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Submitted by iryan on Sat, 2015-04-04 08:13

Dulac wrote:
It's very tough modding alone. That's the reason I've abandoned so many maps. I don't know if you're good at shaders, but parallax mapping could give a nice look for grass. It uses the GPU, so it would save on the CPU. I think a graphic overall should be done with shaders. I can't imagine redoing all the textures.

You're quite correct, there will never be a HD version of Dungeon Siege 2 because of the sheer number of textures involved and the enormous amount of time required to create detailed textures worthy of the massive size they would require.

I did a test over a week with just 6 of the 137 texture folders used for the Terrain textures. Firstly the engine will handle quite large textures (2048x2048). Secondly the size increase is ridiculous (4Mb compared to 86kb) and lastly the increased size is mostly wasted unless somebody was willing to redraw every texture to take advantage of the increased canvas size. In another words the differences between a stock texture of 256x256 compared to one resized to 2048x2048 is negligible. These six folders contained 652 textures and the size of the resultant tank was 1Gb in size! To make a HD version of DS2 would require about 22Gb of space just for the textures for the ground. I can't imagine how much more space would be required for all the other objects in the game.

Replacing textures in a game like DukeNukem 3D or Doom, etc. is feasible as they would only have a few hundred or so textures to replace. DS2 has about 8000 textures for the Terrain alone.

So parallax mapping, etc, would be the only way of improving the textures in the game. Sadly the links provided give a good explanation of how they work but not how to implement them. Shaders are used in the game for water effects but not much else apparently.
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