Looks nice - but it looks a lot like that you would get the ~same result if you just increased contrast and saturation in a image editing program :)

Rock texture (though photo-realistic) looks realy weird.
(Maybe in contrast with stone background)

Finding nice (good-looking, tilable etc.) material texture is only half of the job. The real art comes when different textures place together (on the same screen) should look good as well.
Unfortunately, we still miss such an effect...

P.S. Eventually its much harder to make good-looking terrains with photo-realistic textures.

I have.

Well, he's using specular lightning, which makes the texture "glossy". I'm not convinced we want that (but it wouldn't be hard - that's just shader code). Also my examples are for unidirectional lights, whereas he's using positional lights - that's something that the lights system can provide at some point down the line. Also his textures are obviously actually optimized for this kind of usage, whereas I just hacked something together.

Technically speaking, this is a relatively easy thing to do, though. The hardest part is probably to figure out a naming scheme for how to have them in Graphics.ocg side-by-side. Ugh.

> @ texture size

Not sure whether you understood me correctly. Having higher-resolution textures would actually do exactly that - improve the resolution of the textures shown. So upgrading to, say, 1024x1024 textures would be completely feasible. The only question here is at what point we're going to run into hardware or file size constraints.

Perhaps I exaggerated a bit about the automatic creation of normal maps. My experience is just that the real problem with this automatic generation of those maps is that at the end, the original texture would need to be altered to to really only act as a color-map after the "bumps" have been extracted. Otherwise the linked "awkward" effect occurs.

Uhm, why are you asking? As you said, I'd bet it would make your job harder, too. Once you have models, any decent 3D program should be able to make normal maps out of that.

On the engine side - well, technically possible. Realistically, you'd have to find somebody that's confident in getting it to work. Don't look at me, sorry :)

This is a fairly good point, and I think I prefer these ones to the current textures. The only one that doesn't look so good is the water texture. I feel as though it should just be a single, solid colour. Without noise.

Can you upload the modified textures into a diff for someone to upload to the repos? :) Or just the textures in a zip. Whatever is easiest for you.

As the one who created most of the textures we have for materials and put a considerable amount of work in it, my first reaction to your proposal to rob all the textures of their contrast and colors is rejection. And after thinking about it actually, I still veto against this. Here is why:

I understand Günther's argument that materials should be recognizable even in small chunks.
Though firstly, there is not really a requirement to know exactly which material there is for very small chunks like 1-4 pixels (=3-12 pixels of the texture) since such small chunks will most likely not produce any resources anyway. Also we agreed on that the times of "mine every pixel of material X" goals should be over in OC, so being able to spot every single material pixel of a given material is not necessary.
Second, chunks of that size do normally not occur naturally as the scenario designer sets the zoom rate to about 5-10 (=15-30 pixels of the texture), so, given that players have a short time memory, it is likely that they already know which material it is that remains at the edge of a large gold vein.

Having that said, I still agree with Günther that materials need to be recognizable from their color. But I don't see a problem with the current textures as this is the case for them - you'll never mistake sulphur for gold or rock for ore. The slight color modifications within the textures (like the left rock) move within a range that is far from looking like another material. This is not coincidence, but I carefully painted them that way to fulfil this condition.

Looking at the textures in the clonk folder, I reckon the problem are not the colors and the variation of colors within one texture but the dark spots within a few textures resulting from too high contrast. This contrast has been used to make the textures look more 3D. Namely the sulphur texture and perhaps also the snow and ashes texture. This problem will be solved when we can use normal maps because the height information will then move into the normal map so that the color map will be free of these high contrasts. I would rather push into the direction of converting the current textures to heightmap-colormap pairs - until then I'd like to refrain from modifying the textures because I want to preserve the height information to be able to create proper normal/height maps out of them.

So as a conclusion, I am also for making the textures more clear in what material they represent, even in small chunks, but I want to have it done properly and this involves extracting all the height information from the textures and crafting a pair of height- and colormap out of them.

Can you upload an ingame comparison?