Realism Invictus

[trashmunster]

No, that was only specifically for detail maps on terrain. Units don't even use detail maps, at least for their intended purpose.

It feels strange, as you zoom out texture detail on units starts to wash out and disappear, like they are not crisp enough, when zoomed in as much as possible it looks good though.

 

[Ahnarras]

You're forgetting the base 10% effect that is always in place, without any buildings. Arena basically doubles the base effect.

I'm not really familiar with the culture slider, usually letting it sit down at 0%, so I'm not sure if I understand your answer.
Do you mean that, by default, the culture slider gives a +1 every 10%, even without the arena ?
And that by having the arena, it is doubled thus giving +1 every 5% ? Which would explain why I gain + for upping the slider by 10%...

Thanks for the others answers, too

Edit : Just checked the Civlopedia, the culture slider indeed gives . It even seems to be a vanilla thing and not from the mod.
More than 1500 hours on the Steam version of the game. Always something new to learn >_<"

 

[Deder]

CIV4CommerceInfo.xml

I knew it - it is in xml but i forgot where to look. Thanks!

 

[[Y]]

I'm not really familiar with the culture slider, usually letting it sit down at 0%, so I'm not sure if I understand your answer.
Do you mean that, by default, the culture slider gives a +1 every 10%, even without the arena ?
And that by having the arena, it is doubled thus giving +1 every 5% ? Which would explain why I gain + for upping the slider by 10%...

Thanks for the others answers, too

Edit : Just checked the Civlopedia, the culture slider indeed gives . It even seems to be a vanilla thing and not from the mod.
More than 1500 hours on the Steam version of the game. Always something new to learn >_<"

I've been playing this game for almost 20 years and still only learned about this in the past year!

 

[AspiringScholar]

Do you mean that, by default, the culture slider gives a +1 every 10%, even without the arena ?

Yes, this is a vanilla mechanic!

And that by having the arena, it is doubled thus giving +1 every 5% ?

Just wanted to point out that it is in fact a rounding error for 5% being treated as 10%, so that in the arena's case, it simply rounds 5% intervals up but does not apply twice for 10s values. 5% is treated as 10%, but so is 10%, so it is optimal for generation purposes to run the slider in 5% intervals.

 

[pi4t]

I've spotted a very minor error in the 3.72 version of the mod. The hint which begins "Some buildings will replace earlier ones..." refers to the blast furnace upgrading into the ironworks. This appears to have been renamed "foundry" at some point.

 

[trashmunster]

Seriously guys, why the textures seem so blurry it hurts. Does everybody has it? Antialiasing is on 0 but these flags are just blobs with no detail, what's going on?

 

[TheBirdMan]

LOL - I have always "hated" those Arab CamelArchers.

Spoiler Screenshots :

But being on the right side - then they are just wonderfull (these test-games are the first, where I'm playing as the Saudi'es...). And now I'm writing.... I also do like, that when nations change leaderheads, the attitude also changes (at least I'm pretty sure, that the Zulus didn't disliked me under the rule of Dingane).

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

I've spotted a very minor error in the 3.72 version of the mod. The hint which begins "Some buildings will replace earlier ones..." refers to the blast furnace upgrading into the ironworks. This appears to have been renamed "foundry" at some point.

Thanks, will fix.

Seriously guys, why the textures seem so blurry it hurts. Does everybody has it? Antialiasing is on 0 but these flags are just blobs with no detail, what's going on?

I was first going to say it was a problem on your side, as mine looked better, but then I tried taking a screenshot at the resolution you're using. So now I'll say it comes down to the relatively low screen resolution, it doesn't seem to be using the full-res texture at 1280x1024 of your screenshot; here's a comparison of yours, mine at your resolution and mine at my native resolution (2560x1440), scaled down to be the same size - even when scaled down to same size, it is apparent that a better-res texture was used.

This prompted me to do some further experiments. Forcing a high-quality AA in driver settings (2xSS in Nvidia) seems to produce excellent quality on in-game flags, but interestingly doesn't affect the interface one at all (this has been taken at 1280x1024 too):

So the next thing I did is I simply doubled the resolution of the flag texture. The texture itself was the same, so logically no quality increase would have followed from a simple upscale (no postprocessing of any kind). And yet, there was a marked quality increase not only at 1280x1024 but also at my native resolution (last two in the image below, respectively)!

Which meant that even at my native resolution, the game wasn't loading the actual texture, but one of the scaled-down MIPs! This is quite surprising, but at least there is a rather simple solution of just increasing the resolution for all the flags (shouldn't be that hard on VRAM, as it's just a single texture per civ at any time). I did consider the option of getting rid of MIPs altogether (as is the case for some other interface objects, such as buttons), but unfortunately it creates horrible aliasing on in-game unit flags (impossible to capture on a screenshot, as it's dynamic).

