If an asset isn't listed below, try searching by full word (e.g., Anderson, fish, shuttle, etc). When searching for a texture in Texplorer, always try using both the abbreviation and full word, as BioWare isn't 100% consistent with their conventions (i.e, they use both "Thane" and "THN"). The table below summarizes most of the commonly used conventions. Understanding BioWare's conventions makes it easier to locate a desired texture for observation or extraction with Texplorer. Textures in the trilogy follow specific naming schemes. To know whether a texture uses mipmaps, just look for "Mipmaps: True" in Texplorer. This will ensure the correct number is created for use by the toolset. Image editing programs will auto-generate them from the highest resolution parent image, as long as the "Generate mipmaps" option is checked when saving.
#MASS EFFECT 1 TEXTURE FIX SERIES#
For the purposes of replacement, however, new textures should always have a full compliment of mips that begins with the largest parent texture and decreases by a power of two with each successive step.įor example, a new 4K texture should have a total of 13 mipmaps when inserted into the game:Ī ME3 cabin photo DDS containing series of mipmaps loaded in GIMP. In Mass Effect, all non-GUI textures have mipmaps, but there is a certain amount of variation in exactly which mips are present. For example, when Shepard is standing close to an NPC, their eye texture may be rendered at 512x512px, but by the time Shepard's walked across the room, it's rendered at 16x16px. This is the way DirectX reduces the demands of the game engine and the strain on your GPU/CPU it only renders a texture's highest resolutions when necessary. Mipmaps are a series of lower resolution textures packaged in the same file as the "parent" highest resolution image. GUI textures (codices/war asset images) may be safely scaled, however, problems have been reported for textures that have associated VFX, such as aquarium plants and armor visors. Scaling non-square textures may or may not work. Using an external image editor is always the more powerful solution. TPF Tools is capable of fixing small deviations from the necessary size, but this will always come at the cost of a certain amount of quality (pixelation, blurring, etc). Improperly-sized textures cannot be rendered by the game, so the toolset contains checks that will prevent their installation. They are exact measurements that cannot be off by a single pixel. For example, a vanilla texture that's 256x256px can be increased to 512x512px it cannot be increased to 500x500px. Textures are most often square, and any changes in scaling must be done in powers of two, while retaining the texture's exact proportion. Mass Effect's Unreal 3 game engine has a hard upper limit of 4096px for texture rendering. In addition to game textures needing to be saved as DDS files and properly formatted/compressed, three other things matter when replacing textures: size, proportion, and mipmaps. To avoid problems, always be sure the modded texture shares the same alpha as the original. Improperly formatted alpha can lead to strange texture glitches in game. Texture alpha (transparency) is indicated by levels of gray.
More on this in the summary table at the bottom of this article, but for now, here's a simple list of those used in all three games: It sticks to a small subset, and installments vary depending on the texture asset. The trilogy doesn't use every format and compression available. Texture data may include: RGB (color), alpha (transparency), palette (amount of colors available), luminance (light intensity), bump (surface texture), and more. The variety in DDS formats and compressions corresponds (in part) to the type of data being stored. It's due to this variation that textures for Mass Effect get very complicated, very quickly. DDS files are highly versatile, supporting compressed and uncompressed texture data that uses a variety of formats and algorithms. This format was introduced with DirectX 7.0 and has become the industry standard for use in DirexctX/Direct3D gaming applications. As discussed in An Intro to Mass Effect Mods, all three installments of the Mass Effect trilogy use Microsoft's Direct Draw Surface(DDS) format for textures.