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Asset editor: some more nasty stuff

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Zed68

Zed68

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Aug 26, 2014
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You all know that the asset editor is not very good (ok it's terrible). You might remember that at release it saved textures at low quality fi you had the bad idea to have your graphics settings to low (I don't even know if this is fixed, I should test it).

I just discovered something very nasty.


The asset editor not only compresses your textures when you import a model (well it's part of its job) but it decides... by itself... to meddle with them. If it finds your textures are too dark (omg, this is dull, sad...) it will try to boost saturation like crazy (even inventing colors when your texture map is fully monochrome).

Example :

Stage 1, importing the model. Hey... it looks nice, I'd like to see that ingame (but now I know why it won't happen).

1956992015081500001.jpg


Stage 2 : Texture compression... the model already looks a bit worse... grrrr

2086642015081500002.jpg


Stage 3 : After A second... Let's make this a bit funky, I don't like dark textures, I'm a happy asset editor, trust me !

6929032015081500003.jpg


Apparently (I made some other import attempts) the darker you get the more the asset editor tries to "compensate"


HEY DEVS... WE WANT TO IMPORT OUR MODELS AS WE MADE THEM !!! Is that so hard ???????

(I wasted two hours trying to get it to import as I wanted, with no result... This was NOT funny at all).

Can we (after 4 months) finally get an asset editor that we can trust ???????

And... What's the matter with the compression ? How comes it degrades pics so much for such a bad compression ?? It quadruples the size from 24bits PNG pictures !!! For a crappy result.


FIX IT !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
 
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OH yes, I know about this issue. I hate this problem. You can never have too dark of a color because you get pixels of random color and looks really distorted too. Would be nice if it got fixed some how. Good Post!
 
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boformer said:
It is a result of the texture compression. It is necessary to reduce the memory footprint of the texture.

With a little mod, it could be disabled.
Click to expand...

You can compress textures without destroying them... and as I said this happens when you go darker. And I don't understand how you can "compress" textures so that when you import a 500ko texture you obtain a 2Mb asset.:confused:
 
Zed68 said:
The asset editor not only compresses your textures when you import a model (well it's part of its job) but it decides... by itself... to meddle with them. If it finds your textures are too dark (omg, this is dull, sad...) it will try to boost saturation like crazy (even inventing colors when your texture map is fully monochrome).
Click to expand...

There is nothing intentional done with the colors/saturation, but of course the game's lighting, shaders, color correction etc. affect things a bit. And as was already said, the game compresses all textures to the standard DXT format, including the built-in assets, which probably also affects the colors. But the compression saves significant amounts of memory (6:1 compared to uncompressed) and also helps loading times quite a bit (about which people with many assets are complaining even with the compression, and it would be worse with uncompresssed textures).

About the file size, in addition to just the textures, the final asset file also has the mesh and several PNG images: a preview, 5 versions of the thumbnail and the infotooltip. So the textures are only a part of the file. You also can't really compare the sizes to a PNG texture since that would need to be uncompressed for the graphics card anyway, and what matters is the memory footprint and loading time, not the size on disk.

By the way, on your images above, "stage 2" when the editor says "compressing textures..." is before the texture compression, but with the in-game lighting instead of what the preview uses. Stage 3 is with the compressed textures applied (when the text has vanished).

zed68 said:
HEY DEVS... WE WANT TO IMPORT OUR MODELS AS WE MADE THEM !!! Is that so hard ???????
Click to expand...

I would say it is actually pretty hard given all the constraints. I'm sorry that we have failed your expectations, but hopefully the editor is at least getting better for you with our continuing effort. And thanks for all the content you have produced despite the sometimes lacking tools.
 
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hmm you dont seem to use "highQuality=true" though, which should produce dithering instead of the artifactes shown above and shouldn't have to much influence on performance.
 
CO_Dae said:
There is nothing intentional done with the colors/saturation, but of course the game's lighting, shaders, color correction etc. affect things a bit. And as was already said, the game compresses all textures to the standard DXT format, including the built-in assets, which probably also affects the colors. But the compression saves significant amounts of memory (6:1 compared to uncompressed) and also helps loading times quite a bit (about which people with many assets are complaining even with the compression, and it would be worse with uncompresssed textures).

