Polygon count / Texture size increase?

[Snubnose 640]

are we going to get higher polygon count and texture size in the future (perhaps with / after the engine update)?

because looking at all these high poly models from clothes, cars and weapons really makes me want to have a good looking - modern - apb experience!

 

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/zDqEm

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Z5LmG

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/yQ1v9

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/wNyDw

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/BmxKk

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/gJZnP

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/A93Ny

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/aRK3L

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/aLKZ9


Even though the engine update was never meant for this, I think it's time APB scales up and get closer to modern standards... after all these years, better lighting and shaders won't be enough to visually bring APB on par with more modern games.
(and yes, I'm aware that visuals are not the highest priority, but it should be right up there with performance, matchmaking and balancing considering the strongest aspect of APB is designing... and it's kind of disappointing applying low-res textures to low-poly models.)

also, imagine having physics for clothes in APB... I'm sure most of the male audience would love to see their catgirls skirt lift when jumping down a ledge... on a serious note though: trenchcoats. -gimme gimme
 

btw, if this would ever happen, it would probably be nice for people with weak PCs to have a "original / few polygon" option available.

another (side) question: is this UI work legit, or a high effort fake? seems quite legit to me (even though the placeholders seem confusing)... is this re-design going to come with the engine update?

https://paullasalle.artstation.com/projects/gq6wP




I'd love to hear an answer to these questions, so please consider it for the upcoming Q&A!

[vsb 6171]

why does every car in the first link look like they're fresh out of the greasiest deep fat fryer on earth

 

i sure hope thats not what we're getting with 3.5 tbh

[StunStick 140]

In terms of higher polygon count, it really wouldn't help too much because to get that level of detail it's a bit excessive for a game like this. Most of those small (and even some big) features can be baked into the normal map.

 

I would love a higher texture resolution. That would actually improve the normal maps as well, so it would be killing 2 birds with one stone.

[GhosT 1301]

15 minutes ago, Solamente said:

why does every car in the first link look like they're fresh out of the greasiest deep fat fryer on earth

 

i sure hope thats not what we're getting with 3.5 tbh

 

Common thing with renders that use reflections, but have nothing other than light sources to reflect.

 

Doesn't look too bad tbh.

[NotZombieBiscuit 3146]

Games don't use the high poly versions in the actual game. They are just used for baking down on to things like normal maps/etc. It is not wise to use the high poly variants because bang for your buck you'll get 90% of the visual fidelity from baking down and far better performance.

 

If you want to go even further running 1024 diffuse but 512 norms/specs is even a great thing that most people never notice but saves a huge amount of texture cache.

Edited September 7, 2019 by NotZombieBiscuit

[WhiskeyTangoFoxX 280]

Short answer: No, this will never happen. The way APB's character creation works is something called morphs. In order to increase the mesh resolution of characters you would need to remodel and retexture every single item from scratch. It's a huge amount of work for almost no payout.

 

The real issue is texture resolution, but that is even less likely to change any time soon. All textures would need to be remade, and there are literally several hundred. but even aside from the level of dev work needed, there is the issue of how APB's system works. Every character has 2 textures, both at 1k resolution. These take up 4mb each in memory. if you were to double the texture resolution (2k) the memory requirement increases quadratically, so 16mb of memory per texture. this is a MASSIVE increase in resource requirements, it would be the same as increasing district pop to 320 (aside from the networking issues.)

 

TL;DR because of how APB works, no, this won't happen, at least not in the foreseeable future.

[supermariobrothe 80]

models and textures are fine as they are, what the game really needs is a full re texture of most of the buildings in the game, right now they are just using very generic tiling/procedural textures instead of textures specifically designed for those buildings, the only things that look good in the maps are the roads.

[Bambola 379]

Could my Pentium dual core run the game then? It's Extreme Edition.

[supermariobrothe 80]

here i made a few crappy quick examples of what i mean

 

 

[Lammashta 12]

16 hours ago, GhosT said:

 

Common thing with renders that use reflections, but have nothing other than light sources to reflect.

 

Doesn't look too bad tbh. 

