The Harvest Moon Consortium

[Tiberius_Morguhn]

Does anyone know if the NWN1 engine is smart enough to use mip maps if they are included in DDS textures?

[OldMansBeard]

Does anyone know if the NWN1 engine is smart enough to use mip maps if they are included in DDS textures?

Not sure - I could be completely wrong - but I think it insists on them. That is, mipmaps are the sole reason for NWN1 using DDS.

Unless I'm confusing them with something else.

OMB

[Tiberius_Morguhn]

Not sure - I could be completely wrong - but I think it insists on them. That is, mipmaps are the sole reason for NWN1 using DDS.

Unless I'm confusing them with something else.

OMB

Okay, I was wondering about that. In GIMP, the mipmaps show up as separate layers when you have the DDS plugin enabled. I know that many DDS textures (including Bioware's own) for NWN don't have mipmaps - which are just smaller, scaled versions of the original. I know when you convert to TGA it destroys the mipmaps because the TGA format can't handle layers. I will have to experiment more because you can do some freaky things with mipmaps based on distance (make each layer a different shade so that a creature/object changes color the closer you get to it). Anyways, thanks for the info!

[lord rosenkrantz]

From what I gathered, OMB should be right about it, mipmaps are the main reason why nwn1 uses dds textures, as they reduce the load due to texture weight every time the distance allows the engine to scale down the texture

[OldMansBeard]

Okay, I was wondering about that. In GIMP, the mipmaps show up as separate layers when you have the DDS plugin enabled. I know that many DDS textures (including Bioware's own) for NWN don't have mipmaps - which are just smaller, scaled versions of the original. I know when you convert to TGA it destroys the mipmaps because the TGA format can't handle layers. I will have to experiment more because you can do some freaky things with mipmaps based on distance (make each layer a different shade so that a creature/object changes color the closer you get to it). Anyways, thanks for the info!

The GIMP plugin doesn't always handle NWN1 DDS correctly, at least not for me. I find it better to use NWNExplorer to export the base image as TGA and the Bioware DDS compression tool to go back from the base. But the compression tool seems to generate its own mipmaps, which doesn't help if you want to supply shaded ones.

Nice idea, though. How about a ghost that's transparent until you get real close? Or the opposite, scenery that fades out when close up so it doesn't obscure your view?

Lateral tilefade. Mmm.

[Michael DarkAngel]

I would have to say NWN1 does not use mipmaps. Bioware's DDS format is not a standard DDS format. If you use NWExplorer you'll see three folders for textures (*_tpa, *_tpb and *_tpc). Each folder holds all the DDS textures (and in the case of the expansions TGA textures also) for the game. Why three folders? Each folder has a different size file for each texture, in theory. :huh:

So no mipmaps in NWN1 DDS textures but in most cases you can find three different size textures. And not used for distance if I'm not mistaken, but for texture quality instead.


HTH,


MDA

[Tiberius_Morguhn]

I would have to say NWN1 does not use mipmaps. Bioware's DDS format is not a standard DDS format.

That was my suspicion as well so that is why I asked initially. Damn Bioware's non-standardization!

So no mipmaps in NWN1 DDS textures but in most cases you can find three different size textures. And not used for distance if I'm not mistaken, but for texture quality instead.

The distance factor does equal texture quality in a way = the further away an in game object is from your viewpoint, the smaller the size of a texture you can apply to it and still obtain the same "quality" of look. Smaller textures = less vid memory to occupy = more room for up close textures/objects.

[Michael DarkAngel]

The distance factor does equal texture quality in a way = the further away an in game object is from your viewpoint, the smaller the size of a texture you can apply to it and still obtain the same "quality" of look. Smaller textures = less vid memory to occupy = more room for up close textures/objects.

I actually thought about that an hour or so after I posted but I didn't feel like editing my post, and forgot all about it until I saw your post.


Oh well,


MDA