 

[TheBirdMan]

but is it just a coincidence or could I have hit "the nail on the head"???

It seems like the AI is receptive to bribery - a few more good resources for the "sluggish" AIs, a restart - and then Bingo...... They took the bait. So the "lesson" for me must be not to be too stingy with allocating resources when I'm editing the scenario.

Spoiler The Persians have had some trouble with the Barbarians - right now they have only 2 cities (and some ruins). :

 

[Brugges&Hasselt]

IDW component was unchanged between 3.57 and 3.6, but you're welcome to dig around the IDW.py file. Again, though, why 3.6? It's several versions out of date. The current version is 3.72.

I replied to you in this comment: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/realism-invictus.411799/post-16810546
The main reason is the Cartoonish feel it gives me when I see the most recent version (New City Interface, Ressource Icons, weird-looking AI generated LeaderArt, etc...)
On the other hand, I love the Gatling Gun & 4 different U.S Marines for the USA.
Thanks for your help with the Python file!

 

[trashmunster]

I was first going to say it was a problem on your side, as mine looked better, but then I tried taking a screenshot at the resolution you're using.

Thank you for taking your time and providing in-depth analysis of the issue with all the necessary screenshots. Glad I could pinpoint this problem and there seems to be an adequate solution.

It makes me wonder though, are appropriate unit textures rendered properly? It feels like scaled-down MIPs kick in too soon for my taste, with max zoom in every detail on units is crisp and visible but when you start to zoom out they get "washed out" and lose detail a bit too fast. Of course they should at some point otherwise there'd be aliasing problems but I feel it starts to render less detailed textures too soon. Maybe flag texture issue happens the same way with unit textures, what do you think?

So my question is. Is it adjustable like some render distance in xml or something that tells at which distance game will chose scaled-down MIPs?
Cause it feels a bit like a shame playing with so many incredibly done units to see them lose detail and check them out only deliberately zooming to ridiculous close-up. Hope you understand what I mean.

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

I replied to you in this comment: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/realism-invictus.411799/post-16810546
The main reason is the Cartoonish feel it gives me when I see the most recent version (New City Interface, Ressource Icons, weird-looking AI generated LeaderArt, etc...)
On the other hand, I love the Gatling Gun & 4 different U.S Marines for the USA.
Thanks for your help with the Python file!

Ah ok, missed that. Your choice of course, but a real lot of stuff has been outright fixed in 3.7-3.72 (and therefore was broken / didn't work as intended before), especially with regard to AI. If you moved to 3.6 already, I believe 3.72 won't feel worse to you in the art regard. I've been progressively redoing all the wonkier leaderart that's been there since 3.6 - so if you're "sold" on 3.6, no real reason not to move to the most recent version instead; if anything, it'll be less offensive to your sensibilities than 3.6.

Thank you for taking your time and providing in-depth analysis of the issue with all the necessary screenshots. Glad I could pinpoint this problem and there seems to be an adequate solution.

It makes me wonder though, are appropriate unit textures rendered properly? It feels like scaled-down MIPs kick in too soon for my taste, with max zoom in every detail on units is crisp and visible but when you start to zoom out they get "washed out" and lose detail a bit too fast. Of course they should at some point otherwise there'd be aliasing problems but I feel it starts to render less detailed textures too soon. Maybe flag texture issue happens the same way with unit textures, what do you think?

So my question is. Is it adjustable like some render distance in xml or something that tells at which distance game will chose scaled-down MIPs?
Cause it feels a bit like a shame playing with so many incredibly done units to see them lose detail and check them out only deliberately zooming to ridiculous close-up. Hope you understand what I mean.

Well, I can say with a good deal of certainty that at least the proper base texture is loaded at the max zoom, with full resolution. From experimenting with driver settings, I can also say that a lot of quality can be gained (and FPS lost) from messing with the settings there. Whether we have any influence on how far MIPs are loaded, I can't say at the moment - it might be completely hardcoded, or it may be influenced by something we can tinker with (like the poorly documented CIV4DetailManager.xml).

 

[trashmunster]

(like the poorly documented CIV4DetailManager.xml).

speaking of that, what DF_DETAIL in that file does?

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

speaking of that, what DF_DETAIL in that file does?

You're welcome to play around with it, as it's one of the few XML files that actually applies changes without a game restart, so it's trivially easy to experiment. I went through the file today as well; that particular setting didn't seem to have any difference for me.

More generally, I did a rather thorough test of all things MIP-related. Some of my takeaways:
1) I found no meaningful way to affect MIP display in any game files. Which is a pity.

