Terrain Texture Density

Quote:
I've received a request to give Torque the possibility of using scaled-down versions of the terrain textures in order to make our game compatible with low-end video cards. As far as I've seen this is no easy task, and will probably end up hitting performance negatively, but if anyone has any tips on how to do this, or some more detailed reason to cut this path of investigation It'd be appreciated.

We're working with some heavily modded blending functions because we made Torque work with tiled terrains like the example below, and we did get it to render 64 texels / quad edge instead of 32, but this was done modifying a class constant and making this a variable doesn't seem very doable.

Thanks in advance to any insights

I first posted this in the Engine area. Now a little more research and digging into the code gave me some insight. The blender I can modify as necesary, but my main problem is that I need the terrain materials to tile every 4 quads instead of 8, doubling the density, but without enlarging the generated texture sizes (doing this works because it maps the 256x256 (regular 128x128) mipmaps to the area of 4x4 quads that it usually covers with the 128x128 mips (to see in detail what I'm talking about, change

TerrainTextureMipLevel = 7, ///< mip level of generated textures
for
TerrainTextureMipLevel = 8, ///< mip level of generated textures

and use a texture which is easy to see where it begins and ends), but using the same source files, which in practice means it maps 64 texels per quad edge instead of 32 in highest detail.

But what I need is to find a way of changing the way the generated textures are mapped onto the terrain. If I can make the 128x128 generated textures map onto a 2x2 instead of a 4x4 quads area, the same effect will be achieved without the extra cost in vram (it will have an extra processing cost, since it will process 4X as many pixels per quad)

If anyone had any tips on how to go about this, it'd be great

thanks