[TEC] Graphics Editing...
 

The graphics in SH4 are in .dds format.

This format can be used to store textures, cube maps and mipmap levels, and allows for compression. Due to the fact that most video cards natively support DXTn texture compression, use of this format can save memory on the video card. These files can be compressed by upto 50% more than other formats, this explains the improvement in load times & performance. This is all good.:up:

However, has anyone taken a serious look at these files to see if they can be reworked and improved.

I'm thinking specifically of improving the resolution & detailing of these files.

So far from the screens that I have seen, some of the ships skins are poorly detailed and at a low resolution.

There is a photoshop plugin available at - http://developer.nvidia.com/object/p...s_plugins.html
but I have no files to play with.:cry:;)

Tips, Tricks & messy fixes are welcome!

Skins baby, yeah!

Man!!!! you are a star...been tearing my hair out trying to open DAT files here. This just works man...CHEERS!

Maybe you can explain me why we have these repeats, and what to do here ?. Never seen this in SH3
http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a1...titled-1-4.jpg

They are different resolutions for diferent lod (level of detail), the game chooses the high resolution one when the object is at close range and the lower ones when the object is distant and doesn't need to much detail.

Ref

So...If I would like to mod the skin I basically just copy it and resize it to fit that template?, with the repeats that is. Oh and there are 2 files with the same skins, you have "NSS_Gato_O01.dds" and "NSS_Gato_O01_lr.dds" for example. To me they look the same when i open them in PS CS2... what does "lr" stand for?

Could it be low resolution :hmm:

;) LOL...to easy man ...now I feel like a N00B. Cheers man. Gonna get crackin here.

If you want to make a skin, make one in the biggest scale you want f.e 1024x1024. Now when saving this skin to DDS via the Photoshop plugin, you can select how much mip maps (the smaller skins) the file should have. The plugin creates the mip maps for you automatically. Be sure to save in the right DDS format a game use, because there 5 formats.

DDS textures are easy to work with in Photoshop with the DDS plug-in. You can open them without the extra LOD's and work with them as any other file. After opening, I save mine to native PSD until done. Then collapse all the layers and convert back to DDS when ready to re-install in game.

God you guys are great, I sure hope you can achieve something with the graphics. They may have looked impressive on little movies while we were all waiting for the game, I have the game now and the graphics are really giving me the ****s !

I've tried every permutation with the options but cant get rid of the overall fuzzyness in SH4 I sure hope you can mod this or tell me how to improve the graphics.