I receive a number of requests from authors for an attribute to tag an object as “needs maximum texture resolution” or “needs compression disabled” or “needs maximum anisotropic filtering”. The general idea is that the author wants to ensure a viewing environment that looks good.
For the most part, I am against these ideas – think of the two cases:
- If the attribute on the content is request for a relative improvement in resolution (e.g. set my object to one texture res higher than the rest of the world) then what we’ll have is an arms race – every author will set their content with this flag, and the result will be that the entire sim tends to run at one res setting higher than expected. The result: users without enough VRAM will turn their res settings down another notch and all the content will look like it did before.
- If the attribute on the content is a request for an absolute setting (e.g. load this texture at the highest resolution possible) some content will simply not run on some computers that do run X-Plane.
My general point is this: users run X-Plane with texture resolution, anisotropic filtering, and compression set to lower settings for a reason – because their hardware isn’t very fast! Forcing the sim to ignore the settings and run at a higher res won’t make the user’s video card any better – it will just take the framerate vs. visual quality tradeoff out of the hands of the user.
That’s a simplification of the issue – in fact I am sympathetic to the notion of differential settings – that is, we need to use more texture resolution for art elements that are closer to the viewer. The sim already improves airplane resolution a bit and cockpit resolution a lot. We set anisotropic filtering a bit higher on runways because they are viewed from a shallow view angle pretty much all the time during normal flight.
At this point I am looking at some more specific overrides for cockpit objects. In particular, modern cockpits are built out of many attached objects, and not just the “cockpit object” itself – reducing the resolution of these objects can make cockpit labels illegible.
If we do get extensions to improve resolution I can only say this: use them very, very sparingly! Adding the extension doesn’t improve the user’s hardware. If the user had the ability to run your airplane at extreme res without compression and 16x anisotropic filtering, he’d already be doing that!
