Best Settings

Mipmap

Please disable MIPMAP for most realistic viewing of leaves world. The checkbox can be found in the pulldown menus for Option --> Settings --> Performance.

The following photos show comparrison of mipmap settings.

Without mipmap (recommended)



With mipmap



Without mipmap (recommended)



With mipmap

Sept 29, 2002 --> More on mipmaps (any suggestions welcome). At this time, the default settings have mipmaps enabled for new installations. It seems that other major software also ships with mipmap enabled, such as MS flight simulator. I've also received a lot of feedback that there is a large variability in mipmap effects depending on the type of video card and drivers.

Why not just use mipmap in leaves? In order to keep frame rate up and visibility distant, most plants are made using sprites. Sprites contain a mask, so part of the flat texture is masked (invisible). As the distance to a mipmap sprite increases, the edges around the mask darken, forming a black outline around the edges of the plants. This mipmap edge effect causes poor blending of plants into the background ground textures. On the other hand, without mipmap, as sprite plants become more distant, plants appear to "blend" into the ground textures, looking much more realistic.

We know that that most new users will enter with mipmap enabled, and also they may not be comfortable changing the settings. As an experiment, we have added the "TextureMipmapState Off" command to the plant and tree textures. Overall this seems to look better. Any feedback is welcome (gram cotarr).

Why not use the TextureMipmapState on all objects? So far, there seems to be no way to disable mipmap on textures that are applied as an action command or to terrain textures. We tried creating objects with terrain textures included, but if the terrain loads before the object, then all occurances of the texture are mipmapped. The result creates a mixture of mipmap and non-mipmap ground textures which looked very strange.

Why not ask for a world setting for mapmap state? It's not such an easy question. The documentation states that each texture is only cached one time, and all occurrances of that texture must have the same mipmap state. Often many worlds will share one object path, so it is not likely that the global mipmap setting could be world specific, but this is only a guess. (anyone know for sure?) The best solution would be a global object that would contain default rwx settings, such as collision detection.

Why do we care? We spend a lot of time to achieve a realistic look. It is disappointing to think that some users see this art as it was intended, while others see something totally different. It is unrealistic to build to both standards.

Terrain load failure

Ever since going to 3.4, a few people have failed to load terrin after entering the world. Dumping cache usually seems to solve this, but some people just see flat green, with no elevation or texture data. If you see a lot of plants and tree floating in mid-air, this is likely the problem. I have no clue why, hopefully AW will solve the problem.