Deleted133263User

RenderDoc Pre-v1.6 Nightly build in use ..

Had a message from IrfanView programmer, and I dont think it will be supporting DirectXTex new formats any time soon. Its a bit of a tall order for Irfan to overcome (he would need the code for plugins to be in C or C++, whereas C# has been used and conversion from one to the other is too complicated to attempt .. In other words its too big a job just to support a couple of new dds format texture types in a Viewer which is not really focussed on just that job) Its still very useful for older games, but going forward RenderDoc mentioned above I think is going to be the main man for finding out original textures formats.

Forgot to mention - Photoshop is the best solution, along with installing the Intel Texture Works plugin .. https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-texture-works-plugin I am pretty sure you are using GIMP though because like other mere morsels Photoshop is not affordable just for a hobby But anyway ; Thought I would point out that link to the plugin because on that page it gives an example screenshot of various textures before and after BC7 compression. As you can see it is pretty good and without zooming in many many times you will be hard pushed to see any artifacting differences. Also note : If you save out images from Paint.Net, use "Save As" from the file menu, and among the options for DDS you will find a "Compression Mode" option - For BC7 Choose Slow - Slow == BC7 Fine (as shown in the comparison screens on the Intel Texture Works plugin site) Edit : And lastly, BC6 and BC7 will only work in DX11+ Games - If your textures need to be backwards compatible with older games, then use as previously mentioned the older dds formats .. DXT5 for normals.

;)

Yep, GIMP is great for working on textures, and the newest version of GIMP does not need any plugins for all the older DDS formats, it now supports them natively - But it does not support the latest DirectXTex formats BC6H and BC7. Until GIMPs DDS support becomes more developed to include all new formats, for now Paint.Net just to save your work as a final BC7 dds file is the easiest route. PS if you want to find an original textures format - Open it with RenderDoc, see also this post https://www.afkmods.com/index.php?/topic/5535-paintnet-now-supports-all-dds-formats-including-bc7-linear-etc/&do=findComment&comment=175993 RenderDoc can show you the format of a texture loaded, how many mipmaps it has, and you can even select individual channels to view. I use it just to get those bits of information so I know what formats etc to save the eventual finished work

GIMP still supports the old DDS which includes DXT5 for normal maps Any dds file is a lossy (ie it loses a little detail each time it is saved). Ideally you need a good source image, only work on it and save any intermediary work steps in a lossless format like png. Then when it comes to finally saving it as a dds file you have only lost the minimum amount of detail on that one compression to DXTn Generally most normal maps which will never be so close to notice such minimal loss will be fine saved as DXT5 The only normal maps to be a bit more finicky with are Face and Body normals, which people like to screenshot up close and personal (so in game you get the largest resolution mipmap on display very close to the in game camera, and any minor loss of detail becomes more noticeable). If its not a face or body texture, most other textures will hardly ever be so close as to see any artifacts caused by DXTn compression. Back when Skyrim (original Skyrim LE, not Special Edition) first came out, the original face normal maps were awful, very blocky looking causing square pointy bits particularly noticeable on the nose of the NPCs. Any further work on them made them worse. So various body mod authors went to work on recreating some higher quality source normals without the artifacts. They also chose to save face and body normals without compression so that they would not lose any quality for best in game presentation .. .. The cost of having uncompressed normals is VRAM / System ram use. If they were all uncompressed the game would flood peoples video cards and cause a bottle neck, where that video card would ordinarily be in spec for the game. TL:DR - DTX5 generally for normal maps, saving them uncompressed in a few cases is okay, but don't overdo it. Reference using BC7 - BC7 is an excellent compression format with barely any degradation from compression. You can work on a source texture and save any stages of work as lossless format as previously mentioned - Then load up the png in the most recent version of Paint.Net, and save it out as BC7 with mipmaps as your final step. See this topic https://www.afkmods.com/index.php?/topic/5535-paintnet-now-supports-all-dds-formats-including-bc7-linear-etc/ Reference generating mipmaps = Yes, always do this (unless its a UI texture which does not need them - Rarely, some do) See also this topic https://www.afkmods.com/index.php?/topic/4283-all-about-textures/

