[HELP] Sudden, server-wide quality drop in most vehicle liveries!

[crackedunicornaxle]

Thank you for clicking on my topic! My server recently discovered an issue in which almost all vehicles with liveries have seen a sudden drop in their quality, particularly when viewed up close. This applies to even our newest and oldest vehicles, whose textures were once crystal-clear up close, but now have badges that are essentially illegible. All of our liveries are in 4096x4096 and always have been, and we have seen no problems until just two weeks ago.

Before:

Now:

More Examples:

Here is what we know:

1. All problems with quality loss began as early as two weeks ago from today. All liveries seem to be compressed, if that makes sense.
2. No one resource seems to be causing this quality loss
3. It affects only vehicles, including vehicle liveries we did not personally make
4. The textures we make always look crystal clear in OpenIV, but lose their quality when streamed on our server
5. Some cars have been left unaffected, but they are very few and far between
6. This issue is occurring on other servers, particularly one with much more powerful specifications than our own, as well as their own server box
7. It is not a client-side issue, but no one else has reported this problem on the forums as far as we know

Here’s what we think could be the sources:

1. Something is causing the vehicle’s YTD files to stream incorrectly
2. It could be an issue with mipmaps assigned to the liveries, but this is unlikely, because the entire server felt this issue all at once
3. Too high of a resource count (285 resources), however all liveries saw no loss in quality at even higher counts. It should be noted that the other server experiencing this issue also has a very high resource count (higher than ours).
4. ???

Anyone have any idea how to fix this problem? Thank you!

[crackedunicornaxle]

Even when dropping the resource count down to 175, this issue persists.

[ChieF-TroN]

Is the quality in OpenIV normal? If you switch to a different livery on the same vehicle, does the quality change?

[crackedunicornaxle]

On OpenIV, the quality is perfect. This problem does happen even when switching liveries.

[nta]

See the prior discussion:

Disable mipmap reduction?

Alright, for anyone whose reading this in the future and wondering if there’s a solution, there is - it’s a client-side solution. You can change where mipmap reduction occurs via the str_MaxVehicleTextureRes command. Increase it from 1024 (default) to 2048, or 4096 (I’d strongly advise not going above that).

This has been reduced by default so that servers ‘accidentally’ loading insanely-sized vehicle models are less likely to lead to streaming memory running out.

[ChieF-TroN]

@nta

This has been reduced by default so that servers ‘accidentally’ loading insanely-sized vehicle models are less likely to lead to streaming memory running out.

So the only solution is to do the client-side solution of setting str_MaxVehicleTextureRes? And if so, is this something we can script in to be a different value, so clients don’t have to set it themselves?

[nta]

@ChieF-TroN

is this something we can script in to be a different value

No. Obviously not.

[ChieF-TroN]

I didn’t think so, but it was worth the ask.

[crackedunicornaxle]

Thanks for the reply, would’ve never figured it out on my own!

[sloosecannon]

So I actually really appreciate this - it’s a really great way to counter so-called “texture loss”.

Perhaps, as a future feature, having the ability to set this in the GUI (with all appropriate warnings, of course) would be nice - that way people can have the 4k textures they “love”, while having the default experience be more stable for everyone else.

[atecas1505]

My solution was to put the texture file on the Texture Compression DXT5, after which the quality was perfect again