Quake Textures

[Infje]

Hey guys,

I know that the Quake textures have been remade countless of times. The quality of this varies quite a bit. When Googling I found that this is the biggest project, or so it seems:

:: Quake Revitalization Project :: Quake Retexturing Project ::

I respect the work that went into this but to me, most of them don't look enough like Quake. That's because I'm very picky and if it could, I would just resize the original ones and be content.

The only project I ever fell in love with was the Debaser set by Starbuck:

Starbuck's Stronghold

Since I'm doing some Quake 3 work I'm looking for sets in similiar quality. You as a community surely must have some good recommandations for me?

Thanks in advance,

Infje

[bluntz]

Dead link

[Infje]

I don't get it?

[Syluxguy28O3]

I don't get it?

yeah, me neither....whatare we talking about again?

[Baker]

The debase texture set download link is broken on the debaser page.

[Syluxguy28O3]

oh. i figured it was something like that.

[R00k]

I thought he was looking for q3 remade textures?
Didnt openarena do that?

[Seven]

Hello Infje,

A thread with the same topic has already been discussed here.
You will find more world texture links there.

Click here if you want to Download 'Starbuck�s Debaser textures'.
But be aware, that they only cover the base-"wad" (with 300 textures). The complete ID1 texture amount is 541.
Click here if you want to read more about it.

Starbuck also started to work on the other textures. This is an example of his great talent:


But unfortunately his laptop got stolen and with it all his textures...

The only complete and faithful set is Moon[Drunk]�s QRP set.
Only MH had a complaint about it due to its power of 2 issue, which a few engines have problems with. The set uses some non-power-of-2 textures.

Have fun experimenting with textures.
Seven

[MH]

Specifically I think all replacement texture sets should aim to be sized at powers of two, yes. That's not so much a hardware problem anymore, as all reasonable hardware from the past 6 to 8 years will support non power of two textures, but such support needs to be enabled in an engine too.

If it's not enabled then it's a huge slowdown on loading times (in the worst case a texture could load almost 4x slower) and huge extra overhead on video memory usage (worst case, again 4x usage). It's also the case that resampling a texture from non power of two to power of two will degrade it's visual fidelity. Designing at powers of two will avoid these, shipping at powers of two will avoid the first and a higher quality resample can be used to reduce the third. If the non power of two is rounded up to a power of two there's nothing you can do about the second - you could be throwing away as much as 4mb of video RAM per texture just because the artist decided to ship non power of two.

All of these problems go away if the engine being used has non power of two support, but that's not guaranteed so using powers of two just seems like basic manners to me.

I'm in general agreement that I don't really like replacement texture sets. They tend to go for stupidly high resolution rather than anything else, whereas the real visual improvement actually comes from taking advantage of the increased colour depth offered by a 32bpp format. To my eyes that just makes Quake's original limited palette look even worse, as the limitations of a smaller set of colours really stand out more at that level of detail.

Other folks may have different opinions of course and that's OK - different people are different.

[golden_boy]

Agreed about the palette problems; however I have to appreciate Moon[Drunk]'s talent. Making a replacement set and actually getting it complete and releasing it is no small task, and the textures are very faithful. What good is such work if in the end, the community doesn't use it?

Taking the original textures and upscaling them wouldn't do much in my opinion. I also think Starbuck's Debaser set is so close to the original resolution that you might just use the originals - QRP textures have a better resolution.

The short answer is there is nothing else, and you'll have to make your own textures or use a different approach.

One recommendation is that you could take Moon's textures and colour-correct them to work better with a more modern lighting scheme. That would mean brightening them and equalizing the colours used between a set (using layer modes etc).

Btw a lot of custom Quake maps use completely unrelated textures because they have been established over time - the Unreal rock texture comes to mind. So even purists don't seem to be THAT purist most of the time.

Q3A textures have also been used in custom Quake maps quite a bit, so you could just use them and go for a look similar to Shambler's Castle - something that looks like Quake despite not really being Quake. I think some of the most famous Quake maps ever created use Q3 textures - that makes it pretty hard to argue against the use of those.

[Infje]

@Seven:

I absolutely love Starbuck his work. Seeing that screenshot and reading that his laptop got stolen truly makes me sad. I guess he never felt like starting over? Can't blame him but it's a great loss.

I did a search here but I assumed those texture threads referred to wads while I need tga's or jpg's. Thanks for sharing. It has been very usefull.

@MH:

I couldn't have said it better myself. But taste differs of course. I have browsed through all the remakes but like I stated before, most of them feel out of place to me. That doesn't detract from the fact it takes skill to make them though. I respect that.

@Golden_boy:

The upscaling wasn't meant to be serious. It's because his Debaser set is so close that it looks so authentic imo.

Yes, I've been browsing Quaddicted and looking at the fantastic maps made by CZG, Vondur, Necros,Kell, etc. I'm going to dig through the readme's and see what the texture sources are.

I also noticed maps using textures from other games but to my knowlegde that's illegal right? Anyway, your right about picking textures that look like them. I'll probably end up making screenshots of maps that feel the purists to me and then finding textures that resemble them.

Thank you all again for taking the time to elaborate. This truly is a hospitable community.

[Moon[Drunk]]

Specifically I think all replacement texture sets should aim to be sized at powers of two, yes. That's not so much a hardware problem anymore, as all reasonable hardware from the past 6 to 8 years will support non power of two textures, but such support needs to be enabled in an engine too.

Hello MH, could you tell me which textures are not in power of 2 in the QRP set?
When i made the QRP textures I always tried to be consistent and multiplying the width and height of the originals by 8.
Maybe I did not get every texture in the correct size?
Or are there some original quake textures that are not in power of 2? Just curious...

[golden_boy]

The latter, I think.

Power of 2 in this context means that *all* measures are 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048... *only*.

Something like 96, 192 or 384 is a multiple of 8, but not a power of 2.

[MH]

Wot GB said, basically. As a rule of thumb, if it's not power of two in the original then it's likely to also not be power of two in the replacements.

In fairness QRP is not the worst offender. Rygel's (I think and apologies if I'm wrong) has textures that are really crazy sizes like 503x517.

[_Smith_]

Yes, there are few textures in Rygel's Ultra pack, that are not multipliers of 4 in size, also half the skins in Quake Reforged High Packs have this issue as well.
They are broken when you use texture compression on AMD/ATI cards. I've cut some rows of pixels from them, to assure they play nice with texture compression.
QR team could release them as tga by the way, jpg only introduce compression artefacts with no benefit for VRAM usage and with fast enough drive tga loads faster.

If some higher resolution “source” QRP textures exist, then they could be resampled to higher then current QRP textures and ^2 resolutions.
If you would had to upscale currently released ones, better leave them as they are, it would only blur them.
As I understand this, modern hardware can handle not ^2 textures without resizing.

From what I've read, the last generation of GPUs that has performance issues with not ^2 textures was the first DX9 generation: GF FX5xxx / ATI R9xxx.
With mobile chips it can be different...