When will it be possible to be able to use high res textures?

[Tommety]

Too bad the next generation of consoles are still going to use HDD instead of SSD for storage.

I think (aside from the cost of SSD still) they go with HDD because of the longevity. SSD isn't yet optimised for gaming. Super fast as it may be, the disk degrades very quickly with gaming.
Maybe not all game types, but any game that relies heavily on the disk it's installed on is killing.
I've stepped away from SSD for games when the one game I had installed on it caused it fry within 2 years and the manufacturer stating it exceeded the benchmark usage by a factor of 4 based on a 4 year life cycle.

 

[Arglaar]

This discussion is beginning to stray off-topic.

 

[[V] Knobby]

I liked the way City of Heroes handled it. They had PIGG files (equivalent of a Packfile). You could extract a texture/sound/whatever and modify it but you didn't have to re-pack it. Instead drop it into a folder structure similar to what you found inside the PIGG file. For example if you found it inside the PIGG in /Geobin/textures/indoors/mission_wharehouse/ then you could make those same folders and drop the new texture inside. Their game engine would look for folders on the disk first, failing that it would then look in the PIGGs.

This is how mods work on the Saints Row engine as well, but we just have a flat filesystem inside our packfiles. That's why you put things into the root. The game tries to load blue.vbm_pc, not data\maps\some\other\folder\blue.vbm_pc.

 

[scanti]

Also note that you don't have to do something like alter every single str2 file to get your textures to work. The way our texture system works you could put a larger texture into the startup/al peg and it will use that instead of what is with the asset.

Do you mean the startup.cpeg_pc / startup.gpeg_pc files in the misc.vpp_pc and startup.vpp_pc archives?

I've tried modifying that file and it causes the game to crash. I've tried both loose files and a repacked startup.vpp_pc archive.

I've attached the dump reports from both crashes. I'm guessing that the startup peg files have their own special memory pool and it runs out of memory.

It's not too much of a problem I've found an alternative in the sr3_city_awld.cpeg_pc/gpeg_pc files. They seem to hold the shared textures for rendering the city and as such are always loaded by the system.

 

[[V] Knobby]

Yeah, the startup peg goes into a tiny pool that doesn't have much slop space and you ran out of memory. I was talking about the always_loaded.peg, which goes somewhere...misc maybe? I'll see about making something dynamic so you guys can stuff lots of bitmaps into a peg. The city always loaded peg is a fine spot as well.