[Mr.Deviance]

After viper brought this to my attention with his post about model textures being lower in full game than in the demo, I decided to make an investigation of my own which made me come to the absolute conclusion that it's not the textures that are lower res in the Full game but the bumpmaps themselves.
And the problem isn't just for models, it's for the entire fucking game, walls included!
I've lost too much fucking time perfectly aligning the animations and the position of Duke, cropped and resized the pics and truned them into a high quality animated .png for your comparison purposes...
This shit is unacceptable.
First we find that they've cut the console from the final game, then I find that they've cut all the cheats that you could type during the game just like in duke3d and now I found this...

What you are seeing below are 2 identical screenshots taken at max settings, without motion blur, noise effect and post processing enabled with max Antialiasing and with max settings.
Welcome to the fail of details, enjoy...




Later edit: For those that don't use firefox and can't see animated PNG's and can't see an animated picture in this post, I've also made traditional gifs for you so you can see the difference in your browsers.

[Person of Color]

I'm only seeing one screenshot.

Something tells me the demo was built with a debug build which never had all of the debug features turned off.

[Mr.Deviance]

Descent, on 14 June 2011 - 08:07 PM, said:

I'm only seeing one screenshot.

Something tells me the demo was built with a debug build which never had all of the debug features turned off.

I've made that comparison. If you don't believe me, go check it yourself, I don't know what's the problem?
Here's a closeup of duke that I've made.
If you want another angle or something else pictured I will gladly make a new comparison, but you should know this shit takes lots of time to properly align, since duke has a breathing animation all the times and he moves his arms back and forth.



Later edit: For those that don't use firefox and can't see animated PNG's and can't see an animated picture in this post, I've also made traditional gifs for you so you can see the difference in your browsers.

[Namssorg]

Same here, only seeing one screenshot in each of your posts, so there's nothing to compare. Would love to see what you're talking about, though...

[Person of Color]

No, I trust you. I checked the other thread. Why the fuck do I have to suffer? My system is a 3.4GHz quad core Phenom and a GTX 460. It's far from a piece of shit. I can't turn on bump maps on my own?

Seriously, what the fuck Gearbox? I love the game but it's crippled beyond belief. Don't make release dates you can't uphold. Shipping the game in a fucked up state just proves that they couldn't make the June 10th date, either.

Normally this wouldn't be so bad, but everything is locked down. You can't undo their mistakes. Hell, you can't even cheat anymore.

This is unacceptable. What they should have done was release it for certification then IMMEDIATELY begin working on the first patch so it could be installed at launch.

With their industry standard slave driving 60 hour work weeks that's horseshit they couldn't fix this stuff in a month. The demo could have easily been developed side by side. It's a fucking demo. You delete content, modify the level endpoints, and change a few parameters here and there. Cut and fucking print.

[Jimmy]

Use Firefox. Internet Explorer sucks and doesn't show animated .PNGs.

[Person of Color]

Apparently Chrome doesn't either.

[Namssorg]

Ah, there we go. Wow, what a difference those high-res bumpmaps make. I might drag over some files from the demo to at least make Duke look better. Hopefully this gets fixed in a patch.

Descent, on 14 June 2011 - 08:35 PM, said:

Apparently Chrome doesn't either.

[TerminX]

It looks like the contents of the shaders directory is somewhat different between the demo and the full version. I doubt the textures are actually lower res in the full version; has anyone tried just copying the shaders dir from the demo over?

[Mr.Deviance]

Descent, on 14 June 2011 - 08:35 PM, said:

Apparently Chrome doesn't either.

I've made gifs for your browser too. Go check my posts again and you will see the animations now.

[TerminX]

Oh, another possibility is that this fuckery is caused by driver optimizations that get applied to DNF specifically. It's possible the video driver is detecting the full version of DNF and using one of the lower res mipmaps for the bump texture but that the optimization doesn't detect the first access club demo. Someone should retest with the executable renamed or something.

