Im actually more worried to see nearly 5 pages of bugs in this beta (435)

Oh wow, they compressed the background image for the inventory screen too  noticeably pixelated

 

Can that too be restored? Do we have the technology?

Serirousry now, compressing loading images is bad enough. In-game assets really should be sacred. Please oh please revert back to non-compressed or at least make it an option for people playing at higher resolutions and/or on higher-end machines.

bump for visibility

Would it be an idea to reduce the overall amount of grainy noise before the image is compressed? That jpeg compression is doing the mid-long distance foliage/grainy brick/roof tiles no favours. 

Edited February 7, 201510 yr by dorkboy

All I see is squares of compression 

Seems to me the compression stuff is needed to squeeze everything into the tight memory space of 32-bit systems. So we probably will need a special program version or something to work with more memory to have nicer art. Not sure if 32-bit with that special flag will do (like with Skyrim) or if we need full-blown 64-bit stuff.

 

Anyhow I suspect this will be pretty low priority for the devs at this time, maybe something to hope for once the game has been released.

They must not know how to optimise images when they're trying to save out the files. If it's a matter of making sure the image is below a file size there's a few different ways to do so. One way is changing the ppi or dpi. In Photoshop you can choose the actual output file size by changing the dpi to 72-96 or the canvas size to a fixed resolution. You can typically reduce a file size by 65-70% before it get's gross looking. Also using starting with a 16 bit or 32 bit image and saving it out to 8 bit will reduce it a lot. The biggest issue is the images they're using has a ton of information in it. It would be better to just use 1 image that's standard for loading every time that is like a logo, or a black and white sketch, concept art, or an animated gif file that would likely be much less than 1 meg and still convey the scene. It could even be a movie file of smoke or any number of effect's you want to use that was transparent on a black background, and it would free up a ton of space or memory.

Or just store the loading screen images externally from Unity's file system so we can interchange them with the HD ones.

The texture optimizations on the load screen images were accidentally set to force to nearest power of 2 in the Unity settings. This has been fixed so the images stay their native resolution (1280x720) not (1024x512).

 

There have been a number of audits and tricks being done on all textures to reduce in game usage size. The loading screens were just a small number of them but seem to be the ones that had a wrong setting checked on them.

 

So, the full resolution images are back in the game on our side.

Hopefully we won't see the compression squares when they are updated.

What about the inventory screen background image? How bad is it?

That one isn't a huge deal, but it's noticeably pixelated compared to previous

Glad to read it is not going to be as bad as in the current BB, but I would still like to have future support for running the game on 64-bit machines with more memory and uncompressed graphics. Hoping for an after-release patch or the expansion maybe?

Agreed. Higher-end machines deserve some eye candy.

I don't understand why there can't be different LoD for these textures, loaded based on a user's machine, resolution, vRAM and DRAM.