ultimate question about mipmaps!!!!

[seZereth]

ok, when i had a look at the units in FfH2, 2 units cought my interest, cause they didnt look as blurry as all the others did, so i had a look at the .dds and had lúck not to miss this small detail, i got not asked if i want to see the mipmaps,...
They did not have mipmaps.
I then tried around witrh my old units and saved their dds with no mipmap and with DXT3 explicit alpha, so the filesize went down under 10kb (which is half or even one fourth) and the appearence in game went up 10000 times, even at enormous distances, without getting blurry, showing each detail!! i almost danced around my room, cause i thought that the performance even got better, with such a huge improvement in graphics!!! i attached a screenshot (sorry for it beiong an ugly jpg) where u can estimate (cause of bad image quality) the difference.



So my question, what are miupmaps for, and why should i use them anymore?!

 

[Tyranausaurus]

Holy Nickel! I'd like to know that too! The units look awfully better without them, maybe someone should release some units with the mipmaps disabled.

SeZ, can you check if flags require mipmaps or not? 'cause if they didn't this would solve many problems concerning flag blurring...

 

[The Great Apple]

I think the graphics engine probably reduces the mipmap level based on factors such as the texture quality graphics setting, and the zoom distance. This should increase performance, as the graphics card is doing less work. However, loading the mip-maps takes time, and I'd guess they're stored in memory, so they may bump up memory usage... decreasing performance.

I'm not too sure on the second bit about memory. I'm not to hot on textures.

 

[The Great Apple]

Looking at your pictures again I think I'd prefer a mip level about half way between the one with no mipmaps, and the ones you mark as mipmapped. I'd guess you have texture detail turned right down - it seems very blurry.

While the non-mipped ones look crisper, the individual pixels tend to stand out - especially at boundries between colours. IMO this looks wrong. It might be fixable by using anti-aliasing, but that would require more work by the computer, and I think mip-maps are more efficient.

 

[Chalid]

ok, when i had a look at the units in FfH2, 2 units cought my interest, cause they didnt look as blurry as all the others did, so i had a look at the .dds and had lúck not to miss this small detail, i got not asked if i want to see the mipmaps,...
They did not have mipmaps.

What units were those?

 

[Padmewan]

Based on what little I know from research, mipmaps save your GPU lots of processing time, as otherwise it has to on-the-fly recalculate textures when they zoom out. Also, your custom-tweaked mipmap should be superior to the GPU's on-the-fly re-sizing, but only if you have the time to tweak, or if your graphics software is superior to the GPU's calculations.

(Since GIMP doesn't support MipMaps, and I can't find a Fireworks plugin for DDS, this is all moot for me)

I do notice the effect of NOT having MipMaps when I scroll around the map quickly, as the textures can sometimes "jump" because the GPU is going nuts recalculating every one that flies by. I've got an AGP Radeon 9800Pro, btw.

 

[Chalid]

@Padmewan. Gimp might not allow you to edit the MipMaps (I am not even sure about this) but it allows you to save your file with mipmaps. So the question is does Gimp calculate good ones?

 

[Padmewan]

@Padmewan. Gimp might not allow you to edit the MipMaps (I am not even sure about this) but it allows you to save your file with mipmaps. So the question is does Gimp calculate good ones?

Whenever I've done so, I've found that the alleged MipMaps are blank, resulting in pink textures whenever I"m not zoomed to 100% (which is everywhere except smack in front of the camera). In fact, this is one good way to show yourself the effects of MipMapping

When I open the files and look at the MipMap layers, I find that each one below the top one is blank. Copying and pasting to these layers causes an error when you try to save.

Unless my MipMap plugin was corrupted, I'd say GIMP has no support for MipMapping...

 

[Chalid]

Which Version of Gimp are you using? My Gimp Mipmaps are ok.



Im using 2.2.10

 

[seZereth]

What units were those?

well, one was the, cant remember what it is called, the model is a texturemodified greek phalanx, the one with the white Alpha on the red shield.
the other one was your taskmaster, i didnt look at his texture, but he had the same effect like the phalanx one, so i thought about him having no mip map too. if he had mip map, then well, someone has to tell me the trick for the photoshop nvidia dds plugin.
and well, i didnt get a performance decrease, and hell ingame my units now look like i designed them instead of being a blurred out bunch of units not showing their nice skins (at least the last ones i did)

 

[Rabbit, White]

So my question, what are miupmaps for, and why should i use them anymore?!