[Mr.Deviance]

TX, on 14 June 2011 - 09:09 PM, said:

Oh, another possibility is that this fuckery is caused by driver optimizations that get applied to DNF specifically. It's possible the video driver is detecting the full version of DNF and using one of the lower res mipmaps for the bump texture but that the optimization doesn't detect the first access club demo. Someone should retest with the executable renamed or something.

I cracked the game and renamed it just for testing purposes and it still does the same thing.
I own the game but I use a crack to be able to perform all kinds experiments on it without having steam to delete my files.
I have to crack the game that I own, just so I can remove steam from the equation while testing shit... Isn't this just fucking sad?

[DavoX]

I still want to know how that guy took the exact same angle on all pictures even from different programs. Is he a magician or something?

[Mr.Deviance]

DavoX, on 14 June 2011 - 09:48 PM, said:

I still want to know how that guy took the exact same angle on all pictures even from different programs. Is he a magician or something?

What guy? I made these animations.
It doesn't take mad skills to make this, just lots of patience.
In the demo it was much easier due to having the console at my disposal.
First I took a point of origin where I could place my crosshair by using minimal mouse sensitivity after which I entered 2 commands in the console. One was "Behindview" which shows Duke in third person and the other was "fov 40" so I can see Duke closer to the screen and then I pressed F12 to take a print screen in steam.

Then In the full game, I had to enable the devlog and bind the forward key to the "fov 40" command by writing this "set input w moveforward | fov 40 " and I also binded the behindview command to F10 inside the user.ini so I can use the third person view in the fullgame too.
What followed was easy. I positioned my crosshair to the exact spot where I did in the demo, I pressed F10 and and I got into third person.
After all of this was done, I waited for duke's idle animation to reach his exhailing point where he has the arms close to his body and quickly pressed F12 to take a print screen.
After all of this was completed, I saved both screenshots from my steam profile onto my desktop, shrunk them , fused them together with an app called ANPG anime maker and turned them into an animated PNG that I've converted into gif later for people that couldn't see animated png files with their browsers.

[ferran275]

GEEEZUS!!! the difference is crazy!! a fix is coming, it HAS to be coming... r-r-right guys?

[Person of Color]

If Gearbox doesn't fix this I am going to be pissed. I was shocked at how good the demo looked when it came out.

This is horseshit. I can't believe they would release it this rushed. It's like Duke Nukem had a gang bang with Crysis 2 and GTA IV.

[Dan_Death]

ferran275, on 14 June 2011 - 09:49 PM, said:

GEEEZUS!!! the difference is crazy!! a fix is coming, it HAS to be coming... r-r-right guys?

I'd like to believe there is, but I'm not sure if I can trust Gearbox with that one.

[Person of Color]

I think it will happen. This is a monumental fuckup though. It's like some indie devs were working on a game and said "Fuck, these decals man...these decals! They keep crashing the game! And that bump mapping, it's killing the performance on my eight megabyte Rage Pro. The fuck are we gonna do?"

"SHUT IT OFF LOL WE CAN'T FIX THAT SHIT!"

Except in this case poor Randy's having a shit fit over being late a second time and a few of his underlings do something super fucking stupid that make his whole company look bad.

...And you know what? Therein lies the problem. We have multiple issues that normally would be nothing more than an inconvenience, but combine to create a much larger problem.

[Kathy]

But the SP game was pretty much completed in 2009! The hell they were doing 1,5 years with it if they couldn't fix that?

[Mr.Deviance]

WOW It seems that I've started an entire tsunami with my investigation from this topic, that has managed to also spread to the gearbox forums after a guy made a topic with my gifs and also posted a link to this topic.
http://forums.gearbo...ad.php?t=125184

[Tea Monster]

Has anyone done what I suggested in the other thread and actually opened the files in a graphics program and checked them? On the gif you posted, it looks like there is no difference in the actual textures, they've just reduced the amplitude or resolution of the normal maps. On the comparison videos on the Eurogamer site, the diffuse (colour) textures do look more blurry on the PC version - you can see it on the patterned casino floor and other places.