It looks horrible.  Specularity needs to be dialed way back.  The cars look like they're made of cheap molded plastic.

[AxeTurboAgresor 268]

I dont think that having any higher polygon count in this game is necessary. We already have a good quality polygon models.

 

But textures.. oh yeah thats where the REAL magic happens. Good textures can make all the difference even at very low poly game. It may add depts, many details, and generelly make the game look beautiful.

Iam all for adding better textures.

 

[SalomaLeal 13]

Yes!!! We is need this. I'm havbe aliena wear PCi and waster powers in ABP

[Fortune Runner 796]

about op question : i do not believe anytime soon

 

also is there any lists of current extended goals after upgrade? We know matchmaking phasing and threat but what else?

[Haganu 104]

13 hours ago, Lammashta said:

It looks horrible.  Specularity needs to be dialed way back.  The cars look like they're made of cheap molded plastic.

The cars look like they're made of cheap molded plastic as they are right now. Pretty much like everything else in the game.

cough cough Pestilence suit cough cough

[SkittyM 287]

On 9/7/2019 at 7:05 AM, WhiskeyTangoFoxX said:

Short answer: No, this will never happen. The way APB's character creation works is something called morphs. In order to increase the mesh resolution of characters you would need to remodel and retexture every single item from scratch. It's a huge amount of work for almost no payout.

 

The real issue is texture resolution, but that is even less likely to change any time soon. All textures would need to be remade, and there are literally several hundred. but even aside from the level of dev work needed, there is the issue of how APB's system works. Every character has 2 textures, both at 1k resolution. These take up 4mb each in memory. if you were to double the texture resolution (2k) the memory requirement increases quadratically, so 16mb of memory per texture. this is a MASSIVE increase in resource requirements, it would be the same as increasing district pop to 320 (aside from the networking issues.)

 

TL;DR because of how APB works, no, this won't happen, at least not in the foreseeable future.

I'll admit that i doubt memory space is at all a concern.   At least not a concern at all for the client.  I have no idea how much data the character customization data is prior to being converted by APB.

[WhiskeyTangoFoxX 280]

5 minutes ago, SkittyM said:

I'll admit that i doubt memory space is at all a concern.   At least not a concern at all for the client.  I have no idea how much data the character customization data is prior to being converted by APB.

Considering that characters alone would take up 2.5GB of VRAM (not including cars at all) I do think it would be a pretty big concern. If you include cars (assuming everyone has their personal car spawned) that'd be at least 5GB of VRAM spent *only* on customised assets, no environment assets, no UI, no graphics buffer. It's a much more substantial thing than people realise.

 

The customisation data being transferred/stored on the server is minimal, The theoretical maximum on a single item is 5000 sets of data (50 symbols @ 100 layers each), but the customisation limit will hit loooooooooooooooooong before you can hit the theoretical limit.

[Snubnose 640]

36 minutes ago, WhiskeyTangoFoxX said:

Considering that characters alone would take up 2.5GB of VRAM (not including cars at all) I do think it would be a pretty big concern. If you include cars (assuming everyone has their personal car spawned) that'd be at least 5GB of VRAM spent *only* on customised assets, no environment assets, no UI, no graphics buffer. It's a much more substantial thing than people realise.

 

The customisation data being transferred/stored on the server is minimal, The theoretical maximum on a single item is 5000 sets of data (50 symbols @ 100 layers each), but the customisation limit will hit loooooooooooooooooong before you can hit the theoretical limit.

I'm no tech guru but wouldn't that only be the case if all characters of a district are in render range? they should be loaded into regular ram, not vram?

anyway, I think it must be possible to increase texture / polygon count (even just by a bit) without APB getting a NASA PC only game... it's just not easy optimizing I guess...

Edited September 8, 2019 by Snubnose

[WhiskeyTangoFoxX 280]

2 minutes ago, Snubnose said:

I'm no tech guru but wouldn't that only be the case if all characters of a district are in render range? otherwise they should be loaded into regular ram, not vram?

anyway, I think it must be possible to increase texture / polygon count (even just by a bit) without APB getting a NASA PC only game... it's just not easy optimizing I guess...

