Hi-Res Weapon texture pack?

[erichhart]

Hey guys,

This has probably been asked many times but what if just the community puts together a weapon skin pack for some of the weapons. Maybe even incorporated it with the PTRA sound packs that we the servers will have the skins and no kicks .

Lets face it some of the guns are bad. I know the team is going to be putting out a new version but we don't know all the guns will be re-amped. I want to bring more out of this mod. Its a good looking game for a bf2 engine but with other bf2 mods out there. Some of the guns lack eyecandy.



Im trying to learn the ins and outs of modding bf2 currenlty and I wanted to start some work on some poorly textured weapons. I know we can start by doubling the rez of the textures and going from there. I've seen some of the uv's and they are 512x512 we can get a lot more out of it if it's 1024x1024

SKS (although we have a new model coming into play )
AK-47
M249


I wanted to know if someone out there has already done this or tried too.
I just to mod back in the day for Call of duty UO and Medal of Honor and I did some CS:S skins. If anyone would like to start something.

Lets do this!

[SShadowFox]

The weapons are already pretty beautiful if you play on high settings, also PR wants gameplay realism, you can get both gameplay and graphic realism on PRA2, I think that if they really wanted to make better resolutions weapons they already did something or at least planned it, the same as in the Chinook, if they wanted weapons on it they already have did it.

Sorry if my English was not good on this post.

[Rudd]

This isn't a good idea, I think most people who started using higher res textures than currently implemented will get CTDs from overuse of RAM.

[erichhart]

No its fine,

Well, I know this game is all about the gameplay, You can't get this type of teamwork any where else.

See this might get off topic here but Arma 2 doesn't focus on weapons textures or weapon models. There isn't any different reload animations. and ARMA2 is ment sluggish gameplay IMO.

back to the topic

I know some of the guns look great. But some look bad. Here my problem. Why does the Ak47 look bright and grainy. and the 74 different texture style and it looks good to me.


Just some guns need to be fixed. I forgot there is this new mod for BF2 thats redoing a lot of gameplay and weapon textures and shader effects and the mod looks great.

I think this would grab more peoples attention to the game. It worked in lots of games.

[Rudd]

iirc alot of vehicle texture sizes were decreased specifically because people were CTDing too much.

PR loads ALOT of textures, and for a period it went unnoticed that several PR maps were unoptimised in a texture context (lightmap files were too numerous)

If that other mod you are refering to is alpha mod, it loads alot less than PR does; it does look lovely but PR loads alot more textures.

[erichhart]

This isn't a good idea, I think most people who started using higher res textures than currently implemented will get CTDs from overuse of RAM.

Well like i said people with enough memory to run this. shouldn't have a problem with a few guns with doubling the rez of the textures.

I'm also not saying to go crazy and do 2048x2048 textures for the rock model in the game either.

[lucky.BOY]

Wel this inspired an idea in me:

I know that a lot of textures had to be decreased to avoid crashes on loading for some players, and I am perfectly fine with this. However, couldn't DEVs eventually release an official "high-rez texture pack" with all those shiny original textures? Optional, of course, players with high end computers could try it, see if they crash, and if not, they can keep it for more "eyecandy"

Gorgeus idea, isnt it?

Back on topic, erichhart I think you can go ahead and redo some of those textures you dont like, and maybe if the dev team thinks they are better than original ones, they wil put them in main build? One never knows..

-lucky

EDIT: post count 666, beware!

[SShadowFox]

OFF Topic

^ Oh my God, scary.

[Tim270]

If you want to do some reskins, by all means go ahead. Doubling texture sizes is not really a thing unless you have a copy of the original .psd and scale the texture down from a larger size.

Like Rudd said though, we are hitting the limit of our memory budget (bf2 is limited in its memory, so having say 8gb makes no difference) thus we have to make compromises. The real key to getting a weapon looking great in the 1p is having a uv map that gives considerable room to detail right in the players face, thus reskinning can lead to unwanted results as you will always get a blury texture as the pixel density is low in the uvs map.

[erichhart]

Wel this inspired an idea in me:

I know that a lot of textures had to be decreased to avoid crashes on loading for some players, and I am perfectly fine with this. However, couldn't DEVs eventually release an official "high-rez texture pack" with all those shiny original textures? Optional, of course, players with high end computers could try it, see if they crash, and if not, they can keep it for more "eyecandy"

Gorgeus idea, isnt it?

Back on topic, erichhart I think you can go ahead and redo some of those textures you dont like, and maybe if the dev team thinks they are better than original ones, they wil put them in main build? One never knows..

-lucky

EDIT: post count 666, beware!

I like that idea aswell.

on a site note about the alpha mod...It wasn't that mod I was talking about.

Its this one.

Spec Ops Warfare mod for Battlefield 2 - Mod DB

[Rhino]

I haven't read this topic fully etc but the thing you guys need to understand is it really doesn't matter how good your system is or how much RAM it has, since BF2 is a 32bit program, it is limited to something around 3gb of memory it can use, even if you have 16gb of RAM in your 64bit system, it isn't going to help.

The problem with PR, due to the fact we have so many weapons, vehicles etc and not all of them are as optimized as perhaps they could be, due to the sheer amount of content we have, mixed in with these massive maps we have with loads of statics in them, where most of your memory is just going towards loading all the lightmaps for that map, there really isn't much of that ~3gbs cap limit BF2 has of memory left to expand our textures into, which is why a few releases ago we had to down grade many of our texture sizes on weapons/vehicles so players stopped CTDing.

So while you could make a high-rez texture pack, no one would be able to use it, other than on really tiny maps, or maps with like no vehicles in them, and that's ignoring the PB issues...