edit from above ( If an admin reads this you can delete the texture.rar file from the above post )

er, the colors were horrible this is a bit better:

ahh here

Ok, you asked for honesty 😉

I consider myself a hardcore oldskool integrist TR1 fanboy, and apart from a couple of details I found Gambit's work amazingly close to the original spirit of Tomb Raider. If I have to compare both of your efforts, I'm sorry to say that Matt's looks more faithful than yours.

That said, the textures look sexy; I like very much the slightly over-the-top contrast and vivid hues. The overall work on the lighting reminds me of The Spring of Eternal Youth, one of the best custom levels ever made for TRLE (still unfinished, btw). But in no way it looks as remotely close to the original as TRX, in my humble opinion -- it just looks very different and very personal, but then again, I like it very much.

So, in a nutshell: keep it up and go for it. And don't change a hair for anyone! 😀

The upside is that the game looks fantastic , the down side is that the tone , or feel of the game is changed

There's the rub. Any changes will make the game look different. If anyone wants to play the game with the "original feel" then play with the original graphics, not hi-res updates.

I think it's great that we have more people making their own textures. I'm just doing it for a hobby, and I have one take on it. You're textures are another take and differ greatly from mine. I haven't played them in game yet, just had a quick look in the folders at the flat images. Yours are much dirtier and rougher than mine, and in some cases could perhaps be considered more 'realistic'. I like the look of some of them, others don't really look right to me.

While I haven't been completely anal about accuracy with my textures, two things in yours really stick out: You don't get evergreen ivy in Peru and unless they'd been walking in tar, the wolves wouldn't leave black footprints.

I have to agree with Kaminari that they look less like the originals than mine. Which is kind of ironic given your intention. 😉

As you said in my textures, I've tried to retain a close resemblance to the originals but correct some of the siller things Core did (such as black footprints). That's my view on it, and it's different to yours. Vive la difference that's what I say! It'll be great that players have options for hi-res replacements.

Keep it up!

Oh, one small note -- delete all the hidden files from your folders before distributing them (pspbrwse.jbf, *.tmp. etc...) -- adds unneccesary weight to the download.

I have to agree with Kaminari that they look less like the originals than mine. Which is kind of ironic given your intention. Wink

😀 irony is the spice of life or the intent of mice and men or some damn thing

Actually *i think* my focus is in keeping the same basic light/color values where and when possible , and transforming some of the sculpture / landmarks to the kind of landmarks my eye is looking for. obviously perception o f a 2-d environment as a 3-d 'world' is going to radically alter this for every individuals 'hardwired' mental translation process .

er, but I wanted to make clear I am not under any circumstances knocking you are try to compete or something 😀, I am a total amatuer , it's just really fun to do this ( well except for the floor texture(s); I must have made about a billion of those so far and NONE of them look right ) and I am , of course catering ( to thte best of my ability ) to my own perverted tastes .

I try to avoid being anal most of the time , I am not really shooting for massive technical accuracy ( see note at bottom ) more like when switching between hi-low res that the textures for low res look as if they may have been generated from the hi-res textures . And even at that I am still changing things occasionally for lack of technical skill or worse , no better reasons than , er, because ..( that's my answer and I am sticking to it 😀

about the plants and foot prints I simply couldn't figure out how to do a good foot print ( then, that was a couple of months ago I think I have it figured out now 😉, and I didn't have decent plant pictures and I needed something to experiment with ( hey it was on the desk right in front of me and green at least, though the plants I used forlevel 3 have more 'accurate' representation 😀

You know it is the obviously professionly clean aspect of your panels that got me started thinking about how modern harware could ease some of the physcological burdens of viewing 'grit' . given the medium the gritty nature of my textures look REALLY bad at 'distance' when veiwed at 640x480 without AA or ansi .

in no way it looks as remotely close to the original as TRX, in my humble opinion

😀 thank god it's not a race . though fear not I am as stubborn and almost as intelligent as a box of rusty nails , I shall continue to sally forth rusty armor, donkey and all .

oh , and by the way thanks .

note on accuracy :

In the original TR the accuments are a mismash of different cultures. for example it is highly unlikely that one would find the the center of the Aztec( mexico city ) calender wheel in a temple entrance in peru . In fact the temple is adorned with a blend of anachronistic aztec , olemec And a few traces of mayan glyphs/scupltures, few if any would ever be found in peru ( some would have to travel back in time in fact ) which was home to the Inca .

