Whenever I use a 2048 car skin, and take a screenshot of the car, the skin always looks horrible because you can see the jagged edges/pixels on the skin. Then, it occurred to me, that it doesn't appear that there is mip-mapping on the car skins! Only thing I am not sure about is how mip-maps are calculated. It would look much better on high res skins if they were mip-mapped.

you want mip maps on the car skins?

that would lower the resolution at distance and achive the total opposite of what you want.

Mip maps are basicaly lower resolutions of the same texture so that as a 3d object gets farther away you can use less power to render it's surface. Mip maps are generaly in sets that have each level down one quarter of the last size. so a 2048x2048 skin would be 2048x2048, 1024x1024, ect. untill you get to the end of the set, which is from memory usualy 4 or 8 levels including original size.

In some cases it would make the texture appear clearer because of interpolation and the fact that mip maps are already somewhat anti-aliased, but only at ranges where the mip map is displayed instead of the full texture. At screenshot range it would still look the same or be fuzzy, depending on the mip distance.

Actually, if you open a skin with the photoshop DDS plugin, it has mip-maps included

Then they are already used.

I forgot that LFS now uses DDS for skins. If it was jpg, then it would either have to calculate when loaded, or not use them at all.

Quote from wheel4hummer :

Whenever I use a 2048 car skin, and take a screenshot of the car, the skin always looks horrible because you can see the jagged edges/pixels on the skin....

Maybe your drivers config? That doesn´t happen to me

Quote from DragonCommando :

Mip maps are basicaly lower resolutions of the same texture so that as a 3d object gets farther away you can use less power to render it's surface.

I thought that it applied to the single polys, and not the whole surface. For example, when you are looking at a surface at an angle, the farther away part of the surface (the track, for example) is a lower resolution. It isn't the whole object that gets a lower resolution, is it? Wouldn't make sense if that was the case. I guess I might be getting this confused with anistropic filtering, but still, the skin looks really jagged. Maybe I'll try configuring the anti-aliasing and anistropic filtering through my control panel as opposed to LFS since some people have said that there is a difference in quality between the two.

Mip maps work on a set of distance planes, so the texture actualy gets lower resolution at each of these planes. Because it is using a smaller mip map as you get farther away.

So for instance, if the object is on the plane with half on the far side and half on the near side, the half closest will be drawn with a bigger texture (mip map) than the half farther away. Thats why you see lines on the ground in games where the texture gets less detailed with each line.

Its a bit more complicated than that, but at the very basic thats how it works.
It has no ties to polygons at all if my memory is correct.

Quote from DragonCommando :

So for instance, if the object is on the plane with half on the far side and half on the near side, the half closest will be drawn with a bigger texture (mip map) than the half farther away. Thats why you see lines on the ground in games where the texture gets less detailed with each line.

Ahh, thats what I thought. I just wasn't sure how the different texture sizes were used. You made it seem like the whole object got the mipmap applied to it, but that's not what you meant obviously.

I should have made it clear in the beginning, but I was rushing.
Sorry about that.

Probably not the answer that you`re looking for, but if you really want quality on car skins in LFS, .jpg is still the way to go. I`m horrified at times if I take a look at what saving as .dds does to my skins.

It ruins the whole smooth look of the lines/small text/logos, adds jaggies, and even saving with a full set of mipmaps, it just looks nowhere near the clarity of a high quality .jpg skin.

It seems that when I set the Anti-Aliasing and Anistropic filtering in the nvidia control panel, the car skin looks *much* better. But the rest of LFS looks like a blurry mess.