A new texture set will be released with the new version of AA, vastly improving upon the original TA textures.

Unfortunately, since they are based on the original textures this still doesn't eliminate any copyright issues.

I was originally planning to use them at 256x256, but I realized this would probably be overkill for most situations. I'm going to do some testing and find what size gives the best balance between quality and performance. Updated preview pics will be up shortly.

old news CA redid them over a year ago :p

Checking CA's folder, they appear to have redone some, but not all. Even the ones they have done are still very low resolution.

It seems they redid some textures for the sake of being able to claim they're GPL, without actually trying to make any improvements. Unless I'm not looking in the right place.

Pretty much. I offered to do a quality rework but it was considered irrelevant since 3DO is the paaaaaast.

But seriously Caydr, please don't spend too much time concerned with redoing 3do textures. Or at least do them in a fashion so that they could be reused in a 3do -> s3o conversion project.

Don't worry, I didn't spend much time on this, it's something I did a long time ago. All the textures are redone to 256x256 (or 256 in the largest direction), but downsized to 112x112 (or 112 in the largest direction) for now until I can determine just how large I can make them before I run out of room on the 3DO master texture.

Here are the preview shots, comparing AA with the new redone textures and BA with the regular ones. The difference probably won't jump out at you at first, the main difference is better contrast and sharpness with a lot less random color noise. Unfortunately because the units are 3DO the textures get smeared around a lot, and there's nothing I can do about that.

Well except for the helipad texture I'd call it hardly visible - if you'll even hardly see it in close-ups it'll be next to no difference in standard gaming perspectives...

If you manage to get every texture fit in the 2048x2048 atlas and you really have a replacement for every texture it might be a nice addon...

Oh and why did you keep the brickstone look on that texture e.g. the helipad has. Imo was a very stupid design decision Cavedog made - I mean e.g. the Vulcan's basement is made of bricks - BRICKS!

It does like nice, regardless of whether it's useful or not. I like it simply because it looks a hell of a lot better.

OK.plz release so I can steal this XD

if anything the contrast is better apart from the air pads you cant really tell

Do they work at 128 rather than 112?

Might just be me, but I liked the grainy before texture more...

the grainyness of the old textures makes it look more realistic in a sense.

Seriously dude, the improvements are hardly noticeable at normal zoom levels. Take these textures, stick them on s3o models, then we'll talk.

As for a brick basement, don't talk shit about that shit man. There could be a bakery under there for all you know...

+1 to REVENGE

I'm still making more improvements. 112 is not the size the textures will be permanently, it's just for testing purposes. The difference is more noticeable on other units, but I won't be posting an updated preview until I've got the maximum possible texture size finalized.

Texturing as a whole is being improved in ways beyond what I've shown in pictures so far. I'll have updated pics when possible. Although I don't have the time to convert everything to S3O at present, there is still a lot more that can be done to maximize the potential of 3DO.

Everything is still experimental at this stage, and I apologize for posting pics which do not accurately represent the improvements which are possible. I've removed all but the air repair pad images since they are the only ones that even begin to show the improvements. It's safe to say though that the improvements will be much more visible in the finished product.

I am doing something that I think many people will truly appreciate the value of when it's finished. This is something I've wanted to do for a long, long time so I hope you can bear with me while I finish this aspect of the project and not form solid opinions until you've seen at least the next set of images.

Also, I can see what you mean bout the noise seeming to add detail to the textures. I will try to implement this effect at a higher resolution without deteriorating the textures themselves.

In order for AA to gain traction, I must find ways of improving the project in a more readily-visible way so that it will stand out from the crowd more. This strategy has worked for the project well in the past, for instance with buildpics and explosions - which became the "standard" for everything that followed. Here I'm creating another new standard which other TA mods will have to compete with.

SA for instance has music as its most noticeable feature, something people can get used to and feel is missing in other projects. I hope to make AA have lots of these sorts of things.

Small performance improvements, small visual improvements, small gameplay improvements (well large, I hope), unique features... all these small things add up and become what TA mods have historically lacked the most: polish.

Just out of curiosity: How does this texture refurbishing work? Do you use some photoshop filter magic or do you repaint them by hand? Or are the textures sources available in that better quality?

Biggest polish id want for any TA mod is UI polish that is in the area you do not want to touch,unfortunately.
so many commands are unknown so many stuff are not represented well or not at all..

But if you can improve all these textures that would be a thing id want to add to SA as well.
Would have been much cooler if someone were to make new models that look like the old ones but high poly with more detail..
ATM,It seems impossible due to the scope of the arsenal of the Core and the Arm.

The refurbish starts with a combination of Photoshop actions I've set up which resize the texture, clean it up, improve the sharpness, add some artificial detail to balance out the noise cleanup, improve the contrast, and so on. It's a really, really long process, luckily all I have to do now that it's set up is go "automate > run batch" and it does it all by itself. After that I adjust each texture to its best appearance within reason with a combination of repainting it with my tablet, and some other photoshop filters and actions I've picked up. The filters and actions are about 50% proprietary code and 50% my own tweakery and actions. The first half doesn't work without the second half and vice versa... so I can't just make a tutorial.

To clean the entire OTA texure library takes about 30 minutes (automated) on my 3.6ghz Core 2 Duo, then I go over each texture one at a time, making manual enhancements where possible within reason. This takes 1-5 minutes per texture on average.

That's "step 1".

After that I get onto the time-consuming part, which is still experimental and I won't be talking about until I know it will work universally.

Step 1 cleans the textures, step 2 makes sure they appear as good as possible ingame. Step 2 is probably the more important part to maximizing quality ingame, and it has not yet been applied to all units so the pictures I posted earlier were not exactly showing what you can expect.

If possible one day I would like to finish remodeling all the units, and when that's done I'll have the full high-quailty texture library at my disposal.

I will probably hang on to the source high-resolution textures (512x512) for my own usage but I will of course be distributing all the modified files with the next version of AA. I won't try and claim any rights to them, etc...

well redoing ALL of the textures is a step closer to non ta ip