Someone on Nexus gave me a good tip : RenderDoc designed to handle GPU formats, can be used as a Texture Viewer for dds It gives the necessary info we need about what format a texture is From the documentation https://renderdoc.org/docs/getting_started/tips_tricks.html RenderDoc can be used as an image viewer! If you drag in or use file → open, you can open images in a variety of formats - .dds, .hdr, .exr, .bmp, .jpg, .png, .tga, .gif, .psd. The image will load up in RenderDoc’s texture viewer and you can use the normal controls to view it as if it were the only texture in a capture. Note that .dds files support all DXGI formats, compressed formats, arrays and mips - all of which will display as expected. If the file is modified, RenderDoc will reload it and display it. Note that changing the image’s dimensions or format will likely cause problems. ~snip~ ~snip~ Right clicking on one of the channel buttons in the texture viewer (R, G, B, A) will either select only that channel, or if it’s already the only one selected it will select all of the others. This is useful e.g. to toggle between viewing RGB and alpha, or for looking at individual channels in a packed texture or render target. ---- I noticed a couple of issues with RenderDoc, though its something that can be worked around. Issue 1. If you dont have enough horizontal Screen space, and the file path for the loaded texture is long, the Format of the texture goes off the end of the available space to show it. To solve issue 1, I decided I did not need the "Event Browser" box open all the time, so closed it. Issue 2. Currently in RenderDoc v1.5, if you have closed the Event Browser, and try to load a texture into RenderDoc (by whichever method), RenderDoc crashes. Issue 1 is going to be addressed in a future version, I contacted Baldur Issue 2 is fixed in a private build last night, so will be in the next version whenever that occurs. Meanwhile, Baldur gave me a tip - You can get around Issue 2 by dragging and docking the "Event Browser" as another tab alongside the Texture Viewer Tab etc. Which free's up more horizontal space to show the full path and Format at the bottom of the interface (well that is so long as the file path is not so long as to hide the format again). Anyway, those minor issues aside .. I very much like RenderDoc (even if I dont have much if any use for its full potential), aswell as being able to select all Channels including the Alpha individually for viewing, I like also that you can use a drop down menu to see how many MipMaps the texture has, and I also like that among the Formats displayed RenderDoc also includes un-compressed Formats like A8R8G8B8 .. Whereas IrfanView would just not show any format info for such a texture because it is not compressed, so distinguishing un-compressed formats is a breeze with RenderDoc. Its a bit slower to load than Irfanview, but its a lot more comprehensive for dds support than IrfanView. I think RenderDoc has just become my favourite viewer for investigating dds files

Personally I dont know, its been a fair few years since I used ENB well enough to know it inside out .. Skill fade Does ENB still have its own forum where you can ask the dedicated users / Boris ?

Small bit of info' .. Watch out for updates to IrfanView in the future and the History of Changes I have been in email conversation with Irfan, who has said "No promise" But he may be tentatively looking into supporting all the newer DirectXTex DDS formats. At his request I made a load of different texture types (with / without alphas / normal / diffuse / specular etc), and then saved out duplicates of each in all the different formats with MipMaps. I also gave a run down of each of those with errors generated by the current IrfanView, whether they load / partial load / load elongated / do not load / correct Compression information given or not blah blah .. Hopefully it will all be enough to help Irfan get the viewer up to date in viewing every dds format and the "Information" to help us find the original texture format, before working on it and saving it out in the correct format for its use case by the games concerned .. Fingers crossed :smile: -------------------- Also the Paint.NET DDS FileType Plus plugin has been updated, you can still install this in FileTypes\ as Paint.NET will use either the Bundled version, or a manually installed version of the same plugin, and it will use the most recent whichever is newer of the two. So future updates to Paint.NET will use its own Bundled version if that then becomes newer than the one you manually installed.

https://www.afkmods.com/index.php?/topic/4283-all-about-textures/ :smile: Edit : I just updated the topic first post (and follow up posts), to include newer information.