The only thing with texture resolutions that you can do is doubling, otherwise they stop being a power of 2 and that's bad for mipmapping. As for whether or not it's in VRAM or normal RAM is a good point, however, even if the likelihood of this ever happening is very low, it IS possible, so it needs to be accounted for. Additionally, 5GB of RAM for something that right now takes only a bit over 1 is a very massive step up in memory usage, which again, is just character and car textures, no models, none of the other graphics or memory things required to run the game.

 

This is the price of APB's insane customisation, it's very expensive on the memory front, be it VRAM or just RAM.

[Snubnose 640]

9 minutes ago, WhiskeyTangoFoxX said:

The only thing with texture resolutions that you can do is doubling, otherwise they stop being a power of 2 and that's bad for mipmapping. As for whether or not it's in VRAM or normal RAM is a good point, however, even if the likelihood of this ever happening is very low, it IS possible, so it needs to be accounted for. Additionally, 5GB of RAM for something that right now takes only a bit over 1 is a very massive step up in memory usage, which again, is just character and car textures, no models, none of the other graphics or memory things required to run the game.

 

This is the price of APB's insane customisation, it's very expensive on the memory front, be it VRAM or just RAM.

true... but what about graphic settings?... give players with weaker PCs the option to tune it back down... I mean it's a pretty basic thing to do, right?
they already do it anyway (with the advanced launcher)...

[WhiskeyTangoFoxX 280]

19 minutes ago, Snubnose said:

true... but what about graphic settings?... give players with weaker PCs the option to tune it back down... I mean it's a pretty basic thing to do, right?
they already do it anyway (with the advanced launcher)...

With that we get back to the other point, which is that increasing the texture res is a MONUMENTAL undertaking. There are several hundreds of textures that would need to be completely remade from scratch, and there'd be absolutely no guarantee that the aesthetics would remain the same, considering that the artists that made the original textures are long long long gone. It's also entirely possible that some items don't have their source high-poly models left anymore, which would just further increase the already absolutely massive workload. Not to mention that any artists working on this would obviously not be able to make new content.

[Bellenettiel 232]

On 9/7/2019 at 9:48 AM, Snubnose said:

another (side) question: is this UI work legit, or a high effort fake? seems quite legit to me (even though the placeholders seem confusing)... is this re-design going to come with the engine update?

https://paullasalle.artstation.com/projects/gq6wP
 

Resembles a lot the console UI on APB

Honestly, i feel like it looks atrocious as far as "symbol" designer ui goes. Everything else is 50/50

IMO

 

 

(also hell yeah, i want high poly APB character stuff, the whole game can be a lego for all i care  .-. Gimmie my fashion matt)

[SkittyM 287]

2 hours ago, WhiskeyTangoFoxX said:

With that we get back to the other point, which is that increasing the texture res is a MONUMENTAL undertaking. There are several hundreds of textures that would need to be completely remade from scratch, and there'd be absolutely no guarantee that the aesthetics would remain the same, considering that the artists that made the original textures are long long long gone. It's also entirely possible that some items don't have their source high-poly models left anymore, which would just further increase the already absolutely massive workload. Not to mention that any artists working on this would obviously not be able to make new content.

This isn't entirely true.  A lot of the RTW raw textures are 1024^2 on their own.  They're currently down scaled from that onto the 1024^2 texture atlas that a full character uses.  With a single section of that being 256^2 or less, doubling the size would make it 512^2 (or less) per section.  And that should only affect the base character model leaving clothing alone.

 

I'm not saying everything is like this, but a majority of the RTW stuff should work perfectly fine with an atlas upscale.  I think RP started making clothing in some weird dumb way that mimic's the base texture map so those actually would need to be rebuilt.

 

Ultimately this is all guesswork and is kinda irrelevant at the moment.  No idea how APB actually does its thing but increasing the texture res on its own should certainly be easier than upping the model res since that would actually require everything to be rebuilt.

[Helix Reloaded 102]

21 hours ago, SalomaLeal said:

I'm havbe aliena wear PCi and waster powers in ABP

reading this made me sad