Sovereign001: New Planet textures 2.0

[sovereign001]

This will be the thread where I will keep you guys updated with the new planet textures.
The road will be long as I will be redoing all of them or updating them to Ultra HD res ;)

Let's hope BC is able to handle it..

Update 31/12/20
Note: planets will have more indepth and sharper.
Starfield will also be redone, the one on the current pictures is still stock of KB 1.0
Update 02/01/21

[vonfrank]

You have my attention!   

Something I've noticed through work on BC Remastered though; Planet textures eat up A LOT of RAM. And if there's one thing BC's aging engine doesn't like, it's high RAM usage.

Initially I had all of the planets in my install use 4096x4096 texture sheets, but I had to downscale them to 2048x2048 due to the game crashing after a few minutes of play each session. Something to keep in mind.

[Haxxor1337]

You have my attention too

I think there is no point in creating UHD textures.

As von Frank says, the engine needs too much RAM.
An update of the engine would be an important project.
So we must wait on the Excalibur Project.
Unless someone is able to improve the old engine 

[sovereign001]

You have my attention!   

Something I've noticed through work on BC Remastered though; Planet textures eat up A LOT of RAM. And if there's one thing BC's aging engine doesn't like, it's high RAM usage.

Initially I had all of the planets in my install use 4096x4096 texture sheets, but I had to downscale them to 2048x2048 due to the game crashing after a few minutes of play each session. Something to keep in mind.

They are set on 4K for the moment. Fingers crossed but KM 1.0 is handling it like a champ.

You have my attention too

I think there is no point in creating UHD textures.

As von Frank says, the engine needs too much RAM.
An update of the engine would be an important project.
So we must wait on the Excalibur Project.
Unless someone is able to improve the old engine 

Thanks but Excalibur is a dead project. They are no updates for I think 2 years now.

[Haxxor1337]

Thanks but Excalibur is a dead project. They are no updates for I think 2 years now.

That´s true

I let myself be surprised 

[JimmyB76]

Excalibur is not dead. Things are still being worked on even if not much public posting is happening.

[sovereign001]

Excalibur is not dead. Things are still being worked on even if not much public posting is happening.

I'll take your word for it then.

[moed]

I have most of my planet textures at 4096x4096 playing at 1920x1080 and my system handles everything just fine. Even though the BC engine is old and often buggy, my system specs makes up for the buggy-ness most of the time.

Bottom line, have a good amount of fast RAM installed (minimum 8GB, 16GB or higher MUCH better), a vid card with at least 4GB of video RAM and a decently fast CPU, and the lion's share of the time you'll be fine. That's been my experience of course.

[vonfrank]

I have most of my planet textures at 4096x4096 playing at 1920x1080 and my system handles everything just fine. Even though the BC engine is old and often buggy, my system specs makes up for the buggy-ness most of the time.

Bottom line, have a good amount of fast RAM installed (minimum 8GB, 16GB or higher MUCH better), a vid card with at least 4GB of video RAM and a decently fast CPU, and the lion's share of the time you'll be fine. That's been my experience of course.

Unless your computer is a literal potato, your system specs are irrelevant when it comes to BC's performance and stability. The game can run fine with even a low end rig. The engine starts to bug out when using more than approximately 1.7-2.0 GB of RAM (even with the 4.0GB aware patch) so anything more than 4GB for your system is redundant. As for GPU memory, the game was designed for 16MB (Mega, not Giga) cards, so even 1GB of VRAM is more than enough.

The 4k planet textures are something the game can easily handle on their own, but the problem is then having any more than about 6 or 8 high quality ship models on top of the 4k planetary textures (and background textures, bridge textures, ect.) leads to massive instability very quickly. And if you are playing the Singleplayer campaign, which loads many different planets for each mission, this problem is even more evident.

Visually, you wont notice any difference between 2k and 4k planet textures unless you fly very close to the surface. It's a small downgrade for a result that uses only 1/4 of the RAM for each planet loaded.

[sovereign001]

Unless your computer is a literal potato, your system specs are irrelevant when it comes to BC's performance and stability. The game can run fine with even a low end rig. The engine starts to bug out when using more than approximately 1.7-2.0 GB of RAM (even with the 4.0GB aware patch) so anything more than 4GB for your system is redundant. As for GPU memory, the game was designed for 16MB (Mega, not Giga) cards, so even 1GB of VRAM is more than enough.

The 4k planet textures are something the game can easily handle on their own, but the problem is then having any more than about 6 or 8 high quality ship models on top of the 4k planetary textures (and background textures, bridge textures, ect.) leads to massive instability very quickly. And if you are playing the Singleplayer campaign, which loads many different planets for each mission, this problem is even more evident.

Visually, you wont notice any difference between 2k and 4k planet textures unless you fly very close to the surface. It's a small downgrade for a result that uses only 1/4 of the RAM for each planet loaded.

Correct, and that's why I'm doing a lot of testing.

[sovereign001]

Update will be added in first post.
Will be doing a fresh starfield too.

[sovereign001]

Updates are added in first post. I noticed that when entering some systems, everything lags a lot and the planet(s) are white ? Reason?

[moed]

Unless your computer is a literal potato, your system specs are irrelevant when it comes to BC's performance and stability. The game can run fine with even a low end rig. The engine starts to bug out when using more than approximately 1.7-2.0 GB of RAM (even with the 4.0GB aware patch) so anything more than 4GB for your system is redundant. As for GPU memory, the game was designed for 16MB (Mega, not Giga) cards, so even 1GB of VRAM is more than enough.

The 4k planet textures are something the game can easily handle on their own, but the problem is then having any more than about 6 or 8 high quality ship models on top of the 4k planetary textures (and background textures, bridge textures, ect.) leads to massive instability very quickly. And if you are playing the Singleplayer campaign, which loads many different planets for each mission, this problem is even more evident.

Visually, you wont notice any difference between 2k and 4k planet textures unless you fly very close to the surface. It's a small downgrade for a result that uses only 1/4 of the RAM for each planet loaded.

Thanks for the info vonfrank. I didn't know that level of technical detail about BC and definitely helps in understanding why sometimes it crashes.

[Grummelmax]

Where can i find the download for this?