Option to turn off texture filtering

[Trist]

This is an obscure interest as far as I can tell, not many people seem to share my viewpoint on them. My biggest complaint with Morrowind has always been its blurry textures. It accomplishes these blurry textures with linear texture filtering. Yeah I know the texture size is small and it would be blocky, however linear texture filtering gives me a headache on par with chromatic aberration. Linear texture filtering also has a considerable impact on performance. Many games before Morrowind, like Quake III Arena for example, force linear texture filtering by default but I think it looks awful. However not many games bother to include an option in the GUI to turn it off. For example, again, Quake III Arena you could turn it off by entering '/cg_texturemode GL_NEAREST' in the console or placed in an autoexec, and it was similar in Quake II and all the source ports for I as well (half life also shares quake I/II's command), but you could only bring the texture filtering down to bilinear in Quake III's GUI. Or in Unreal Tournament, you would have to; update your opengl renderer, then select opengl as your renderer, and finally place these commands under [OpenGLDrv.OpenGLRenderDevice] the the UnrealTournament.ini;

HighResTextureSmooth=False
LowResTextureSmooth=False
NoFiltering=True

I figured this out by trial and error, luckily these commands were referenced under the software renderer tab, but I am not always so lucky. I have never figured out how to turn it off in vanilla Morrowind.

I am in the process of creating a basic HTML website specifically for this niche, but I would like to live in a world where this isn't necessary . Anyways, I don't know the technical business involving this, but to finally get to the point, could this become an available option in the future, and is it available now as a command in the openmw.cfg? Also only marginally related because it involves textures, could an option to turn off mipmapping find it's way in too? Thanks for reading

[scrawl]

Have you tried anisotropic filtering? That does get rid of the blurriness of textures to a certain extent. Anisotropic filtering was not available in vanilla MW. OpenMW enables AF by default.

The performance impact of texture filtering is negligible on any graphics card from the last 10 years.

[Chris]

Anisotropic filtering helps with polygons viewed at steep angles, but not the general blurriness of the textures when viewed at close distances. For that, you'd need to look for high-res texture mods.

[Trist]

Have you tried anisotropic filtering? That does get rid of the blurriness of textures to a certain extent. Anisotropic filtering was not available in vanilla MW. OpenMW enables AF by default.

The performance impact of texture filtering is negligible on any graphics card from the last 10 years.

Yes I have, but that doesn't accomplish what I want. Attached are three pictures of Quake III Arena at 640x480, named after what texturemode they are under. I favor nearest. It isn't this dramatic with higher resolution but it is still noticable, I just want to be clear what I am talking about.

Anisotropic filtering helps with polygons viewed at steep angles, but not the general blurriness of the textures when viewed at close distances. For that, you'd need to look for high-res texture mods.

I don't mind low-res textures though and general blurriness could be turned off so that isn't true either.

[dudezzz]

I would also appreciate a nearest neighbor/no filtering option to preserve the pixels.

[AnyOldName3]

To me, this looks like the equivalent of asking anti-aliasing to be removed from a game which it was locked on for (except without the benefit of a performance increase). The first two pictures just look unnecessarily noisy to me, and much less like real life than the third (although being an older game, none are amazingly close - it's all relative). You might have a better time of it if you looked into why filtering is considered more realistic, and then convinced yourself to stop actively looking for it.

In computer graphics, it's quite common for people to convince themselves that 'realistic' effects look bad (e.g. the sudden wave of people who seem to think anything over 30 FPS makes them feel sick) and then via the placebo effect actually have that experience. These issues normally go away when the user stops focusing on them, and can use the better option without necessarily realising it.

The final thing I'm going to say is that the texture artists designed the textures while aware filtering would be used, so are unlikely to have their visions fully realised with it forcibly removed.

[dudezzz]

It is precisely a request for nearest neighbor filtering with no anistropic filtering, a texture mode that is commonplace in other open-source 3D engines and presumably easy to implement. It simply doesn't matter what is more "realistic" or what the original artist's intentions were: any feature can be suggested/requested here, and many options currently in OpenMW can make the game look more or less realistic according to player preference, not to mention enabling the player to fly in the face of "authorial intent" by playing the game with the FOV slider set to 20 or something.

[onionland]

It is precisely a request for nearest neighbor filtering with no anistropic filtering, a texture mode that is commonplace in other open-source 3D engines and presumably easy to implement. It simply doesn't matter what is more "realistic" or what the original artist's intentions were: any feature can be suggested/requested here, and many options currently in OpenMW can make the game look more or less realistic according to player preference, not to mention enabling the player to fly in the face of "authorial intent" by playing the game with the FOV slider set to 20 or something.

^This
I have no interest whatsoever in this feature, but if it improves the experience of some players without any greater amount of effort I don't see what the issue is. I'm on the side of the fence that no matter how obscure something is there may always be some use for it, perhaps a modder going for a certain look, or wanting to see every blemish of their texture in action.

It should probably stay out of the options menu to avoid clutter, but i don't see the issue of requesting an option that would improve their subjective experience. It is important to remember that media in nature, be that games or anything else, is subjective.

[AnyOldName3]

Options are great, and I'm not saying this one shouldn't be added. However, on forums of other projects I follow it's normal to have someone play devil's advocate for a proposed feature so that those who want it are forced to actually write a lot of good arguments for it (if they exist), as without them, the devs are unlikely to take interest, and the feature is ignored forever. It's a pretty simple way of separating the wheat from the chaff, as otherwise people could request really silly features (e.g. add an option to only display the green channel of the output image), which at worst lead to feature creep, as they're low hanging fruit for a developer looking to keep someone happy, and not caring who, and at best, lead to developers just avoiding those parts of the forums.

If this is seen as bad here, I'll avoid doing it again - it's certainly not as busy here as the other forums I frequent, so I can see it being less necessary to check things stand up to scrutiny.

[onionland]

If this is seen as bad here, I'll avoid doing it again - it's certainly not as busy here as the other forums I frequent, so I can see it being less necessary to check things stand up to scrutiny.

Many of the developers are very active here so I doubt there is much point to spark conversation for its own sake. I don't mind disagreeing opinions in the slightest though, it is important to be able to freely speak our minds on a subject, and as long as you keep the conversation civil, as you were, I doubt anyone would mind either.