Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

(06-11-2016, 03:55 AM)rlaugh0095 Wrote: [ -> ]Thanks for the advice! Does your tool work with your nrm files as well? Yeah Ill compress the png texture pack and put it on my usb HDD for safe keeping.

BTW i'll have another beautiful screenshot to share in a minute. Im quite pleased with myself. <3

the tool generate material files from normal maps, specular maps and bump maps. and also if selected it compress them and the color data

(06-11-2016, 04:11 AM)Tino Wrote: [ -> ]the tool generate material files from normal maps, specular maps and bump maps. and also if selected it compress them and the color data

Sweet! I'll give it a try after I reach the finalizing stage.

Anyway, my latest screenshot. I've been working on Kakariko village.



Also ignore the face texture. I've been doing some experimenting on making a realistic face. (Pores and all). It has been a battle, but im getting close to figuring our. The only issue im having is finding a way to make his eyebrows look legit.
As for the ground texture, I opted out of using displacment for technical reasons, using only the nrm to give it a sense of depth. The cliff texture, is using displacment though. Im using it sparingly, taking advice from some of my past critics and I got to say, I think it's coming along great. I would have showed off more of the town, but I still have to do all the wood and 1 house texture.

(06-11-2016, 04:40 AM)rlaugh0095 Wrote: [ -> ]Sweet! I'll give it a try after I reach the finalizing stage.

Anyway, my latest screenshot. I've been working on Kakariko village.

*EDIT* Click to see screenshot *EDIT*: (Show Spoiler)

Also ignore the face texture. I've been doing some experimenting on making a realistic face. (Pores and all). It has been a battle, but im getting close to figuring our. The only issue im having is finding a way to make his eyebrows look legit.
As for the ground texture, I opted out of using displacment for technical reasons, using only the nrm to give it a sense of depth. The cliff texture, is using displacment though. Im using it sparingly, taking advice from some of my past critics and I got to say, I think it's coming along great. I would have showed off more of the town, but I still have to do all the wood and 1 house texture.

Consider experimenting with custom mipmaps. Custom as in not just a downscaled version of the same texture, but a modified/different "texture". You can control the distance of these mipmaps via anisotropic filtering--mipmaps with AF@1 will be closer to the screen than with AF@16.

This can produce some interesting results. BrunoFBK did this in his Xenoblade textures. (Link to his youtube video, his textures are used in the one of the Xenoblade texture packs on this forum).

Although I think you're already aware of this "trick" in that texture pack. Just wanted to remind you but mostly I wanted to bring it to more people's attention. I think it's a great tool for us artsy fartsy people
One Idea I had was displacement maps only on base texture and not being applied to mipmap levels, or only on 1st mipmap level to really enhance the icy/wet/metalic textures as shown in the video above.
I'd love to see someone actually combine this with material maps and other new features added to Ishiiruka.

This can also, in theory, improve performance, however small that improvement might be.




And since I'm talking about anisotropic filtering, using AF@16 is a bad idea... but only with custom textures.

This is totally my opinion!.

Allow me to explain.
Games have different texture sizes, obviously, and most custom textures are at a much higher resolution than the textures they replace in <insert game here>.
Because each game has different texture resolutions, so are their mipmaps. Each game's engine is configured in a way that loads X mipmap and Y distance/angle. One game may transition 50 feet in front of the player/screen, and another might instead transition at 10 feet.
Dolphin/Ishiiruka's Anisotropic filtering option just prorates this transition point further away. This is a good thing for PC gaming in general, and mostly holds true for Dolphin/Ishiiruka.
But these high resolution textures are the exception!
Because of the resolution there are more pixels which means we can have far more fine details visible, like better looking blades of grass or smaller gravel. Naturally, this looks great when up close. This also means the mipmaps for this texture will also be a much higher resolution.
For illustration purposes in the following, let's say we have a 2000x2000 grass texture that would be tiled in-game.
With AF@16 you see this 2000x2000 texture cover more area since the first mipmap transition point has been pushed x2.5 further away than it was with AF@1.
You are not going to fit/scale this 2000x2000 texture in a 300-500 pixels² (pixels squared) of your display that it is being rendered in.
When this happens you get texture crawling/shimmering/aliasing. Very noticable during movement, thus the crawling/shimmering descriptor. It's worth noting that the these problems are focused on the fine details so this totally depends on the art style of a texture--high resolution textures in styleized games like, Mario games, won't have the fine details of something that was going for realism would have.

This is why mipmaps continue to exist, to address these types of artifacts. AF@16 has not had an impact on performance since late AGP video card days.
And this ends my explanation.

TL;DR: Using AF@16 with texture resolutions that are more than twice your render resolution is actually a decrease in image quality.
Example A: 4026x4092 textures have to many pixels to fit inside 1920x1080
Example B: Xenoblade UltraHD Environment pack (8192x8192)) at 1920x1080
Example C: Using Xenoblade texture pack as example, compare UltraHD@native vs Core-only@native.

Normally I'd just give screenshot comparisons for proof, but to me this is just so self explanatory that I don't feel that it is necessary. That and it would be like comparing two downscales using nearest neighbor but starting at a different corner (coordinates starting at top left of screen vs the bottom right; same fartifact pattern just starting at a different point which makes both look different of each other).

*Not an edit*
Fartifact. Thanks typo, I have a new favorite word.

It's worth noting that this

(06-11-2016, 01:07 PM)Kamikaze_Ice Wrote: [ -> ]Consider experimenting with custom mipmaps. Custom as in not just a downscaled version of the same texture, but a modified/different "texture". You can control the distance of these mipmaps via anisotropic filtering--mipmaps with AF@1 will be closer to the screen than with AF@16.

