Our ReVolt Pub

Ever since Re-Volt 11.0525, Re-Volt has had support for 32-bit textures. They have this advantage that you can keep part of a texture semi-transparent, for example a window. Previously it was only possible to keep this windows semi-transparent by making sure the windows was separate polygons. 32-bit can spare you from unnecessarily dividing a polygon into several because you can make the window texture semi-transparent by itself. On complex windows like the ones below this can fortunately save you a good amount of triangles.


(Original window texture image to the right by rinaz)
Re-volt can also exploit the semi-transparency to refine the texture edge. The two pictures below from Graphical Error by Skitch2 is an example of that. (left: in-game picture, right: bitmap texture).





As you can see, the applied anti-alias on the texture is actually not visible in-game, but instead makes the texture edge look better. So what if we make the polygons translucent so the anti-alias appear in-game? I have experiemented a bit with this idea and the result is a nice semi-transparent edge. From distance it can look pretty much like actual anti-alias that you would have applied in your gfx card settings. In my case I'm sitting behind a laptop that doesn't support gfx card anti-alias, so I was quite positive about the results.

As soon as you get near, the result can get rather blurry (depending on texture resolution). However, I have found this effect to be looking very decent on all kinds of vegetation. So with the use of these two different methods I have "converted" the stock tracks so that they now use 32-bit bitmaps. Below are a few comparison pictures of Toys in the hood 2 in-game to show you the difference. You can see the converted 32-bit textures to the left and the original 24-bit textures to the right.







Download: (Update 20-01-2012)
If you are interested in this you can download the converted Re-Volt textures here. They can be installed by simply unzipping the files to the Re-Volt folder + merge folders and replace all files.

I have also compiled a zip with the original files (download here) so you easily can revert back to how it was before again.

Note: Along with what you can see in the screenshots there also seems to be a few bugs. Below is what I have observed so far. Feel free to help fixing existing bugs or report new bugs if you happen to notice any. Just try make sure that the bugs are only caused by the 32-bit update and not because of a third reason.

Issues with the update:
Botanical Garden - All bushes has this horizontal line on them (caused by bad UV Mapping). FIXED

All tracks - Instances changing vertex color/flashing. This is caused by the 32-bit textures and only happens on the instances which makes use of them, even if only partly. Right now this is noticeable on house2.prm and bin.prm in Toys in the hood 2 and I believe this might be a rendering bug from Re-Volt's side. The bug only seems to happen on polygons which pixels' alpha are 255 (opaque) though I'm not exactly sure.

With that said though, there isn't anything to bad effects to notice. But if you do find anything please tell me.

Good news! Since UV Mapping in Blender isn't as hard as I thought I have now fixed the seams on the bushes in Botanical Garden. Below is a comparison with 32-bit textures + translucent prms to the left and the normal 24-bit textures and unmodified prms to the right.



Only seams left are those caused by anisotropic filtering but I won't be able to fix those unfortunately. They aren't that visible though so hopefully they won't bother you too much.

I have also fixed a bug in the 24-bit textures, related to Botanical Garden so the backup files should be fine now. The download link has been updated for both 32-bit and 24-bit textures in my first post.

Cool Urne!!! I like the new gfx. Are you going to eventually convert the buggy instances as well? Or was it just the tree in botanical garden?

Glad you like it too. If you plan to keep using the update, please report anything odd you see.

Zach wrote:Are you going to eventually convert the buggy instances as well

If you by buggy instances refer to the Instances changing vertex color/flashing issue I described in my first post, I'm afraid I can't do much about it. It seems to be an issue with how Re-Volt handles 32-bit bitmaps unfortunately (more details in my first post).

Zach wrote:Or was it just the tree in botanical garden?

The bug I have just fixed only cover the trees and bushes in Botanical Garden yes.

Is it possible to take a screenshot of the 2 remainning issues? (instance and car)

The car issue with 32-bit bitmaps should be visible on this screenshot. The semi-transparent pixels appear as some sort of white and isn't used to "refine" the edge the same way as above. On translucent polygons the semi-transparent pixels on the bitmap appear semi-transparent in-game, but they still appear white at the same time (Clicky).

As for the instances issue, it seems like it only happens in Instances mode for me right now. Perhaps this is connected to the changing vertex colors appearing in nhood1 somehow. Anyway, here is a screenshot of the nhood2 bin in Instances edit mode.

Can you send me the BMP texture used for the car seen in your screenshots? (you can simply send me an email with the zipped texture attached)

Ok, I've checked the texture... Well, the white edge issue we can see on the car screenshot is not an issue with Re-Volt and 32 bits texture, the issue was just in the texture...
In fact the transparent areas were filled with "transparent white". You can't see it when editing the image, but it will blend with the adjacent pixels when the texture is interpolated.

To avoid that, the pixels in the transparent areas should be the same color than the adjacent pixels, but it's not easy as when you use the eraser tool, your image editor will likely replace the RGB info with pure white (it was your case) or pure black (the texture I've emailed you back).

Well, I tried a solution that seems to give full control though.
In Gimp, I use a Layer Mask instead of an Alpha layer to set up the transparency (just remember to paint in black or white on the Layer Mask to add or remove transparency instead of using the regular eraser/delete tools). That way the RGB values are left unmodifed and will be saved in the file when exporting to BMP, even for fully transparent pixels.

Ah, thank you for the solution. I was aware that the background could have this effect, but I thought it only happened in distance when anisotropic filtering is applied..

Will remove the issue from my first post now.

Supermarket 2, just before the start position:


There is a missing polygon in yours market2.w...