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Is there a way to mute the really busy / grainy textures so I can better see the units?

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5 years ago
Pretty much what the title says, as a newer player it's heard enough to differentiate the units visually, let alone when they're on really grainy textures.
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5 years ago
Sounds like a bad map, do you have a screenshot?
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5 years ago
Id also like to know, some maps I gotta draw selection boxes to find my dudes
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5 years ago
I found the black outline option helps with visibility alot. Called "x-ray shader" in settings I think.
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5 years ago
GBrankTarks this is why i mostly play zoomed out, as i found the radar-icons to be far easier to read than the actual models when they are just tiny clumps.
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5 years ago
Reducing Icon Distance is also a good way of improving unit visibility. I have set it to 58 currently.
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5 years ago
Remember that we may actually just be dealing with a bug. Screenshots are really useful and we've basically got no advice without one.
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5 years ago
i can assure you that my personal problem is totally unrelated to bugs. Doesn´t matter anyway because i found a solution to it and always prefer to learn how to deal with stuff myself if i have control over it.
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Firepluk
quote:
Pretty much what the title says, as a newer player it's heard enough to differentiate the units visually, let alone when they're on really grainy textures.

Same problem I have with human faces - almost all have 2 eyes and 1 nose... damn hard to differ one from another :\
My neural network has not got enough training probably ^^
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5 years ago
(Side note: This is scratching an itch that hasn't been satisfied since supcom, thank you so much :D)

Should have posted photos, apologies.

I think this is a combination of textures and the actual units not having strong 'glance value' imho (buildings are great).

Here it's quite hard to see stuff


Here in this SupCom inspired map it's a lot clearer (unless you zoom in and like me are still new and and have foliage enabled like a fool...)


I've enabled team halos and unit outline for now to see how that helps. It's likely exacerbated by being new to the game but watching replays on youtube I do struggle to quickly differentiate between a lot of the smaller units.
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5 years ago
Ah, that texture is what CArankTheMooseIsLoose (the creator of many maps) calls high quality. If Small Supreme Battlefield were made with present day technology it would be just as hard to see units.
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That's Saktoth's texture. V3 series consisted of my detailing.

I never considered this version, or anything about living lands to be high quality. Just an improvement.
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5 years ago
Thanks for clarifying. I've managed to mitigate this personally by looking for maps with cleaner/blander textures, disabling vegetation and adding unit outlines + halos. I want to introduce some friends that are old SupCom players to this game but I want to make it as easy as possible to get into and these sorts of things will make a difference :)

The other issue I'm having is seeing the range indicators on maps is also tricky:



Tried to see if this was a configurable option via lua configs a la team colours but it doesn't appear to be exposed.
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5 years ago
The outlines look really good imo, is there a reason they arent default?
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5 years ago
The outlines make me sick. They change thickness in a nauseating way when I change my zoom level or camera tilt. Without such changes they become too thick when zoomed out. A better thickness function is required. They also fail to display for nanoframes, which is inconsistent.

Also, performance. They should be a shader but they are not.
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I mean, there's a variable thickness option, though it produces floating lines when close up. Also, there is a "low-quality" version which basically just renders the unit in GL_LINES mode with some depth/offset tweaks to make the lines largely only appear behind the unit. Doesn't completely fix the visibility issue for units that cut into the ground (like mexes), but works reasonably well otherwise.

Lastly, the outline effect is mostly a shader (specifically a light fullscreen blur shader), but there is the stencilling bit that I had to put in to deal with water, and don't know how to replace it. I've done shader-only outlines in other applications, but that used geometry shaders, so it requires OpenGL 3+, not to mention having triangle adjacency data to work with, and it's not like geometry shaders are known for their performance. A pure fragment shader-only approach (render units with no texture in black to offscreen buffer, blur offscreen buffer, draw buffer image between map and units) doesn't work in Spring because the high-quality water reflection and refraction settings screw with depth and rendering order, which caused the outline silhouettes to render on top of the units.

The only other approach I'm aware of (used in Guilty Gear Xrd and AFAIK Dragonball FighterZ) is to flip some parameter with the winding order of triangles to turn the models inside-out, and draw that inside-out version before drawing the models properly. This has the same problem as lines of not respecting the ground/unit intersections, since it assumes the model isn't intersecting other geometry.
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5 years ago
I'll have a go at using outline again, without the variable thickness based on camera height. Here are my general worries with enabling outline by default:
  • It has a performance impact that is likely accentuated for those who are already struggling for performance.
  • It is in a family of widgets which are known for crashing. I've watched people enable things like X-Ray halo and unit platter and have those widgets crash.
  • Relatedly, it is from 2007. Old (drawing related) widgets are terrible and I don't know how much of it has been rewritten and checked.
  • I have no idea what proportion of people like it. Apparently some graphics guy at a GDS said (looking at ZK outlines) to not use outlines.

Outline has had work done on it so perhaps it is not fair to judge it along with other unit visibility widgets. However, I don't have updated data on outlines so I've had to go with my learnt bias in this area.
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Outline has had work done to it, though I do kinda get where the GDS guy is coming from, seeing as most RTS games don't have visibility issues where it's not clear where a unit ends and the ground begins, or just where units are at all. Part of that is that most games lack zoom, but mostly it's art direction. Usually either emissive lights on units, or palette choices for units that use brighter and more saturated colours than the ground, or just less noisy ground textures.

I like Outline right now as a way to clearly see what things on the screen are units, and to make it easier for the video compression OBS uses to see what things on the screen are units/foreground objects, but it does feel like something done more out of necessity to make sure units are visible regardless of map, rather than a conscious and deliberate aesthetic choice. Considering that Zero-K is using some maps made for other games, along with having unit designs from a bunch of sources, and I don't expect a full re-texturing/re-colouring of all units and featured maps to improve visibility by default anytime soon, so I think that Outline+XRay or Outline+Spotter is a necessity for the forseeable future.
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