For example the calender wheel or the sun stone is an aztec artifact carved in 1479 and found under mexico city in 1760 (pretty far from peru) . A very recent artifact considering that the aztecs did not have as sophisticated or detailed a method of time keeping ( as the MAyans ) , though it was most cerainly taken from the mAYAns system due to the fact that the origin of the MAyan cultureand calender predates the aztec sun wheel by 0ver 5,000 years .

The picture used by the TR artists only depicted the center of the stone , which may have been done for space/clarity considrations or may have been done in a misinterpreation of how the mayans / aztecs wrote time . That being that ALL time was written in relation to 'zero time ' or about 3114 BC so that todays date would be written as x number of days months and years since day zero ( a bit cumbersome I know )

so the thinking may have been that if they only shown the center of the wheel that it would infer greater age , although the calender only shows the structure not the actual date and truncated as it is it only represents a calender that enumerates the information down to the 20months ( a calender without days in fact ) . Adding the outer ring to the wheel makes more sense but still doesn't reconsile the troubles of a recent aztec monument in an "ancient" incan (presumable if one is in peru ) tomb.

the 'dragon' or feathered serpent glyph carving over teh 'faces' entrance door is of teotichaun design ( end of the early clasic period ) and is taken from the directly from ( thoughthey threw in th e mayan gylph for death in the recursive areas ) the west wall of the temple of quetzalcoatl ( again 'central america')

most of the carved faces are of olemec orign , thougth the architecture of carving (structural) is a mix of aztec and mayan ( the walls are especially MAyan , whereas most of the moulding designs are aztec or mayan )

in the second and third level the architecture and glyhps are predominately mayan whereas the temple architecture is taken directly from an olemec site ( I even found the picture I believe they generate the original texture from )

So to be accurate ( anal) enough to worry about plant placement ( which moves and changes much faster than stone or cultural placement ) seems to pail when considering over-all 'accuracy' in regard to where the temple /tomb is actually located . (if the cultural references got older the deeper one went in it woul;d make sense I suppose , but one would still be dabbling in central american cultures )

As a curious side note the word 'Quincunx' is the 'common' name given to Mayan Glyph 'T585' the emblem glyph of the Piedras negras or the (place of ) black stones . [/quote]

(note con't) anyway I am getting long winded and that stuff doesn't really matter anyway . I suppose that the culture mismash can be correlated under the auspice of an alien super advanced race that spawned the various cultures from a common source, and in that light the feathered serpent motif on the entrance ( over the bamboo ) starts to make a kind of sense as one can also find the the feathered serpent enmeshed with mayan figures on the (huge outer) walls of Xochicalco.

Yeah that and as you well noticed dogs have four mostly non-ink dispensing toes 😀

Heh, you're preaching to the converted! 😀

I've had a longterm interest in ancient cultures, and when Tomb Raider came out it was mana from heaven -- to be able to 'virtually' romp about in old tombs and temples was simply great. The first thing I noticed was the weird homogenous nature of Core's take on South American and Meso-American cultures. Indeed, I've discussed it at length on Tomb Raider forums...

Anyway, one can take these things too far.... 😉

That's why in my textures I have remained close to what Core did -- to match the spirit of the game -- and I haven't corrected them to be architecturally or chronologically correct.

In fact, that my be an interesting project -- re-texture TR to be historically accurate! 😁

History-correcting may not be an option given the atlantis /alien /ancient culture nature of the TR story arc. I mean if I worked for the MArvel ( as in comics ) bullshit team ( you know the guys who make up "plausible" excuses , like 'the extradimensional source' ) I would say that the TR tombs predate all the other cultures and hence it was the seeding factor for history .

for example one could speculate that the Sun stone calendar was reproduced after the aztec equivilient of Indiana Jones travbeled to the fabled (secret) tomb of one of the 'progenetors' and retreived the image of the calendar wheel so that the "new " aztec temple could sport a reproduction of an 'official' holy artifact .