About the file size, in addition to just the textures, the final asset file also has the mesh and several PNG images: a preview, 5 versions of the thumbnail and the infotooltip. So the textures are only a part of the file. You also can't really compare the sizes to a PNG texture since that would need to be uncompressed for the graphics card anyway, and what matters is the memory footprint and loading time, not the size on disk.

By the way, on your images above, "stage 2" when the editor says "compressing textures..." is before the texture compression, but with the in-game lighting instead of what the preview uses. Stage 3 is with the compressed textures applied (when the text has vanished).



I would say it is actually pretty hard given all the constraints. I'm sorry that we have failed your expectations, but hopefully the editor is at least getting better for you with our continuing effort. And thanks for all the content you have produced despite the sometimes lacking tools.
Click to expand...

I fully understand that compression is needed, really... But you can't say that between stages 2 and 3 there isn't some kind of problem.

Compression can be destructive... this is demolition. :D
 
Shelltoe said:
hmm you dont seem to use "highQuality=true" though, which should produce dithering instead of the artifactes shown above and shouldn't have to much influence on performance.
Click to expand...

If you are referring to Unity's Texture2D.Compress, we are not using it. The compression is done using NVIDIA texture tools with the highest quality preset. There are several different algorithms for DXT compression, though, so maybe we could experiment with some of the alternatives at some point.

Mr Maison said:
CO_Dae, Is anything going to be done about this......any plans to make it better? We're in a constant fight to make good looking assets.
Click to expand...

If the compression is the problem, I'm not so sure what could be done about it. Possibly we could add a very low size limit that depends on the asset type, and not force compressing textures if they are below that size, so you'd have the option of choosing between very blurry and compression artifacts. Would that sound useful at all? But honestly, this is not the highest priority, compared to the things we are currently working on.
 
CO_Dae said:
maybe we could experiment with some of the alternatives at some point.
Click to expand...

This is good !! :cool:

CO_Dae said:
honestly, this is not the highest priority, compared to the things we are currently working on.
Click to expand...

This is less good.

The game was made and marketed as highly modable... and yes it is. Modders make awesome mods and builders can't stop building...
But some things there are not ok at all.
The asset editor is still behaving very badly in lots of ways, prop placement is still super annoyingly inprecise, we still have the color change system not working... as a builder I'd prefer having the asset editor fixed and have to wait longer for the night/day dlc.

Now maybe that texture compression part can't be made "perfect" (because yeah, compression... I completely understand) But I'd like it to be just a bit better... or maybe be given more choices.


Anyway... If the game is modable, some of the tools we are given and the way the game handles our work (yes, it takes time) is not completely satisfying.
 
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How does the lighting (sun) interact with textures? Is there some way to maintain brightness without effecting the texture too much. Like we have to make our roofs very dark just so they don't look washed out.

But I agree that the asset editor really needs fixing fast. A lot of modders been hurting especially the past month. DAE, are you guys aware that the train creation is broken for those using templates made after the last update? And I see some nasty bugs with others and I often experience some error messages on my end too about broken assets (not assets made by modders but native ones).
Though we are able to make nice assets even with the limitations we face now, imagine how much better our assets would be with a better texture system. Don't think because many are just dealing with it right now that we won't lose some good people out of frustration. We can still do things but not without often cursing while we work.

Keep going with the nightlighting btw :cool:
EDITED.
 
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When I said this is not the highest priority, I was only talking about improving the texture compression, and by no means asset editor in general. We are constantly working on improving the tools for creating custom content with both bug fixes and adding new features.

I'm aware that a train template problem exists, but I don't think anyone has had the time to investigate it yet. It may seem like ages for you, but for most of us here it's only been a few very busy workdays since the last patch, because of our vacations + a gdc/gamescom trip.
 
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CO_Dae said:
When I said this is not the highest priority, I was only talking about improving the texture compression, and by no means asset editor in general. We are constantly working on improving the tools for creating custom content with both bug fixes and adding new features.

I'm aware that a train template problem exists, but I don't think anyone has had the time to investigate it yet. It may seem like ages for you, but for most of us here it's only been a few very busy workdays since the last patch, because of our vacations + a gdc/gamescom trip.
Click to expand...
Thanks.....I feel better now. Hope y'all had a good vacation. And I hope it's fun for you to work on this....
 
sorry to rehash an old thread, but my question would be, if the asset editor compresses our textures to DXT, if we supplied our own DXT texture, would it still get changed?
 
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