[NightFright]

OK, fixing this + ability to toggle DOF separately --> essential fixes! Won't do another campaign run before this is done...

[Tea Monster]

Before the drama-content goes out the roof, someone check what TX and I suggested. You might find that its something simple and easily fixable. If not, its going to much more help if we actually know what the technical issue is.

[Mr.Deviance]

Tea Monster, on 15 June 2011 - 12:47 AM, said:

Before the drama-content goes out the roof, someone check what TX and I suggested. You might find that its something simple and easily fixable. If not, its going to much more help if we actually know what the technical issue is.

The drama went out through the roof already. If you check the gearbox forums, your pc might actually need to start using all of your cpu cores, just to process the new negative topics and posts that get made per second there.
I actually expect this event to end up with some real life murders, brain strokes and/or heart attacks.

[Alithinos]

That makes things even more complicated.
I didn't noticed the texture quality between the demo and the full game,but what I did noticed was that in the demo I could max the graphics settings with ULTRA for textures and shadows,and FXAA,and I had a smooth frame rate,while in the full game the frame rate drops regularly too much and I had to adjust the settings to be less good than I had them in the demo.
That's strange if not anything else.

[Tea Monster]

That is freaking crazy. I wonder what happened over at GBX to cause this to happen?

[trackit]

Tea Monster, on 15 June 2011 - 03:42 AM, said:

That is freaking crazy. I wonder what happened over at GBX to cause this to happen?

I can be wrong of course, but it seems they "fixed" the problems by removing troublesome things and pushed it out the door.

[viper3885]

Tea Monster, on 15 June 2011 - 03:42 AM, said:

That is freaking crazy. I wonder what happened over at GBX to cause this to happen?

IDK, I just hope it's a bug or something that will be fixed.

[Tea Monster]

LOL, and I thought I was joking when I said the DNF High-Res Project could hit the ground running and not have to wait for 5 years of tech improvements before we started upgrading the graphics.

Here's hoping that there is a quick, or at least reasonably timed fix.

Deviance - The reason I said we need to find out what the problem is first is that if it is the textures, GBX are going to have to push a whole new texture file pack out to people through a Steam update. Before they can do that, people have to compile it, test it, retest it, then sign off for it, contact Steam, send the file to them, get them to push it out. You are looking at a weeks worth of work at least.

If its a shader issue and they just adjusted the amount of influence normal maps have, then its changing a line in one of the ini files and off you go. MUCH SIMPLER.

[viper3885]

Tea Monster, on 15 June 2011 - 03:57 AM, said:

LOL, and I thought I was joking when I said the DNF High-Res Project could hit the ground running and not have to wait for 5 years of tech improvements before we started upgrading the graphics.

Here's hoping that there is a quick, or at least reasonably timed fix.

Deviance - The reason I said we need to find out what the problem is first is that if it is the textures, GBX are going to have to push a whole new texture file pack out to people through a Steam update. Before they can do that, people have to compile it, test it, retest it, then sign off for it, contact Steam, send the file to them, get them to push it out. You are looking at a weeks worth of work at least.

If its a shader issue and they just adjusted the amount of influence normal maps have, then its changing a line in one of the ini files and off you go. MUCH SIMPLER.

It's a bump mapping problem. I've cracked my copy so that steam doesn't keep messing with files just so I can test this. I've replaced these files bumpmapdirectory.dat, bumpmaps000.dat, bumpmaps001.dat, bumpmaps002.dat, and bumpmaps003.dat in the full game with the demo's files. And once you do that Duke's and the Cycloid Emperor's models look just like the demo. Unfortunately any textures that are only in the full game and not the demo take a gigantic hit in the quality department. And you can only replace all those files or none, if you try to replace only one or two the game will crash when you try to load a level.