skins <- your own!
skins_hi <- hi res ones that you want to see, but not have appear in the garage list
skins_dds <-- as current
skins_x <-- as current
skins_y <-- as current
Edit: How about a mode to allow 4096 skin downloads for Lemon? Just resize the 512 one to 4096 (it'll keep him happy!), and charge him £1 per skin for the process?
So, my guess is that if I want to SEE my mates Hi-Res skins (not to use them personally), I get him to send me the dds files from HIS skin_dds folder (created by his LFS locally), and put those into my Skin_x folder. (perhapse the skin_y folder since they are a higher-res (>512x512)
??? hows that ??? - Does that work ???
edit: 5 posts appeared.. haha
edit: Well maybe this wont work. The skin_y folder probably only likes 1024x1024 skins.. Nothin bigger..
So maybe I have only suggested a way to get High-Res Skins (1024) and save £1 .. hehe
edit: So maybe a skins_z folder for the 2048x2048 dds skins could be added to LFS? Then eventually if/when 2048 skins become downloadable, the folder is already there and being searched by LFS.
Perhapse if skins_y accepted skins 1024 and 2048 sized then the extra folder wont be neccessary.
edit: Well I tested it, you can put any friends (512 or 1024 or 2048) dds skins in skins_x and LFS still sees them and you can still see your buddies skins. Tested on DEMO so no skins were auto-downloaded. I just manually put them into skins_x and bingo I could see them.
because the skins uv mapping does not mean youlll see the whole width of that skin on your screen ... although i doubt youll even see the difference at any reasonable distance between the camera and the car
as far as i myself am concerned i highly doubt id see the difference between 512 and 1024 while actually driving and im a high res user
oh and btw the next one to misuse the word bandwidth in this thread gets it
i guess if youre right up somebodys tailpipe (that sound thoroughly wrong in retrospect) with a 30" display you might see the difference for the second you have until you crash from being so close to your opponent that you cant see the track and concentrating on his skin rather than the little bit of information youd still get from not looking at his car
well if you really really want to see them you could either manually convert them to dds or place them in your skin folder, start lfs, wait for lfs to convert them and manually copy them from skin_dds to skin_x
or alternatively you could wait for w22 which will probably have these issues resolved
DDS contains DXTC compressed surfaces. DXTC (or S3TC) is a form of compression your video card can handle with hardware, if you have a JPG/PNG/whatever texture it needs to be either recompressed to DXTC or sent to the card without compression. DXT1 without alpha channel gives you a compression ratio of 8:1, meaning the texture will take 1/8 of video memory than what an uncompressed texture would. While it is lossy compression, the saved memory is very well worth the image quality loss in most cases.
For example if you have 32 cars each with 2048x2048 32b textures, without compression those would require 512MB of video memory. With DXTC they only take 64MB. You could double the resolution with DXTC and it would still be half the size of the uncompressed ones.
DDS can also contain pregenerated mipmaps, for other formats they need to be generated every time the texture is loaded.
Ok I will try to answer the where to put which skins question after I tested it all out today.
skins folder (the old one) is the one that contains your JPG skins, on bootup of W21 these are converted to DDS files and the new DDS files appear in the skins_dds folder. Once this conversion is done you can safely delete all the old JPG's skin files as LFS doesn't use them any longer. You can also put other JPG skin files in their to convert them to DDS if you have no other way of doing so.
skins_dds is the folder LFS now uses for skins you can select in your garage.
skin_x folder has your old JPG's 3rd party skins which do not get converted or are never used again. But this folder is where the LFSW skins are downloaded to as new DDS generated from the 512px car or 256 Helmet skins from LFSW.
So if you want to keep all you old downloaded skins working you need to convert all the old JPG's to DDS or just let LFS World download them next time you come accross that skin online.
skin_y folder, I could not get a skin to work from this folder regardless of it resolution, Scawen why is it so?
