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Anisotropic Filtering & DarkSpace |
Pantheon
Marshal
Palestar
Joined: May 29, 2001
Posts: 1789
|  Posted: 2011-08-01 17:48
I'm very aware that most of you have machines capable of doing this simple texture filtering method that most of you have no idea about.
For quite some time, almost all games have used Trilinear Filtering, which is super quick and fancy and all that. The only issue with Trilinear Filtering is that when you view textures at steep viewing angles, they start to distort and become washed out. You've probably seen this in lots of games.
Now, Antistropic Filtering was designed to stop this, but not many people use it, or know about it (even in games that give the option to use it!). If you've got a machine that's puttering along quite nicely with DarkSpace, I'd suggest enabling it. You don't need to set it to stupid levels like x16, but x4 or x8 will do just fine. Do note, however, that the higher the setting, the more VRAM on your graphics card it'll use, and the more horsepower it needs to use to filter the textures.
I highly recommend enabling it, as it enhances the viewing pleasure by quite some margin, and on todays hardware it's practically a no-brainer, as most modern graphics cards have special parts on them specifically designed to deal with it.
You can find the Anisotropic Filtering option in your graphics card driver settings. Do note that this is not to be mistaken for Anti-Aliasing, which is VERY demanding on the graphics card!
I'm sure we'll enable some form of this in the future, but remember to disable it when you want to play another game!
Here are some example screenshots with it enabled for your viewing pleasure:
[ This Message was edited by: Pantheon on 2011-08-01 17:50 ]
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MarineKingPrime
Marshal
Exathra Alliance Fleet
Joined: October 04, 2010
Posts: 239
From: CSS CheezyBagels
| Posted: 2011-08-01 20:30
ok.
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*FTL*Soulless
Marshal
Joined: June 25, 2010
Posts: 787
From: Dres-Kona
| Posted: 2011-08-01 20:30
thats all good and dandy but you have to tell poeple how to access their card.
FOR AMD/ATI Users you have to go to to their website and download the latest drivers to gain access to your card controller
FOR NVIDIA Users you also have to download the latest drivers here
offers Great help in changing the settings of your Graphics card without me having to type up at least a page just to tell anyone
[ This Message was edited by: Soulless *ADM* on 2011-08-01 20:31 ]
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-Shadowalker-™
Admiral
Galactic Navy
Joined: September 23, 2007
Posts: 709
From: Shadows
| Posted: 2011-08-01 20:40
WOAH... ive never seen ds ships look that good before...
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apate
Fleet Admiral
Joined: March 21, 2010
Posts: 205
| Posted: 2011-08-01 22:08
Quote:
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On 2011-08-01 20:40, -Shadowalker-™ wrote:
WOAH... ive never seen ds ships look that good before...
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I'm just thrilled that the stars look like stars now, instead of bright circles of color....
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Talien
Marshal
Templar Knights
Joined: May 11, 2010
Posts: 2044
From: Michigan
| Posted: 2011-08-01 22:13
Speaking of stars.....it is literally painful looking at a star in Darkspace, can something be done about the brightness?
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Adapt or die.
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Kenny_Naboo
Marshal
Pitch Black
Joined: January 11, 2010
Posts: 3823
From: LobsterTown
| Posted: 2011-08-01 22:49
Quote:
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On 2011-08-01 22:13, Talien wrote:
Speaking of stars.....it is literally painful looking at a star in Darkspace, can something be done about the brightness?
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Get a pair of Oakleys man, thermonuclear protection LOL. 
Anyway Jack, nice visuals.
But I do have one comment on the bump mapping. Reduce it a bit more.
On your bump map, filter it so that the levels are closer to the 127 median.
Reason is, ships in DS are supposed to be huge. Eg, that UGTO dread there is supposed to be 1.5km long. At those scales, any grooves in the hull from plating will be very very minute when viewed from the distances that we see onscreen.
If the bump mapping is too ... how shall I put it?... obvious, deep, or too pronounced ... then the ship ends up looking like a small toy instead of the titan that it supposedly is.
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MarineKingPrime
Marshal
Exathra Alliance Fleet
Joined: October 04, 2010
Posts: 239
From: CSS CheezyBagels
| Posted: 2011-08-02 00:51
there isnt much detail on the ships, they will always feel like little toys
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Lark of Serenity
Grand Admiral
Raven Warriors
Joined: June 02, 2002
Posts: 2516
| Posted: 2011-08-02 02:17
the one thing on DS ships that REALLY needs to be fixed is the light effect on the lights on faction logos etc.
it looks so, so bad on most ships. it used to look so good. what happened?
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Admiral Larky, The Wolf
Don't play with fire, play with Larky.
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SpaceGK
Marshal
*Renegade Space Marines*
Joined: July 26, 2009
Posts: 323
From: Ontario, Canada
| Posted: 2011-08-02 03:57
I have to enable shaders for anisotropy to work. Problem is that disabling shaders on my system creates a red glow around the sun. Disabling HDR after that clears that up, and sharpens everything up a bit. Basically what I'm saying is play around with the settings a bit if it's not working.
I tried running anisotropy at 16x, which doesn't seem to create any noticeable fps drop for me (sround 100fps in beta), but I'm running a 1.5Gb nVidea Geforce so i have extra power to spare in the first place.
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Kenny_Naboo
Marshal
Pitch Black
Joined: January 11, 2010
Posts: 3823
From: LobsterTown
| Posted: 2011-08-02 07:05
Quote:
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On 2011-08-02 02:17, Lark (Retired) wrote:
the one thing on DS ships that REALLY needs to be fixed is the light effect on the lights on faction logos etc.
it looks so, so bad on most ships. it used to look so good. what happened?
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That lighted logo think is actually a texture. To get it to work, you use it as a illum map. This is true for all the windows too. The effect works well when you don't have HDR enabled.
Now with HDR, the faux lighted logo doesn't come out very well anymore. Real light sources are not really blending well with the lighted logos, so the effects look a bit off when viewed from some angles. In the dark however, it still looks OK.
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SpaceAdmiral
Grand Admiral
Joined: May 05, 2010
Posts: 1005
| Posted: 2011-08-02 13:09
How do I enable this anisotropic filtering?
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Nightsabre
Marshal
Joined: February 21, 2005
Posts: 66
| Posted: 2011-08-03 00:20
I've always had mine set to max. Its nice and all but not all that noticable in a game that has bearly any geometry in it. Its not Like I have time to zoom up and check out how awesome my ship is.
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SpaceGK
Marshal
*Renegade Space Marines*
Joined: July 26, 2009
Posts: 323
From: Ontario, Canada
| Posted: 2011-08-03 11:16
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On 2011-08-02 13:09, SpaceAdmiral wrote:
How do I enable this anisotropic filtering?
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I'm not sure what you have as far as graphics cards go, but for me I have to go to the nVidia control panel, on the side click 'manage 3D settings' and then turn Anisotropic Filtering on. Setting it to 8x seems to work just fine.
In order to notice a difference in-game I had to enable shaders. Disabling HDR made everything look alot sharper too.
But this could all be different for you especially if you don't have an nVidia card or if your drivers are out of date...
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$yTHe {C?}
Grand Admiral
Sundered Weimeriners
Joined: September 29, 2002
Posts: 1292
From: Arlington, VA
| Posted: 2011-08-03 11:39
Computers do not have horsepower I question your qualifications as a developer if you think computers have internal combustion engines in them.
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