Why do my textures look so blurry in blitz3d?

Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Programming/Why do my textures look so blurry in blitz3d?

skidracer (Posted 2003) [#1]

Possibly worth a faq entry? Most people blame mipmapping and bilinear filtering, but are some perhaps using non power of 2 texture sizes and suffering from a blurrd texture load as blitz internally scales the src image to fit the power of 2 texture dimension?

sswift (Posted 2003) [#2]

Oh there's a billion reasons it could be blurry. Another is that they could have their video card settings mucked up and set to something like "performance" which will halve the size of all textures. Someone did that when running my tank game and sent me a screenshot and you couldn't even read the font! Stupid video card manufacturers shouldn't make a setting like that so easy to change! :-)

Hotcakes (Posted 2003) [#3]

I always knew Blitz chose texture sizes differantly to what you specified (if you specified something odd), but I always assumed it would leave the rest black and refer to the original size internally. Good to know it stretches them. Means you have to be more careful.

skidracer (Posted 2003) [#4]

An extra level of bi-linear filtering is not the most pleasant effect. It's required for repeating texture types, but single odd sizes should be laid out with some sort of texture page manager that helps to reduce surface state changes maybe. Big job as all verticy uv maps have to be transformed so no easy workaround there although ScaleTexture comes in handy in latest pixie code which now supports any res texture keeping it 1:1.

Anthony Flack (Posted 2003) [#5]

Last time I checked (and maybe this has changed?) blitz used pixel-doubling to upscale odd-sized textures - DEFINITELY not the most pleasant effect.

sswift (Posted 2003) [#6]

The solution is don't use odd size textures. :-) And if you do want to use a texture that is wider than tall, then pad the area around it, or better yet, use that area for other textures, or even variations on the original texture. It's not rocket science. :-)

Anthony Flack (Posted 2003) [#7]

Which is why I can't say for sure what method blitz uses to upscale textures anymore. As soon as I noticed it happening I never used an odd-sized texture again.

cyberseth (Posted 2003) [#8]

You should never use non-^2 textures, because different video cards will treat them differently and some won't load them at all. You will get unwanted results on certain video cards.