I suppose it's just a matter of fixing a defining correlation for the story arc , and then implimenting the "misplaced" cultural references as the first indiana jones type of archeological clues ( the mismatch itself would become something that should peak the curiousity of those with eyes to see it ) .

from that perspective the cultural influences in the tombs should possibly get younger the deeper one gets because each (individual, 'cultures' ) exploration of the tomb(s) would penetrate a little deeper thanks to the earlier explorers ( as is evidenced by the skeletons ) . So the equation would become ; younger culture = deeper penetration into the tomb . Of course one could not count on the linear progression of cultural exploration over centuries , or even that secondary ( tertiary , etc, etc) explorers would "go the distance " , so trying to define

how to historically adjust the tombs becomes some what problematic .

Frankly I am inlined to stick with the jumble as I think it kind of fits with the idea of A new and revolutionary archelogical find . Certainly the 'revelations' in tombraider would qualify as paradigm busting 😀

on a different note

****

Kaminari,

you mention my use of color and contrast . Those two issues are interesting ( i think ) for anyone trying to create textures for this glide OpenGL hybrid .

The problem with the old 3dfx glide process is the pesky free color wash and blur that the textures receive. Maybe it no longer has to do withthe glide process but the textures do get a little washed out and slightly fuzzy when veiwed in game .

I notice dhtat contrast changes were really noticeable at certain 'threshold points'.

In one example in one of the wall/floor textures I could increase the contrast to something like 30% and the texture still looked 'flat' , but once I hit 31% it appeared to have signifigant depth when veiwed in game .
ther was a small range of perhaps5 or 6 percentage points which I could 'adjust' the apparent depth , but over about 37% the texture didn't get any "deeper" looking .

The perceived 'depth' is very much a narrow plateau , this may be due to the gamma level of the game interacting with the set level of constrast on the texture so that the combination of the two factors limits the range where human perceception looks for the information to interpret depth .

But , to turn a phrase , that's the rub . Trying to interpret a 3-d environment from 2d information is gonind to be Heavily ( if not entirely ) dependant on each individuals combination of the brains trained ( learned ) and hardwired interpretational capacity .

It's the nature of drift in the physcology of interpretational capacity from individual to individual that I considered . To be precise the constrast plateau made it quite clear to me that the range for depth information is pretty small when compared to it's over-all importance.

So much so that I felt small variations in hardware ( computer ) set-ups combined with the very personal interpretation process' that each individual uses to interpret depth could very well lead to others having a vastly different experience ( hence 'feeling' ) with the textures than I as the creator would .

I decided that eschewing subtlety (shiver) and pushing the texture contrast a little closer to "saturation" would give an more accurate translation of the intentional feel . IN a way it's like cutting a hole inthe hood of your car and adding that big ass blower scoop .

The color decision , though i know over use of color is a sure sign of the amatuer, is one made in two parts ;
a) I like color
and
b) when veiwing real ruins it becomes very clear that while great swaths of time tend to render things ever more grittily in black and white a vast of color is still abundant . Every thing from strange lichen and moss to the difference of moisture on broken and unbroken stone ( much the way a wet sea shell is very different from a dry one ) .

plus the 'ancient' people of meso america liked color in almost garish profusion . they painted every thing , and where they didn't paint they color plastered or used various colored stones for beautification . Even ruined and dilapadated the ancient structures still boast an amazing diversity of color even if one has to scratch the surface a little bit to get it .

Now the real trick will be to see if I can moderate the color when it comes time to create something that does not look a bazillion years weathered 😉

Phew! 😉 I just enjoy making textures!

Anonymous wrote:

The problem with the old 3dfx glide process is the pesky free color wash and blur that the textures receive. Maybe it no longer has to do withthe glide process but the textures do get a little washed out and slightly fuzzy when viewed in game .

You sure got a point there. The 3dfx renderer is much, much more washed out than the software or Saturn/PSX renderer, and this has always been a problem to me. For some reason, the crisp colours of the original engine are lost in the process, yet the Voodoo renderer uses the very same textures!

I did an interesting experiment in Glidos once by using a pure white texture for absolutely everything. I tried various gamma / contrast / luminosity combinations without any significant success. All I got were various shades of light grey.

