos.
2. Converting the original water textures directly from 8-bit to 24-bit (no dithering, no rework) produces dark artifacts in the corners of the texture, like those mentioned by Gambit some time ago for his title screen (though I'm using the latest Glidos and OpenGlide versions).
3. Black dots (actually, transparent dots) appear over some textures where the graphic engine assumes the colour is "more or less" transparent brown (96-64-32). Depending on the angle of the camera, you can even see the textures of the room behind (if any). Look at the painting frame below. Problem is: there's no such RGB colour in this texture (I checked the affected zones pixel by pixel). It's like the graphic engine is being too tolerant with colours having close RGB values.
3. Black dots appear over brown/orange textures when calling the transparent Inventory screen (actually not specific to the highres textures; it has been there since a few OpenGlide releases but I didn't bother mentioning it before).
It seems the transparent brown colour is causing much trouble, since it could easily be used in any 24-bit texture without the designer being aware of it. I mean, there's more chance that this colour may appear unnoticed in a digitized texture than, for example, pure magenta (255-0-255). Would there be a way for Glidos to handle magenta as the default transparent colour instead of that problematic brown colour?
I attached a small archive with the painting and water for anyone to check out.
My setup: Glidos 1.24b + OpenGlide 0.09rc6.
[Options]
EnableMMX=1
CreateWindow=1
InitFullScreen=1
EnableMipMaps=0
IgnorePaletteChange=0
EnableFog=1
EnablePrecisionFix=1
Wrap565to5551=0
EnableMultiTextureEXT=1
EnablePaletteEXT=1
EnablePackedPixelsEXT=0
EnableVertexArrayEXT=0
EnableSecondaryColorEXT=1
EnableFogCoordEXT=1
PalettePrecision=16
TextureMemorySize=16
WrapperPriority=2
FrameBufferMemorySize=8
Hi kaminari. Thanks for your reply. It's great to get comments like "This is awesome", but it's even better to get good, constructive criticism.
All in all, this is impressive work. The best part is yet to come -- Qualopec, St Francis and Egypt, yoohoo
Too right -- I'm getting sick of these caves and want to do something a bit more interesting. I'm really looking forward to re-texturing Egypt as that is a passion of mine.
I agree with you about the stone texture. I'm still not happy with it at all. I've reworked it dozens of times, and each time it's got darker and darker and more offputting. I decided to leave it for now and concentrate on some other stuff, but eventually I want to make it more like the original. As you pointed out, because the tiles in TR are small, any kind of detail soon becomes annoyingly repetitive with the high res textures -- difficult to avoid this.
Regarding the logo: I agree that the tagline is probably redundant, but I wanted to tie it in with the website. This is also why I changed the text style of the logo. Although I liked the old one (which was basically a copy of the original) I decided I wanted something a bit more sparkly to represent the idea behind the update. I agree about the positioning though -- I'll revise this.
I've been having a look at all the TR utils, inlcluding the editor you mentioned. Most of them aren't that useful for what I'm doing, but some will prove to be invaluable -- using WinTRSCP the ability to move lara, cameras and add static enemies really is a god send.
I have noticed all the problems that you've mentioned. The brown issue is very annoying -- you think you've edited out all the offending pixels but they still have holes when viewed with Glidos. I agree, 'power pink' would be the way to go to avoid this, though not sure if it's possible -- some of the later TR levels use a bright green as the mask colour, and this obviously comes from the internal palette. Anything that could be done to improve it would be good.
Paul has just released Glidos 1.25 which now supports 8-bit paletted BMPS, as well as 8 and 24-bit PNGS. This is great work which means the texture pack downloads will now be a lot smaller.
I love your new mansion! It's looking great -- keep up the good work -- perhaps we could discuss working on this together -- although to be honest, I am quite keen to keep it as a personal project at the moment, as I'm using it in my portfoilio for job applications.
Cheers for now.
I like the floor... I love the floor... ah, don't change the floor.
And I like the "redundant" "High res textures" thing. Should bung a http://resonantedge.com/trx/ and your name (why not). You should do that for the day when Core are trying to show it off to some customer as their work. Don't laugh: I've seen it done. The person looking at it, isn't always the person who set it up. Anyway, I think people should stamp their ownership on their work in some way or other.
The transparency color: I can imagine its annoying, but do you really have to go around dealing with it pixel by pixel. Can't photoshop change every oocurence of one colour to another (in this case differing by aaggh...
aaghh...
aagh..
I've just realised: the fact that Glidos is converting the 24bit textures down to 16bit makes this loads worse. It will mean that a range of colours become transparent. I could perhaps write a tool for you that maps them to the nearest non-transparent colour.
Black spots in the water textures: that was a bug in OpenGLide, now cured, as you should see in v1.25 of Glidos.
EnableMipMaps = 1: that's strange that you don't see the crawling in the distance. Its not when you are looking at a still sceen; its when you are moving very slowly. Mipmapping was invented because of this. The little black bits that appeared when Mipmapping was enabled was a bug in Glidos, now cured. Oh, and mipmapping makes the original game textures look a bit crap because of edge problems.
Kaminari: is lara's home downloadable from anywhere? Love the doors.
Pure magenta is a possibility, but it would still suffer from the problem that it would capture any colour that is pure magenta in its 16bit representation.
wrote:I love your new mansion! It's looking great -- keep up the good work -- perhaps we could discuss working on this together -- although to be honest, I am quite keen to keep it as a personal project at the moment, as I'm using it in my portfoilio for job applications.
I agree with Paul, it can be a formidable asset to your career. The mansion is just a fun way for me to try my hand at some basic level mapping, I certainly can't imagine seeing it merged to TRX! 😅 I'm just at the beginning right now, I quickly put a few textures together to see what could be done with the mansion. It's not a piece of cake (poor texture stretching all over the place). I'm keeping the better for the end -- marble swimming pool, yum! 🤑
I've just been thinking of a way to help you in your work, though. When you are done with the Egypt levels (ie, we still have time!), I could reuse your textures for the remake of Shadow of the Cat. It would be an easy job for me, and you could go on with the Atlantis levels while I take care of some Unfinished Business. That way you'd still keep legitimate credits for your artwork. I'd be certainly happy to help you in some way or another.
wrote:I like the floor... I love the floor... ah, don't change the floor.
Do you mean the flooring or the carpet? I still have some work to do before considering making the mansion available for download 🙄
wrote:I've just realised: the fact that Glidos is converting the 24bit textures down to 16bit makes this loads worse. It will mean that a range of colours become transparent. I could perhaps write a tool for you that maps them to the nearest non-transparent colour.
Ah, now that makes sense. I'll try converting some textures to 16-bits and see what it gives.
wrote:Black spots in the water textures: that was a bug in OpenGLide, now cured, as you should see in v1.25 of Glidos.
Mmm, the 'corner bug' is still there, it even happens with the standard 8-bit textures (when captured, then reloaded in TextureOverride mode).
wrote:Pure magenta is a possibility, but it would still suffer from the problem that it would capture any colour that is pure magenta in its 16bit representation.
Indeed, though it's naturally less prone to happen than with the current brown. While I'm at it, just a crazy question: does PNG support means the alpha channel could be used for transparency instead of a fixed colour?
"I love the floor": no sorry I meant the TRX floor, that you didn't like... although I do like your carpet.
Great idea of yours, BTW, of texture reuse in UB.
That corner bug! Damn! What have I done there then. When I was tracing why there were black bits in the corner, I added some debugging code that tried to set them white. Maybe I left it in.
