Cannot see out of vision slits in Jagdpanzer IV

[Colin Basnett]

Used to be able to see out of these in 5.1. Was this intentional?

[Colin Basnett]

This was possibly caused by re-saving the texture with no alpha channel?

[Matt Hands]

Showing periscope texture used in interior model of hetzer.

[Matt Hands]

Yes, that's it. Looking at 5.1 files, interior texture was originally a whopping 2048x2048 uncompressed RGBA8.

Could probably have been compressed to DXT3 and work file. Easy to recreate.

Could probably also be resized to 1024 x 1024 and still look ok. Easy to do.

Ideally, interior mesh would have separate material slot for periscope glass, then just that small, separate glass texture could be DXT3. Remember doing that for the hetzer, using a resized blue-ish periscope glass texture with a kind of border (screenshot attached). Looks pretty good I think, and only 256x128 DXT3. But probably too late to think about revising model !

Really though, the transparent scopes look pretty unrealistic to me. I wouldn't think you can see anything useful through a periscope unless you put your eyes up to it. Most of the vehicles have a solid texture over the periscope and you only get a view when you move to the peri position. I'd be happy leaving the JP4 like that, except in this case it's ended up with an odd, brown & grainy texture where the glass would be.

I think the best thing would be for me to try resizing the interior texture down to 1024 and compressing as DXT3. That way we should get a major memory saving and still get alpha and a decent looking interior. If the reduction to 1024 makes the interior look bad, I can put it back to 2048, but at 4 times the memory use I hope we don't need to, just for an interior.

ps - I have reviewed the 7 German vehicle textures recently, looking for any rogue uncompressed textures. There were none - not sure who did this already but it was thorough. But I also checked the material SurfaceType of every texture (very boring, I know), looking in nearly all cases to make sure they are set to metal armor, not default. Affects sounds and maybe other stuff. Changed quite a few in no. 1, 2, 3 & 7, so will commit the set when I've done this JP4 thing. I mention it just so no one else works on these files & uploads a branched version. I intend to review the other vehicle textures too, just did the German ones first.

[Matt Hands]

Ok, made the change, as above. Transparency restored and reduction to 1024x1024 texture looks ok to me. File reduction of 1.4 megs just by resizing one texture, even though compression has been lowered to DXT3.

Amended DH_VehiclesGE_tex4.utx file committed.

Will leave this open for a while so you see this. Cheers.

[Colin Basnett]

Nice work!