Whatever Glide wrapper is used, it's impossible to get a pure white because the Voodoo renderer seems to be hardcoded to apply a kind of 'David Hamilton' (fuzzy) photo look over the original level files (even when their built-in light information is set to default), which results in too much luminosity and not enough contrast. Add to this that the lighting in TR1 is not dynamic, and you'll realize that the control you have over how the colours are rendered in the game is minimal at best.

I believe there's nothing that can be done about it from the wrapper point of view. As a matter of fact, I don't believe Glide or OpenGL are at fault there, since of lot of Voodoo games had perfectly crisp colours. But it'd be interesting to see how the original textures are rendered when used in, for example, a TRLE custom level set to plain luminosity.

I agree, the washed out-ness is a bit annoying -- I partially got around it by lowering my the gamma in Glidos down to around 0.70 -- while this doesn't 'correct' the problem, stuff generally looks richer.

Some of the graphics I've taken this to account on (like the Title graphic) and have actually booster it's contrast by using an adjustment layer over the whole image in Photoshop before saving out to PNGs.

Incidentally, PNGs retain gamma information -- does Glidos use that data at all?

There's a Glide command to set gamma and Glidos honours that. I have some recollection of TR1 setting it the opposite way to most games.

'David Hamilton' (fuzzy) photo look

heheh, 🤣 😀

I was running my glidos TR gamma lower also , originally , but then I noticed the screen shots came out *really* dark and so tried to start accomodating something that was a little more "gamma tolerent"

I did an interesting experiment in Glidos

that IS interesting , as I think there might be something hinged around the way uneven areas of "lighting" are applied to individual textures.

The ones that seem the most washed out to me are the ones that have an almost uniform light across the entire texture , and the ones that seem the most crisp and colorfull are the ones that have very high contrast in the applied 'ambient' lighting .

for example in the cave level on the first landing in the room containing the two wolves teh switch for the first set of double doors and the secret suncalendar area it has a really good texture reproduction in the ceiling tiles that have the "shadows " on them , but in contrast the floor tiles suffer horribly from the blur wash in the areas that have uniform 'lighting' .

possibly the blur factor is some hardwired expression of poorly ( by 3dfx Voodoo Rush stuff ) implimented 'lighting' instructions, or as you said too much luminousity and too littel contrast , only I am adding that possibly it is aggravated or more prevalent in "bright" or "well / evenly lit" situations .

that's how it seems to me anyway.

Personally I have an old voodoo 3 , 2 voodoo rush boards (s-video, composite outputs plus output for 3-d glasses ) , 2 3dfx 2 boards ,and 2 versions of the original 3dfx cards .

It could simply be brain damage on my part by I always thought the Rush drivers/ boards ( had to use the rush driver with the V3 ) never looked as good ( in the case of TR) as the plain voodoos did .Also the rush drivers have that texture "outline" / mismatch problem which is prevalent sometimes on walls , LAra's head but always on the gun flashes .

In case you are curious I aquired all the old voodooo hardware ( with the exception of the V3) solely for the ability to play TR and carmagedon with the 3dfx graphics ( I dilligently tried to get one of those Orchid cards ( can't remember The name off hand ) that had "reversepass thru" because it had some kind of speciall driver/hardware that allowed one to pump a signal back into another video card so as to use it's outputs

I wanted to use the voodoo I drivers coming off a voodoo I boards but play it on a big screen television . At teh time the only way to do this was with the reverse pass by using some other cards TV out capabilities .

anyway ,

I do not understand what this means :

opposite way to most games.

?

ahh , I think the card was called the 2500 spectra or some such ( don't hold me to this though )

oops it's a canopus , here it is :

http://www.hardware-one.com/reviews/spectra25 … ECTRA2500_1.pdf

I finally got around to playing the Caves with your textures, Guest. (Please consider registering or posting with an actual name -- it gets very confusing when multiple 'Guests' post).

The boosted contrast and extra dirt detail really does work well, better than I expected. You base rock texture is pretty good and achieves a good balance between being like the original and adding detail, something I found difficult to achieve.

But on the whole i found your textures to be much further from the original game than my own. Not so much in interpretation, but in *tone*. I thnk you've probably gone too far with the high contrast for it to have the same feel as the original game. Maybe if you tone that down a bit it might work better?

