*Team Avalanche: WMRP(WorldMap Retexture Project)*

[pyrozen]

WorldMap Retexture Project

A Part of the Team Avalanche 2D Overhaul

OFFICAL TEAM AVALANCE TROUBLSHOOTING THREAD

I have redesigned the first topic to reflect the progress made.  The goal of this mod is to replace EVERY texture on the world map!  There are quite a few(100+) so this will take quite awhile.  All original sizes are being upscaled x8, so they all appear much crisper and more detailed than the bleh originals.  

Here are screens of recent progress:







-=RELEASES=-
ALL RELEASES ARE NOW PACKAGED IN THE TAOH AUTOINSTALLER
NO DOWNLOADS WILL BE FOUND IN THIS THREAD

lee

[pyrozen]

Textures Identified:
fld- 90% of the grass ingame
fld_**- all the other grass, with the exception of the areas around forest,dirt,beaches
farm***  - all pertain to the chocobo farm
wood - The tops of 90% of forests
wod-e2 - the sides of 90% of forests

i really would like to find the texture that makes up the light green area around the chocobo farm, but i have scoured the .lgp and have comeup with nearly everything else.

lee

[pyrozen]

I've gotten alot of the grass textures figured out, as well as the textures that blend light/dark areas into the grass(otherwise it's all the same color and it looks like crap).


ignore the light ares around the forest, i have to match the darkness with the surrounding grass still.

next up is a few of the less used grasses, then the dirt areas, then the mountains.  Oceans and rivers will be last since they're all animated.  I've also got alot of the forest retexured as well, but forget to grab a photo of them.

lee

[Timu Sumisu]

You should post the originals, I can take a whack at redrawing them

[pyrozen]

sorry, maybe i'm really dense, but the originals of what Let me know, i would love to have a bit of help with this(especially the mountians, I'm very inexperienced at making rock textures).  Also, these are all preliminary textures, with the final versions being polished a it more.  I'm also working at 512x512 for the largest textures, since 1024x1024 really doesn't make any impact over these, other than the total filesize of the image.

lee

[Timu Sumisu]

i meant the grass

[sl1982]

sorry, maybe i'm really dense, but the originals of what Let me know, i would love to have a bit of help with this(especially the mountians, I'm very inexperienced at making rock textures).  Also, these are all preliminary textures, with the final versions being polished a it more.  I'm also working at 512x512 for the largest textures, since 1024x1024 really doesn't make any impact over these, other than the total filesize of the image.

lee

1024 might not be too bad of an idea since many people run at more then 2x the original image(640x480) it better to downscale then upscale in my opinion

[obesebear]

sorry, maybe i'm really dense, but the originals of what Let me know, i would love to have a bit of help with this(especially the mountians, I'm very inexperienced at making rock textures).  Also, these are all preliminary textures, with the final versions being polished a it more.  I'm also working at 512x512 for the largest textures, since 1024x1024 really doesn't make any impact over these, other than the total filesize of the image.

lee

1024 might not be too bad of an idea since many people run at more then 2x the original image(640x480) it better to downscale then upscale in my opinion

But with your mod, plus this one pyrozen is doing, that is a lot of 1024x1024 textures.  And if Aali is planning to preload all of these into a memory cache, that's going to eat up a lot of RAM that not everyone has...

The grass is looking really really good by the way

[sl1982]

Ram is fairly cheap these days. And aali could also put a flag in his config file to downscale textures for memory limited computers

edit: also couldnt he store textures in vram?

[Hellbringer616]

the RAM requirement for FF7 is only 32MB, with TA (team Avalanche)'s entire GUI overhaul it's only 4 more MB to cache data in. i figure by now every PC has AT LEAST 512MB of RAM. but anything running Vista is at least 1GB so i don't think RAM usage would be to bad.

80% of new PC's have 4GB of RAM now, and the other 20% has 3GB. so i don't think a RAM increase would matter much.

Amazing grass textures though

[sl1982]

the RAM requirement for FF7 is only 32MB, with TA (team Avalanche)'s entire GUI overhaul it's only 4 more MB to cache data in. i figure by now every PC has AT LEAST 512MB of RAM. but anything running Vista is at least 1GB so i don't think RAM usage would be to bad.

80% of new PC's have 4GB of RAM now, and the other 20% has 3GB. so i don't think a RAM increase would matter much.

