a) 4. 1 Creating a texture with the correct pixel dimensions

Understanding by Billy Johnsson

When creating a texture for a mesh it's important to understand what dimensions to use to get the most out of the texture in terms of optimization and usability.

Now it is not perfectly clear whether a squared or rectangular texture works the best for the game engine but since squares can be found in both shapes, I'd recommend starting with squares. Square texture dimensions go as low as 2x2 pixels all the way up to 2048x2048 except in a few cases where 4096x4096 may be suitable for liveries.

Recommended pixel dimensions can be found below:

(2x2)

(4x4)

(8x8)

()These are extremely small.

16x16

32x32

64x64

128x128

256x256

512x512

1024x1024

2048x2048

4096x4096 (Not recommended, tendency to cause performance issues)

To create the most optimized texture for your mesh you can have these factors in mind:

• How large is my mesh?

• How much detail do I want my mesh to obtain?

• How much will the end user see my mesh?

• Are the details necessary to have in compensation for a loss in game performance?

After you've composed your texture with all the necessary details, what file format do you choose? Now that can be quite tricky in the start without any previous knowledge about textures. DirectDraw Surface or short just ".DDS" is the format used for the Grand Theft Auto engine because of its ability to stay compressed even when loaded. And because of Grand Theft Auto's sheer size in world, you have to take into consideration that not all textures can be loaded without compression. DDS is also very quick with data directly to the internal memory structures. This saves memory for your Vram to load further textures for other meshes in the scene.

In this thread, I've included a texture document which is 2048x2048 to give you a better understanding of pixel dimensions.

Pixel dimensions guide