Forcing high Quality textures...

[Chesspieceface]

Ok, as a tangent to my lighting thread, I think I may have a fix for this matter as well.  I'm hoping a few of you will test this as well.  This will cause a significant performance hit on most all machines so you may want to drop down one order of magnitude on your screen resolution (i.e. 1600x1200-> 1280x960->1152x864->1024x768->800x600).  Also do NOT attempt this if you have less than 128mb of video RAM or you are just plain asking for trouble.

In %Program Files%\EA Games\The Sims 2 %Latest Expansion%\TSData\Res\Config\  you have a file called LODconfig.txt

What I'd like folks to try is commenting out all but the top two entries so it looks like:

LOD  0 600
LOD  1 500
#LOD  2 450
#LOD  3 400
#LOD  4 350
#LOD  5 300
#LOD 15 250
#LOD 20 200
#LOD 30 100

Based on Argon's comments, and my concurrent observations, it would seem that the two highest LOD's are based off the pure original textures.  I think to be safe you might also want to make this same change in the same file in the Base Sims2 Config folder a well as your latest expansion.  This tweak should work with any combination of expansions or lack thereof.  My observations indicate that this does in fact block the game from reducing texture quality at all, but at a trade off of increased texture swapping and reduced performance.  I'd like to be certain that I am not merely hallucinating this improvement, so if a few of you clever souls wouldn't mind messing with this too, I'd be much obliged.

[Argon]

You know, I've tweaked with this before and found it to only really be optimised for 1024x768 by default. (the number after each lod is height in pixels of the object on the screen; higher resolutions will use the larger texture, making the performance lower)

I'd say it would be better to tweak the numbers, rather than forcing less lods... if you're zoomed out really far, you can't see the difference anyway.

[Chesspieceface]

In some cases that may be so, but I find when there are a ton of textures present, if thegame has ever loaded a lower LOD version it will keep it if it needs/wants to.  I'm trying to not give it access to those textures at all.  It also so happens I'm playing in 1024x768 as I found that at anything higher the game seemed to start using LOD textures much faster.  Maybe I can go back up if this tweak is working right.

[Argon]

You're right, the LODs are used faster as you zoom out, but you see the larger textures in the higher resolutions when you would see the smaller textures at the same zoom in a lower resolution.

Maybe this will help, it's the LODs adjusted for a 1152x864 resolution to keep the LOD levels at the same place (in relation to 1024x768; all the numbers have been rounded).

LOD  0 675
LOD  1 563
LOD  2 506
LOD  3 450
LOD  4 394
LOD  5 338
LOD 15 281
LOD 20 225
LOD 30 113

Edit: No wait... if this was for the textures, then why would there be 30 levels?

[Chesspieceface]

Its definitely for textures, take a look at the file.

But I think perhaps you misunderstand me.  I want the game to not load the lower detail versions at all, ever.  I realize it makes no difference when zoomed out, but IME if the game has loaded the LOD textures it will choose not to switch to the higher ones when it is under load, particularly on Sims themselves when they change clothes during those situations.  So I am trying to not give it that option.  I do think that what I posted above is working.  But I'd sure like to hear from anyone else who's tried it.

[Argon]

I have tried it, and you can still see the different textures changing as you zoom in and out. I really don't think this has to do with the textures.

If you look at that file, it doesn't say anything about pixels (it could be their own "game units"; so I'd be wrong with the changes I made above). Also if you look at these lines:

# No interpolation is done between the LODs listed in this file. This allows using only as
# many LODs as needed e.g. on a low-end machine an "aggressive" use of LODs might
# list all 30 levels possible; on a high-end machine only 1 or 2 levels may be necessary.

I wouldn't make sense for it to be talking about the textures, since those have 2 LIFOS and 7-9 MipMapped textures (depends on the size of the texture 1024x1024 will have 9, while 256x256 will have 7). With the max size texture there would still only be 11 levels, not 30. LOD can refer to models as well, maybe that is what they are refering to.

EDit: By the way... what texture setting do you play your game at? High, Medium, or Low?

Or maybe a better question would be if you had all your settings at high.

[Chesspieceface]

Yes all high.  In 1024x768 with 8x AF set in drivers.

The problem Im trying to fix only occurs on lots with a LOT of stuff on them.  At some point the engine decides it just is not going to use the highest textures for certain objects no matter what.  I don't want it to do that.

[Argon]

Ah, well that can't really be changed. Video cards have a limited amount of memory and cannot store too many large resolution textures at once. Because you have so many different objects, there have to be many different textures loaded at once and so the smaller textures have to be loaded. If you try and force the game to use the larger textures and there isn't enough memory, then textures will dissappear entirely (since they can't fit into the video card's RAM).

If you want to stop the game from loading the MipMapped textures, you have to either get a new video card with more memory or modify each TXTR in the game (and risk textures not showing up at all).

[Chesspieceface]

...Video cards have a limited amount of memory and cannot store too many large resolution textures at once. Because you have so many different objects, there have to be many different textures loaded at once and so the smaller textures have to be loaded. If you try and force the game to use the larger textures and there isn't enough memory, then textures will dissappear entirely (since they can't fit into the video card's RAM)...

I believe this is false.  First off, smaller textures are only loaded because the software thinks it can.  If either they werent available or it wasnt an option they wouldnt be at all.  Secondly the amount of VRAM is not the absolute limit on available texture memeory.  A certain amount of system RAM is reserved to be used for video textures as well.  For AGP this is known as the Aperture qnd is configured in most BIOS/CMOS.  But even should that amount be exceeded the result would not be blank textures, the result would be excessive swapping between texture memory and the system pagefile, or HD thrashing as its sometimes called.

I feel that the game engine is very conservative about its scaling, which is sensible to protect the lowest common denominator, but in any other game, if you choose 'High' textures... that's what you get regardless of performance.  I'd like to get the engine to let me actually choose rather than it "optimizing" on the fly. 

I haven't given up yet.