Amazing grass textures though

4MB so far lots of good stuff in the works here

[Hellbringer616]

Oh i know you are. I was just pointing out. That i don't think increasing the RAM requirement would be that bad

[sl1982]

Not really. Im sure if we redid all the assets in the game to a 1024x1024 texture map we wouldnt even come close to scratching 512MB

[obesebear]

Not really. Im sure if we redid all the assets in the game to a 1024x1024 texture map we wouldnt even come close to scratching 512MB

512Mb is all well and good, but remember, the OS uses some of that, as do other programs constantly running in the background.  These worldmap textures are so small and never seen up close, that 512x512 texture is more than enough

[halkun]

Uh, guys?

You need to learn the difference between video memory and system memory.

For example, My graphics card is an  Nvidia card with 512 MB of memory. That needs to hold not only the textures, but also two copies of the display, and video data for my second monitor.

If I'm running  1600x1200 at a bit depth of 24 bytes, multiply that by two and that's how much video memory I'm using just for the display. Anything left over is for textures in my graphics card.

Let's put this another way.

When figuring out what size to make the textures, imagine the absolute largest it will be in the game  and make it that size. Double it the model you are textureing  has a backside.

Here's an example...

Magic at *AT MOST* takes up a quarter of my screen. So if you make a texture that is greater than 512x512 you are wasting my video memory because there is likelihood I'll never see the detail and you make the system really start to drag when it load textures. It doesn't matter if it's cached, when you make that initial load, the system is going to stall.

Characters need 102x1024 (And that's pushing it!) because they also never take up more that 1/4 of the screen, but they also have a backside

So what you need to so is figure out the original texture and scale it appropriately. I will say that the new requirement for the game should be 1600x1200 *MAX*. The original game was 32x240 so that means you have to scale your textures by a factor of 5.

Don't pull numbers out of your rear-end or else you are going to break the game, use the original texture sizes and scale. Squaresoft already did the texture math already for us.

[Tekkie.X]

World map textures should be no more than 512x512 even 256x256 would be more than enough for the extra detail, most of the world map textures are tiled anyway, larger textures would appear noisy.

[Timu Sumisu]

I tend to just make everything big and downscale it after to the desired size.

[sl1982]

I tend to just make everything big and downscale it after to the desired size.

This

edit: Not to mention arent we being as shortsighted as square if we only design this to work with technology that is out now? Monitors with high resolutions are already out and will get cheaper over time. Dell has a monitor that can handle 2560x1600 right now

[halkun]

So can my moniter.... It's analog

I'm not saying don't keep the textures around, but if you are going to be making worldmap textrues @ 1024x1024, you pretty much disqualified my P4 with 512mb 7400 AGP card.

[sl1982]

And aali could also put a flag in his config file to downscale textures for memory limited computers

Could this not be an option? I know many games have different texture sizes for different computer setups

[sl1982]

That is cool, but the grass texture looks like one of those carpets that cover the whole floor. Don't know what they are called. Did you find out how to extract the world map model, or models?

Good old fashioned shag carpet?

[Hellbringer616]

Hmm i didn't take video memory into account, Again i wouldn't really have an issue with that, BUT i know that most people don't have top of the line video cards here.. So then we should try and not make it anymore then 128MB. since i believe that or 256 is average

[sl1982]

Hmm i didn't take video memory into account, Again i wouldn't really have an issue with that, BUT i know that most people don't have top of the line video cards here.. So then we should try and not make it anymore then 128MB. since i believe that or 256 is average

Easy fix. Cache all textures in system memory. Pull what is needed into vram. eg. When on world map all those textures in vram, when going into battle swap those out for battle textures. Without input from aali we may all be talking out our butts though. Who knows what magic he can pull off

[pyrozen]

That is cool, but the grass texture looks like one of those carpets that cover the whole floor. Don't know what they are called. Did you find out how to extract the world map model, or models?

yeah i know, it's not the final version of the grass by any means.  I'm still going through the long process of determining which textures go where, and bright textures make it much easier to distinguish which custom texture is being used.  The final will look more washed out like the originals, and not like something out of a bubblegum anime film.

*edit* also, i've looked at these textures at 1600x1200 and i see no reason to make them 1024x1024, the differnce isn't even decernible.  It will make the final package obscenly large in size, considering the world map is made up of 50+(that i've seen) different files.  512x512 is perfectly acceptable for the world map, and as someone else said, 256x256 is also passable, but you being to lose detail.

lee

[Hellbringer616]

512 sounds good to me then. If you can't tell the detail between the two that is