2) Some practical experimentation shows me that at my native resolution, even units are not generally at MIP 0 (original texture; each subsequent MIP level is basically a 2x smaller texture), but rather at mostly MIP 1 ("mostly" since the levels blend into each other rather than simply replacing, so maximum zoom for units in my case was MIP 1 with traces of MIP 0). Most things at my resolution are displayed at MIP 1 - MIP 2 at best, whereas at 1280x1024 they are mostly MIP 2+.

3) Tinkering with stock Nvidia control panel got me nowhere as well.

4) However, Nvidia Profile Inspector (https://github.com/Orbmu2k/nvidiaProfileInspector/releases) produced some amazing results (working profile is Sid Meier's Civilization 4: Beyond Sword). Once I fixed its broken LOD bias feature (set Antialiasing - Transparency Supersampling to AA_MODE_REPLAY_MODE_ALL; don't ask why, it's magic), setting a negative LOD bias (Texture Filtering - LOD bias) had a profound effect, actually forcing the game to use higher MIPs. In my case, setting LOD bias to -1.3 resulted in MIP 0 being used in most zoomed in cases, and MIP 1 at reasonable zoom out. That does produce quite a lot of grain, so it's best to also set some quality AA while you're there (in my case I set Antialiasing (MSAA) to Override and to 8xSQ [Combined: 2x2 SS + 2x MS] and turned on MFAA, but you can play around and find the best performance/quality ratio for yourselves). ATI users should have similar functionality somewhere, but I wouldn't be able to help them with that.

Here's the resulting image sharpness with the same texture (all that doesn't mean I'll abandon my plan to upscale all flags, as I can't assume most users will jump through these hoops). It clearly shows that setting a good LOD bias works even better than upscaling (and that upscaling after that gives additional detail - and works even better if the actual texture was not just upscaled but redone in a better resolution).

(BTW, do not expect any SVN updates for at least a week after today, as I'll be away from my modding PC)

 

[trashmunster]

You're welcome to play around with it, as it's one of the few XML files that actually applies changes without a game restart, so it's trivially easy to experiment. I went through the file today as well; that particular setting didn't seem to have any difference for me.

Very intersting finds! See Walter, I was not imagining things, textures on units aren't what they could be or even supposed to be.

Also it's quite surprising that Nvidia profile inspector made a meaningful impact. Shame I am playing on integrated intel graphics so I cant experiment with that right now.

My finds so far are very small. changing DF_DETAIL to

<Fader>
<Name>DF_DETAIL</Name>
<Key>100, 0.00</Key>
<Key>150, 1.00</Key>
</Fader>

I've noticed that flags stop disappearing on zoom and maximum zoom probably even exceeds intended texture quality, its for you to corroborate. Also that small panel under city doesn't disappear on zoom also.
check this out

Spoiler pics :

default max zoom

changed DF_DETAIL

And while you're at it please check out how my fortified japanese infantry (IJA) looks on max zoom. Would be cool to compare it to yours and figure out what MIP it uses and how big the difference is.

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

To people "in the know" it's no secret that driver settings can make a huge impact on image quality and performance; I used some of those tricks to improve AA back when Civ 4 just came out. The specific setting for LOD bias was broken for quite some time, but the arcane workaround I posted (logically that setting has absolutely nothing to do with LOD bias) seems to work. And well, yeah, if you're on Intel-integrated stuff, you're out of luck, as from what I know, ways to adjust LOD bias are only available on dedicated GPUs.-

How close/far and how big the flag is can be controlled separately in the same file with FLAG_SCALE. Likewise, the maximum zoom level is specifically controlled by CAMERA_MIN_DISTANCE in GlobalDefinesAlt.xml

I'd say your infantry doesn't look much different from mine at that zoom level:

Spoiler :

 

[Hafenguy]

Hi folks,
enclosed you will find a screenshot from version 3.6. Vietnam has more cities and 4 vassals.
He throws stack after stack on me. I was able to destroy a lot of his units by locate them into the swamp.

At least he managed to break to the frontier and taked one of my cities. A bribed state is going to invade my isle of great britain.
I guess the game is over.
Has anyone an idea how defend against the vietnamese and maybe win the game?

 

[Ahnarras]

Random question for those that wanders often into the late game : does swamps have any good sides ? Any building, improvements or something that use them and could makes keeping them interesting ?
Or are they just a pure negatif tile and should be drain as soon as it's possible ?

I know I could keep them for the -25% defense that could be useful when trying to lure the IA in combat, but except for that, anything else to makes me reconsider draining them ?

 

[tebriz]

Hi folks,
enclosed you will find a screenshot from version 3.6. Vietnam has more cities and 4 vassals.
He throws stack after stack on me. I was able to destroy a lot of his units by locate them into the swamp.

At least he managed to break to the frontier and taked one of my cities. A bribed state is going to invade my isle of great britain.
I guess the game is over.
Has anyone an idea how defend against the vietnamese and maybe win the game?

What mod is it? Because RI doesn’t have Vietnam