I haven't read the whole thread Jimmy, BUT I also don't understand why you need such massive skins. I run LFS at a resolution of 2560x1024, and the only car I really car about seeing high-res skins on is MINE... in which case 2048x2048 works FINE. All I can say is that if you have time to NOTICE the terrible quality of the cars' skins around you, then you are not really racing. The only think I see when I'm racing are the tires/brake lights of the car in front of me... everything else is a blur.
Also, you talk about not just high-res skins. I also have those high-res texture packs... and those are high enough. Even on my massive screens the only think that gets blurry at any point is the road surface near the car... thats the only think I can complain about. I don't get what the big deal is. Plus using a skin that big for multiplayer is, in my mind, stupid if it forces everyone else to have to see that on their not-$5000-PC. If you want to use skins that are 239823232x239823232 while on single player, go ahead... but you're going to have to live with it on the public servers.
Just because someone owns a Bugatti Veyron doesn't mean that the highway speed limits should be raised to 253 mph... and that the roads should be resurfaced to be extra smooth, and the guardrails should be replaced with stronger ones, and the signs should be made bigger so you can see them at that speed, and.... get it?
Never tried the converter, have always used the photoshop plugin, but DXT3 offers better quality than DXT1 (less compression), likewise for DXT5 although I think the _biggest_ difference you'll find between DXT1, 3 and 5 is the alpha channel. When I was doing stuff for rF, the main car skin was always saved in DXT3 format and the windows as DXT5 as 5 offers a smoother transparency shade range.
1024x1024 skins in DXT3 mode will be 1.33Mb, 2048x2048 will be 5.33Mb (don't think these filesizes are dependent on mipmaps).
The absolute best AFAIK would be to use the RGB 8,8,8,8 mode rather than a DXT# method (don't now what options are available in the converter).. but this is likely to affect performance on lower-spec boxes.
Just had a thought about this... you're converting compressed JPGs to DDS, which will probably produce poorer results than saving direct as DXT#.
Attached a screenshot (screenshot used to prevent DDS->JPG further compression) of a skin in DDS format that I did for rF.. it's DXT3 at 1024x1024 saved directly from Photoshop and doesn't seem to include the artifacts, or at least not as bad
I've only learnt this much from working with DDS files in rF.. I'm certainly not an expert in this area
DDS files sometimes have a problem with reds that are bumping sharply against blacks or whites- then you'll get a slight bleed effect that isn't too attractive. There's bound to be a lot of redish skins out there (as red makes you go faster) that will have problems when converted to dds.
Re- 4096 as a texture size. I'm sure sometime down the road- high-res will actually mean 4096 X 4096, rather than 1024 or 2048. Most of the new textures I'm making for Aston are in 2048, and in a couple of small cases, I wish I could bump them up to the next size. But I'm talking about big textures that cover lots of area- roads and grass mainly- and it wouldn't be such a problem if some of the track textures weren't so stretched out or scaled up in some places to allow for very broad areas to be covered. A car skin is displayed quite small ingame really- just observe the difference between a car texture and the road texture and how much distance they both need to cover- the point should be clearly made.
I do understand the logic of Jimmy's point that high-res for skins could be 2048, medium 1024 and low 512 (I'm speaking only in visual terms here, not about the practical problems of hosting larger files, which of course is of paramount importance). I don't really care about super clear skins at 2048, never race with that sized skin offline, but I imagine the difference would be noticable. That would make 1024 standard size and I think that's pretty acceptable- but I'm maybe looking forward into the future a bit too much. The currently discussed system is probably more than adequate. 4096 size textures for skins on the other hand just seems way overboard... almost grossly decadent. If you can tell the difference between a 2048 and a 4096 skin ingame, then you're pixel hunting rather than racing I'm afraid, no matter how big you're monitor is.
You didn't understand that Woz was talking about the decompressed size of the image. In order to be viewed, a jpg image (as everything that is compressed) must be unpacked and stored in the memory of your graphic card. Just read again his post and if you have a brain, you should get it.
