Texture Troubles

[Boingo the Clown]

I noticed a problem with high res textures while working on DeiMWolf, and I am certain it is something that can not be fixed.

Those of you who remember the original version of DooM, or have at least played the game in its original 320 x 200 resolution, will recall how the textures shimmer and crawl as the player's view point moves. This is because the textures are rescaled as they get farther away, removing different rows and columns to make them smaller. The shimmer is caused by the rows and columns as they repeatedly appear and disappear. When the DooM ports started using higher resolutions than originally used by DooM, the shimmer was virtually eliminated, except for very distant objects, because the textures are much farther away before they start to be rescaled.

Now comes the problem with high res textures. Because the pixels on the textures are smaller, the game starts rescaling high res textures at a distance that is much closer than the old low res textures, which means the old shimmer and crawl is back when high res testures are used.

There is not really anything that can be done about it. It is really all a matter of deciding whether one can live with the shimmer in exchange for the increased resolution or not.

JUst thought I would bring it up is all.

[Graf Zahl]

It's more a question of how graphics cards apply mipmaps. I have seen a definitive descrease in quality between Geforce 5900 and Geforce 6800. The older cards did a considerably better job with far less shimmering.