Mipmaps reduce engine work by allowing it to use smaller texture sizes, and when needed interpolate between two different size to achieve something in the middle. Without mipmaps the engine has to always process the entire texture even if eventually it's very small on screen. In addition to that, since the mipmaps are prepared beforehand the anti-aliasing is already done as it were and there aren't as many artifacts on the textures. If done right mipmaps mean that the textures look good and performance is good.

Of course if the differences between the mipmap levels are too great, for example the second level of a 256x256 texture is 64x64, and/or the engine switches to lower level mipmaps too early then you get blurry textures.

Also, naturally mipmaps take more memory but, once again, if done right, whatever performance hit taken from that is offset by the increase from not having to deal with large textures all the time. Also, strictly speaking, mipmapped textures should only be about 1/3 larger because the sequence 1/4 + 1/16 + 1/256 + ... converges to 1/3. I did however noticed that saving vanilla textures (whenever I do some adjustments to them for new units) without mipmaps produces textures smaller by more than 1/3, sometimes as much as two times (I think), so I'm not sure what's up with that.

If you're getting such blurry units then it's either low texture settings (causing the engine to go to lowever level mipmaps earlier) or your computer not handling it, causing the engine to do the same thing, or simply the implementation of mipmaps is not optimal. I haven't actually noticed this behaviour but to be honest I wasn't really looking for it so could've easily missed it. I'm gonna take a look at this tonight, it's an interesting topic (am I a geek or what ).

One thing is that you shouldn't have a performance hit from having mipmaps, if you're seeing something like that, or seeing a performance increase (and a real one, not just a feeling of increase because things look better ) from removing mipmaps then, well not sure what's going there. Could be some issues with memory not handling things correctly. In either case, of course do whatever makes the game look and play better and if that means removing mipmaps from all textures then by all means do it. Though like TGA pointed out while the textures w/o mipmaps are sharper they also have artifacts and some people find that worse than blurry textures so it's down to personal preference.

Hope this cleared up some things.

 

[seZereth]

ok, perhaps the best way to go will have 2 different versions, one with mimaps and one without. so people can decide which they want to use. i will try around with it. please post your experience too, and if it is better to have for example 2 or 3 mipmaps or even 12 or something. my problem is, that civ uses the first mipmap very very early, this means that you loose much detail in contrast when u dont use any mipmap...

 

[The Great Apple]

my problem is, that civ uses the first mipmap very very early, this means that you loose much detail in contrast when u dont use any mipmap...

Out of interest, what graphics settings are you running?

I'd go for 2-3 maps.

 

[Agent 009]

I think the main reason is that the units don't seem to need them.

I discovered this by accident when making my mod.

I am using the DDS converter and at first I was just converting the dds files to tga's, editing them, and then reconverting them. This made them without mipmaps.

However, later on I decided to make new city graphics, and well those turned out horribly because they needed mipmaps. They ended up looking very grainy when zoomed out and the pixels seemed to dance around the screen when the camera was moved.

After asking about this I found that it was because of the mipmaps and thus I then redid my city graphics.

Suffice it to say, I suggest not using mipmaps unless you end up with a grainy texture in game.

 

[The Great Apple]

I'm pretty sure units use mipmaps - check out the screenie at the top.

 

[Agent 009]

I'm pretty sure units use mipmaps - check out the screenie at the top.

Yeah you are right they do... but what I meant is that they don't need them. Mine worked fine without them, but my new city graphics came out all grainy.

 

[seZereth]

i got a gforce FX 5200 and i use in civ every setting on high and 1280 x 1024, nothing else. no low res textures and no improved terrain

 

[Padmewan]

Which Version of Gimp are you using? My Gimp Mipmaps are ok.



Im using 2.2.10

I just updated GIMP to 2.2.11 and I'm still getting no love.

When I "Save as" DDS and check the "Generate mipmaps" box, I still get blank mipmaps:



I am using the DDS/Mipmap plugin from here (version 1.0.1).

What are all the right settings for Civ4 and/or the DDS plugin? e.g. what level compression (None, DXT1/3/5), what format (Default, RGB8, etc...)...?

 

[Chalid]

I have to check which version of the Plugin i am using.

Usually i use DXT3 and Default for the plugin.

 

[Chalid]

Invisible units
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kael
Definitly not normal. Anyone else having this problem?

I see (or don't see!) some invisible units, too, when playing on low resolution. Those units include: goblin, orc spearman, and fire elemental. The skeleton is only partly visible (head, shield, and sword).

My computer is partly to blame -- I can start the game in high resolution, but once I've saved and closed it out, I can only reload if I've lowered the settings -- but I also wonder if possibly some of the new units in this mod don't have a low-resolution image associated with them for display on the low-resolution setting. (That's a total guess. I have no idea if that's how it works.)

Could this be related to missing mipmaps ...