If you could get hold of a 4096 skin, (pretty difficult in itself) you could try proving to us that it would somehow make a difference. A couple of ingame comparison shots- one at 2048, the other at 4096. Not whole screens, my god, but a good example of contrast. If this isn't possible, then we should assume that you're just spouting techno superiority over the rest of us, which isn't a very nice or mature thing to do...
ok.I am the one who rely a lot on how the graphic looks and I have tried difference between the 2048*2048 and 4096*4096 but to be honest there is almost none if you dont look at skin on car from like 20 centimeters in LFS.Come on... 4096*4096 is too much even for nice screenshots.
During the racing I cant notice different between the 1024 or 2048 version.
Regarding the track textures 4096 would be problem with some older graphic cards which just support 2048 texture resolution.Everything higher would be taxing them a lot and the file size for all higher(4096) textures would be insane.
Hopefully with the upcoming updates from Eric will give us an option to download higher version of textures alone with the standard resolution.I am hoping for the improvement mapping of the textures on the track too.Sometimes its a pain in the a** how its done now.Make it very complicated for modding the textures later.
yes i know, id most cirtanly pay £1 for 2048 textures infact id pay £1 for 1000 and £2 for 2000 if they was 2048, but i dont see the point for 1024 because 1024 is low in some peoples cases, im sure im not the only one who runs a high resolution
Yes, can't wait to test this, if it really works, than big thumbs up for Scawen!
Have someone already tested this? What should we expect, less graphic card power = more FPS, and what about the glitch when someone leaves the garage, does this have influence on that? Is that lag less noticable now?
me and jimmy both have the same machine roughly and i can see what he is saying. I would love to see his suggestion come into LFS because it would be great for us people with powerful machines, but on the other hand, i would like to see it kept as it is now due to quite a majority of people having low/medium spec machines.
I think higher textures would actually start to look pretty weird, and I'm talking about track textures now. I don't have a huge monolithic monitor in my lounge so I can hardly understand what you guys are talking about re: skins. But wouldn't you rather turn over some of that graphics power for the greater good of better modelling of cars/cockpits/more detailed tracks, etc.. before going all bananas with super duper textures? Add a dash of weather, more sophisticated car physics, a dynamic lighting system- and you've got yourself one hell of an entertainment. Sure, if we want to improve the gfx quality now- textures are basically the only avenue that the community can utilise to achieve that, but let's wait to see what Eric's got in store before demanding higher skins etc. As most people say- 1024 for skins is obviously enough, and simply upping that any further isn't going to compensate for the other things which are lacking right now.
if you think that texture size is holding the number of the cars you are totally wrong.Think about it once more.3D engine,car physic etc.Its not mainly about textures size which with hires track textures still fit 3/4 into 128MB memory.
You guys still don't get the point now, do you...
Have you read previous posts, there is NO difference in 2048 and 4096, as i said, you can see everything on a 1024 skin as you can on a 2048 version, everything that matters, i don't have the chance to see if that NOS logo is with little "TM" or without it.. Don't you see the point? When you're racing, you don't notice it... Think about it, HARD...
Anuway, can anyone tell me is the "leaving the pits stutter" now less noticable then before?
Unfortunately for many that is a thing of the past now with 32 cars... which isn't at all a bad thing, 32 cars is brillant and long awaited. Now to get the most out of my old PC to get frame rates back up... just can't afford an upgrade atm. Progress shouldn't be hindered by low end PC's though.
I think the skin idea is good. 1024 isn't all that high quality considering old games such as Operation Flashpoint have allowed the choice of 4096 textures if you wanted. However for bandwidth sake it's a good balance... 4096x4096 skins would cost a fortune, I dare say 1 pound wouldn't cover 2000, maybe 2... hehe.
Im a skinner have been for yonks, and want more visible detail, but there are far more important things to worry about in lfs than charging for the privilege of seeing detail more clearly..Devs are going in wrong direction here..
Yup, I agree Mark, there ARE more worthy things, and I do wonder who decided that this (hi-res paid for texture downloads) was a) wanted by the majority of the community, and b) needed in the first place, as it offers nothing that we can't already do now.
how is 1024 allmost the size? you insain? 