Paint.NET also now supports WebP https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/ (Another plugin bundled which was also programmed by null54) Lossless and lossy, I havent used it yet but it sounds like its better than PNG and JPG for website performance.

GIMP now includes a dds plugin, but does not yet support all the newer Intel Texture Works DDS formats and they need developers to advance the old plugins we used to use .. .. In the mean time have a look at this https://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/8057638-paintnet-now-supports-all-dds-formats-including-bc7-linear-etc/

SPREAD THE WORD PEOPLE If you know a Mod Author working on textures, who needs a solution to load and save in the newer Intel Texture Works dds formats like BC7, but they dont / cant afford to own Photoshop .. .. Tell them to grab the latest Paint.NET Even if they prefer working in something else like Affinity Photo or GIMP, but lack the ability to easily save out a dds file with mipmaps in the newer dds formats (GIMP has started supporting dds natively, but does not currently have all the newer formats) - Just save resulting work from your preferred graphics software to a lossless format like PNG. Load it up in Paint.NET, and then save it out in the desired dds format. PDN now bundles a plugin made by null54, it used to be necessary to rename any dds file to work with to have a .dds2 extension name which was a bit of chore if you had many files to work with - Now it is officially bundled with PDN, .dds files are loaded and saved without any renaming of extensions See the release notes here for PDN 4.2.2 https://forums.getpaint.net/topic/115144-paintnet-422-is-now-available/ PDN is now at version 4.2.5 and includes the latest dds plugin (further updated work since 4.2.2) https://forums.getpaint.net/topic/115242-paintnet-425-is-now-available/?_fromLogin=1 Source for the plugin (where any issues found need to be reported) on Github https://github.com/0xC0000054/pdn-ddsfiletype-plus Paint.NET forum topic for the plugin https://forums.getpaint.net/topic/111731-dds-filetype-plus-2019-09-20/ Edit : Please feel free to copy this post on the various official CK forums (I am no longer a member) Paint.NET also now supports WebP https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/ (Another plugin bundled which was also programmed by null54) Lossless and lossy, I havent used it yet but it sounds like its better than PNG and JPG for website performance. --------------------------- To save a file in DDS formats : Choose File / Save As And use the drop down menu to select the DDS filetype Then click Save You will then be presented with the Save Configuration Use the drop down menu to select the DDS format And dont forget to tick the box for Generate MipMaps PS - When choosing the compression mode in PDN, Slow = Fine (More accurate) (Fine as in Intel Texture Works definition of the compression mode) And have a read of this topic - Its a bit old now, but still relevant I think. https://www.afkmods.com/index.php?/topic/4283-all-about-textures/

Updated the first post - I am running the most recent Experimental version of the game ( after 2.12 ) which has a new setting, GTAO instead of HBAO. So remade the settings screenshot and video to show how the game performs now. I also increased the Graphics setting for Planet Quality in my game, I am finding with this new version of the game, and with the few down tweaks to compensate, I can have better LOD etc on planets without degrading performance. Anyway, if you are wondering about GTAO, and not running the experimental, you will catch up with the next public update to the game.

No problem, and I do play the game, far too much :cool: ( surprisingly even more than Egosofts X series of games which I have played for years ) I just dont bother modding it yet until HelloGames have finished updating / patching it .. Only been waiting 3 years :happy: ( which is not half as bad as waiting for the community to fix all Bethesda's problems for them :laugh: Edit : Not blaming the community, they do a marvellous job of dedicating time and know how, just Bethesda could do with fixing a lot more problems before they move on to the next cash cow ) I was going to suggest giving Tannin42 ( Vortex programmer ) a nudge in the Vortex forums, but it sounds like you have already been down that route. See if you can PM him if his PMs are not flooded. Anyway, good luck with your modding, I will be joining in a few years ( and probably making a few mods ), but for now keeping a clean install for continued beta testing and helping HelloGames out. If you haven't seen it, I have a few tips on tweaking the game :geek: Take care, Alt. Edit : Ooh forgot to mention, HelloGames will not be able to solve the issue, their files / folders are where they should be, its Vortex that needs to be corrected for this game if its looking in the wrong place for Mods\.