This can produce some interesting results. BrunoFBK did this in his Xenoblade textures. (Link to his youtube video, his textures are used in the one of the Xenoblade texture packs on this forum).

Although I think you're already aware of this "trick" in that texture pack. Just wanted to remind you but mostly I wanted to bring it to more people's attention. I think it's a great tool for us artsy fartsy people
One Idea I had was displacement maps only on base texture and not being applied to mipmap levels, or only on 1st mipmap level to really enhance the icy/wet/metalic textures as shown in the video above.
I'd love to see someone actually combine this with material maps and other new features added to Ishiiruka.

This can also, in theory, improve performance, however small that improvement might be.




And since I'm talking about anisotropic filtering, using AF@16 is a bad idea... but only with custom textures.

This is totally my opinion!.

Allow me to explain.
Games have different texture sizes, obviously, and most custom textures are at a much higher resolution than the textures they replace in <insert game here>.
Because each game has different texture resolutions, so are their mipmaps. Each game's engine is configured in a way that loads X mipmap and Y distance/angle. One game may transition 50 feet in front of the player/screen, and another might instead transition at 10 feet.
Dolphin/Ishiiruka's Anisotropic filtering option just prorates this transition point further away. This is a good thing for PC gaming in general, and mostly holds true for Dolphin/Ishiiruka.
But these high resolution textures are the exception!
Because of the resolution there are more pixels which means we can have far more fine details visible, like better looking blades of grass or smaller gravel. Naturally, this looks great when up close. This also means the mipmaps for this texture will also be a much higher resolution.
For illustration purposes in the following, let's say we have a 2000x2000 grass texture that would be tiled in-game.
With AF@16 you see this 2000x2000 texture cover more area since the first mipmap transition point has been pushed x2.5 further away than it was with AF@1.
You are not going to fit/scale this 2000x2000 texture in a 300-500 pixels² (pixels squared) of your display that it is being rendered in.
When this happens you get texture crawling/shimmering/aliasing. Very noticable during movement, thus the crawling/shimmering descriptor. It's worth noting that the these problems are focused on the fine details so this totally depends on the art style of a texture--high resolution textures in styleized games like, Mario games, won't have the fine details of something that was going for realism would have.

This is why mipmaps continue to exist, to address these types of artifacts. AF@16 has not had an impact on performance since late AGP video card days.
And this ends my explanation.

TL;DR: Using AF@16 with texture resolutions that are more than twice your render resolution is actually a decrease in image quality.
Example A: 4026x4092 textures have to many pixels to fit inside 1920x1080
Example B: Xenoblade UltraHD Environment pack (8192x8192)) at 1920x1080
Example C: Using Xenoblade texture pack as example, compare UltraHD@native vs Core-only@native.

Normally I'd just give screenshot comparisons for proof, but to me this is just so self explanatory that I don't feel that it is necessary. That and it would be like comparing two downscales using nearest neighbor but starting at a different corner (coordinates starting at top left of screen vs the bottom right; same fartifact pattern just starting at a different point which makes both look different of each other).

*Not an edit*
Fartifact. Thanks typo, I have a new favorite word.

It's worth noting that this

My native resolution is 4k btw. 2560x2560 ain't got shit on me!

metal gear solid

Ishiiruka.680(4ebaaa0).x64

game runs only once the second time crash you have to delete a folder shader cache it will be fixed?

There seem to be a few problems with the shader cache on the latest version. Super Mario Galaxy now has a tendency to freeze when using the spin attack, and I also managed to freeze Windwaker as well. Both threw me an error about something something shader error. Will give the exact error when I can.

Also: I did delete my entire shader cache folder, and yet the errors still occurred.

Woo maybe I can do a grass shimmer by brightening the specular map in one of the mips. I'm going to experiment with that. I'm on a kinda sorta vacation and I observed it happening in real life. Should be interesting to see if I can do it.

If i want to update the version, or replace it with the original Dolphin, what files do i replace without interfering with the system files for the Wii itself.
Cause i have my own Wii files from my console, but as Dolphin has it's own generic files, i don't know which files are for the actual Emulator and which are for the system files.

Thanks.

If you want to keep your settings, and saves separate from Ishiiruka and official Dolphin, throw a blank "portable.txt" file in with Dolphin.exe

This will create a User folder that isn't in your Documents folder and will only use that for that install.

If you want to move your save files around, only use normal saves and just copy the memory card files over. Savestates are not compatible between versions in many cases.

(06-11-2016, 01:07 PM)Kamikaze_Ice Wrote: [ -> ]Consider experimenting with custom mipmaps. Custom as in not just a downscaled version of the same texture, but a modified/different "texture".

A couple of us on the Xenoblade texture pack coined the phrase "dynamic mipmap" for this awhile back, not sure if there's actually a proper term for them. This is easy to do with PNG and possible to do with DDS, my script preserves dynamic mipmaps for all formats. But, not with textures created with Ishiiruka Tool since it generates all layers from the top level. My script uses Ishiiruka Tool when material maps are present, so this means a choice has to be made between dynamic mipmaps and material maps.

Aside from all that, I'm pretty sure Tino added the ability in Ishiiruka to load DDS textures from other tools, and still use the material maps created with Ishiiruka Tool, so it might be possible to combine the two (as in, use a color texture with dynamic mipmaps generated from other tools, and include a material map generated from Ishiiruka Tool). But I have never tested this, and if it works, I'm not sure how it would look as the material map may affect each descending level differently depending on how different each level looks.