After reading yours and Kaminari posts I went back and tried to veiw my texture set with ( as much as one can ) an "external eye" , and I have to agree my textures are set to a very persopnal feel .
I guess it would be more acurate to say that I am trying to accurately reproduce the feeling I get : )

Although one of the main factors I have found is the one of in-game constrast . To that end I am trying to keep my new texture close to the original histogram signature of the originals . Of course this method has to be only a general guide line , and ( as in the case of the floor texture ) can be impossible to maintain when trying to add detail .

I did notice that taking a texture and colorizing a copy of it totally in shades of blue then reapplying it to the original texture ( as a color layerof various transparency ) can help overcome *some* of the texture wash process , though this throws the texture even farther from the original . But , having about a zillion more colors to work with ( than the original TR team ) leave one with the 'problem'
of deciding how much additional color can be added to the texture before the 'feeling' drifts signifigantly.(wih a straight ( no additional) color adaptation the game feels like one huge dusty cardboard box even with other wise hi-res details )

Generally I have been learning through the whole process ( I keep figuring out how to do things that I had to "fudge' at teh beginning ) and when forced to make a choice, have been using things I simply like better than the original ( often times the result that I have choosen are ones accidentally stumbled upon ) .

But Kaminari nailed it when he said "very personal" . Also I kind of got the impression ( from reading some of these forum posts ) that you wished to complete this texture set yourself , so I avoided using any of your stuff ( this has caused me some consternation as I will never be able to get a better looking passport ( though i did find a nice picture of the 'old' brown passport to use ) , and will be hard pressed for something as pleasing as your title screen ) .

Which brings me to the hi-constrast thing and the floor texture .

There is a REALLY sharp cut off on the contrasts effectiveness , sometimes cutting the contrast by merely one percent can COMPLETELY "flatten" the texture ( then the texture simply looks like is has weird black splotches on it ) .

I have generated over 250 ( shiver ) floor textures with numberous ( probably in the 4 digit range ) color / contrast variations of each.

This "research" illuminated for me the very narrow contrast corridor one has to work in. I like the effect sometimes but when everything looks "contrast induced bumpy" the eye (oops brain ) does not interpret it as depth but rather as illumination ( which aggravates the recursive pattern problems ) .

Since I couldn't iron out the recursive issue using detail enhanced "direct" conversion textures , i decided to leave some to of the original texture "mismatches" in place in favor of having some hi-contrast textures to allieviate the "Flat" effect when I could ( Obviously my skill level is the limiting factor in how effectively this has been implimented ) .

basically my "rule" so far has been to try and emphasize ( things that are mostly used for ) wall textures as "depth objects" and things mostly used for floor texture as "flat" objects .

Most this is because hi constrast on the mostly uniform floor lighting gets interpreted ( by my brain at least ) as blotchiness ( dark recurrisve patterns ) instead of depth .

You are right about the differential from the original and the contrast thing . Though so far I simply haven't found a better way to add something to the textures without making everything look "too busy " and still too flat . I have several different versons of the wall rock textures but the ones with less contrast have a tendancy to look "flat" and painting like .

as an experiment I took pictures of rocks and simply dropped the original texture colors on them . The "depth of those textures is obsolutely astonishing , and when looking at teh histogram have a contrast even higher han the one I am implimenting . I simply haven't been good enough to emulate the natural ( obscenely high) patterns of constrast in a way tha the brain recoginizes as 'organic' and ' natural ' so I thnk the textures come off a little like "TR the anime " versions 😀 *LOL*

the blue overlay thing is a relatively new discovery for me and it might be that I could use a blue color layer as a contrast tool insted of the black / white method I have up until this point .

hmm? , perhaps I should simply chuck the idea of sticking to the original too closely and simply run with the idea of "my personal favorites" . It definitely gives me fuel for the fire 😀

(p.s. going to registar now , and by the way thanks ...that base rock texture was a *bitch* and a half to generate )

Interesting It would seem that one cannot register with a user name of three characters .

Anyway I imagine you have done this a zillion times but here is the 'real rock' texture with an unsaturation / lightness corrected colorization