Hi Res Texture Pack

[Shioban]

I'm highly sure that they still have the original HD texture assets from 1.0 and a little over a year ago, Yoshi boasted that they wrote some awesome conversion tool to push 1.0 assets to the 2.0 engines. This might imply that the 2.0 engine only support low res texture, but that should only be an issue for PS3 with memory limitation. For PC and PS4, I don't see how they could have just throw away the HD textures after the conversion.

At the very least, I think they should re-release the HD textures in increments if they don't have the manpower and resource to do it all at once. Start with HD character models so people can stop making threads about flatbutts. Then move onto gears, then monsters, then background environment. It's not a lot to ask but will please fans for years to come.

The original baked maps for each model (as well as the original Hi-Poly model) still exists, yes.

Some examples of some of the original hi-poly models are here;




The conversion tool they're speaking of it probably based on elements. Where-in you can select a "portion" of an object and then lower the resolution. This would be a very fast way of taking something from it's original detail down as far as it can go whilst retaining a balance of detail and the overall memory impact.

Essentially what you would do is, let's say for this body piece;



There are multiple segments to it, and therefore multiple textures that were applied.
(1.23 had the great idea of taking one base piece of armour and then adding on pieces.)

So Linen>Felt>Wool Bliauds all have the same base model, but with more added ontop of them as the level increases (accessories/extra cloth.

Therefore, the multiple textures across the segments had to be adjusted.

As i've pointed out some, (and you can probably apply this to any gear in-game) is what they would have used this tool for.
"Okay, this segment will be 64x64 pixels, where-as this area willl be 256x256. A very streamline process to spead up the 1.23>2.0 conversion".

It would be time consuming but a possible task to go back and compress them less-so than before, so that not everything is sitting at 4096x4096 textures, but so that there's more detail retained than what we currently have at least.

A great example of how new items in ARR are made and how compression is affecting them badly is the 'un-segmented' gear we're getting.
The Crystal Tower/Titan Weapon/Gear pieces seem to be textured differently now in that thing are in much larger segments meaning the overall compression can be horrific at times.
(This is more apparent with the weapons than anything else.)

Example of bad compression:

Example of fantastic compression: