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

Broccoli said:
Yeah i hope there's no problems with the game engine. Not like limitation of the Skyrim engine. If you reach 3.1GB of used RAM the game will crash. That was revealed weeks ago
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Well, I believe SR3 and SR4 are both 32 bit programs, so you would have that limitation. :) That's the kind of thing we might be able to fix in a patch though... no promises, but if you happened to hit the limit with a kick ass mod it could be the persuasion needed for such effort.
 
[V] Knobby said:
Well, I believe SR3 and SR4 are both 32 bit programs, so you would have that limitation. :) That's the kind of thing we might be able to fix in a patch though... no promises, but if you happened to hit the limit with a kick ass mod it could be the persuasion needed for such effort.
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I read somewhere in the internet that said about Skyrim 32bit limitations. It's possible to fix that 3.1GB limit. But it requires developers to recreate the program in 64bit i am guessing recreating the whole game in 64bit would be tedious and it's probably a high chance of not gonna happen though. Unless there's demand and developers willing to do for it. By that time i am sure you guys and girls at Volition are working in next Saints Row game :p

Yeah that kickass mod would crash the game would be Entire Stilwater next to Steelport with high texture packs equipped :p
 
Broccoli said:
I read somewhere in the internet that said about Skyrim 32bit limitations.
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Yeah, that's a hack that has been going around for a number of games. Simply involves changing the file header of the executable to be allowed to address more than 2gb of memory. Doesn't automatically make it a 64bit binary though, but it does allow more ram to be used. Saints Row 4 already has that flag enabled in the executable though.
 
Broccoli said:
I read somewhere in the internet that said about Skyrim 32bit limitations. It's possible to fix that 3.1GB limit. But it requires developers to recreate the program in 64bit i am guessing recreating the whole game in 64bit would be tedious and it's probably a high chance of not gonna happen though. Unless there's demand and developers willing to do for it. By that time i am sure you guys and girls at Volition are working in next Saints Row game :p

Yeah that kickass mod would crash the game would be Entire Stilwater next to Steelport with high texture packs equipped :p
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We have a 64-bit editor and as a result most of our libraries are 64-bit compatible. This might not be too much of a stretch to make happen on the PC build, but these things are impossible to know until you get down into it.
 
I'm skipping the 32-bit/64-bit subtopic of this thread, I am fully expecting that consoles will remain the core focus of most game developpers and with those seemingly going 64-bit as well (looking at the currently known RAM specs for 'm) I am expecting games to be designed in 64-bit format as a standard from that point on.

My question regarding all this texture talk, I am under the impression that most of the textures are packed together in either one single file or just a few.
Since Skyrim has been already brought up in this discussion I see no reason why I can't too: Skyrim's textures/meshes setup is very accessible for modders because it hasn't bundled everything together in packaged files, everything has it's own folder and file (with maybe a few exceptions, not a modder, just an avid mod-user).
From a mod-using perspective this structure offers great ease in choosing what you want to improve and then mix and match texture mods, though I am guessing this offers greater ease in mod-making for textures as well.

Down to the actual question: is it Volition's intention with upcoming (saints row) games to go a similar route as TES/Fall out, where you have many individual files rather than packages since you are now beginning to embrace/encourage modding?
 
In regards to NPC's pretty much every character has a high and low res texture set. The character slots are set up to accommodate only the low res character textures. There is a high-res slot available for single player which will take memory from the reserved Co-op player pool. It creates a high-res npc slot. This slot is actively changing to stream in textures for the npc closest to the player camera. I believe there are scenarios where it might also choose a mission npc to maintain as high-res throughout the mission.
 
Tommety said:
Down to the actual question: is it Volition's intention with upcoming (saints row) games to go a similar route as TES/Fall out, where you have many individual files rather than packages since you are now beginning to embrace/encourage modding?
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I wouldn't expect our filesystem setup to change drastically. I personally don't think it would need to do that. We are primarily a console shop and as a result we are very scared of seeks on the disk. Interiors for SR3/4 like Let's Pretend had thousands of files to load in order to load the interior. It was amazing to me to see those kinds of numbers and next-gen I can only imagine it to get much worse(better if you're not a streaming guy I guess). If we had to seek around and stat looking for thousands of files just to load an interior it would be noticeably slower even on the PC.

I would like to see things become more friendly and maybe we can move in that direction, but I envision a mod landscape that has mods released as a single file that you drop in a mod folder and magic happens. The hard part is what to do with collisions, which is easier, but still on the user in the scattered file method.
 
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.
 
[V] Knobby said:
I wouldn't expect our filesystem setup to change drastically. I personally don't think it would need to do that. We are primarily a console shop and as a result we are very scared of seeks on the disk. Interiors for SR3/4 like Let's Pretend had thousands of files to load in order to load the interior. It was amazing to me to see those kinds of numbers and next-gen I can only imagine it to get much worse(better if you're not a streaming guy I guess). If we had to seek around and stat looking for thousands of files just to load an interior it would be noticeably slower even on the PC.

I would like to see things become more friendly and maybe we can move in that direction, but I envision a mod landscape that has mods released as a single file that you drop in a mod folder and magic happens. The hard part is what to do with collisions, which is easier, but still on the user in the scattered file method.
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That makes sense. i/o is a killer for performance in just about anything if not done right. Too bad the next generation of consoles are still going to use HDD instead of SSD for storage.
 
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