Why No Official Support For The High Quality Texture Aspect Of Kunt0r's KSMod?

Yes, Gaile posted in the original thread and didn't say there was anything wrong.

From what I have read, unless you have a really bad gfx card, the textures do not result in lag - and I myself have not witnessed any lower FPS from them either.

What DOES happen is that it takes longer for each player model to load (ever notice when you map into a town, the people fade into view one by one?), as Guild Wars has to process the textures harder.

Also, I don't believe it downloads any new files to the DAT. I was told that the low and high definition textures are all the same "file" and are simply toggled by the game, so technically if you've seen the low definition texture before GW already has the high definition one.

I'd say it's a safe bet the low definition texture is simply a downsampled version of the high definition texture, and that the only texture in the DAT is the high-def one.

EDIT: Did we ever find out what that non-texmod way of making GW show other players in high res was? I don't want to run texmod as it's so horribly buggy, but if there is some other way I'd be interested in hearing about it.

The KSmod doesn't use Texmod... It's simply an ini and dll file, nothing else.

Yeah, which is why I use it - I don't like launching GW via texmod, it's just too annoying (though I guess one could make a command prompt shortcut that does it or something).

Perhaps the new Community Relations Manager can offer some opinion on this?

Kuntz hasn't been seen in sometime and hasn't played GW in months.He might be busy with rl or why.

Why does it need official support, and why Arenanet go out of their way to give it support?

Because this is an awesome mod that shows Guild Wars how it's suppose to be and the majority of players are not aware that this even exists. Players deserve this option in their graphics settings.

I use Kunt0r's KSMod (with UT99 sounds off) and haven't noticed a decreased FPS rate in large towns (Kamadan am1 for example) with an ancient nVIDIA 6800GS. Honestly though, anet doesn't need to add an option, the mod is super easy to install. They could however spread the word about the mod, make it available on their web page but I doubt that will happen.

They won't because they don't support nor condone modding.

What part of Anet won't support mods are people not getting?

Supporting a mod like that would mean paying royalties to the mod maker + a lot of time spent checking the mod OR having a programmer spend lots of time to implement the thing in the engine itself (and while adding a feature sounds simple, adding a feature without mixing up the whole engine system is not quite as simple).

And, even if the mod is nice, it's certainly not something Anet HAS to do. It's up to them to decide whether to do it - and they see a much broader picture than the players...

What part of "adding a switch to settings would take a programmer less than a day" is it you don't get?
The functionality is already in the program, all that's missing is a way for the gamer to turn it on. And there's no royalties to pay because it's ANets intellectual property.

Yep. I'm not a programmer but I guess there is one line of code that does this. It would look something like:

HighResArmorTowns = 0

to

HighResArmorTowns = 1

Could be as simple as that...

I seriously doubt it.

Also note that there would be fallout from the people who would suddenly start having problems for overburdening their systems. "My GW crashes whenever there's a festival! Fix nao!" style.

That's why ANET would set high detailed armor in outposts by default to OFF and let people choose to turn it ON. This has been mentioned so many times and this topic is not to debate whether or not this is a good idea, or if it will work. It's been made, it's been tested, it has a very minimal performance hit and it's fantastic!

I just installed this mod and GOD DAMN I can't believe what I have been missing out on.. Everyone running around town in all their high res armor glory.

If my account gets stolen I'll post back and let you all know lol but if all goes well I have to recommend this little mod for those of you that love the pretty graphics in an instance and have longed to see it in towns and outposts.!

I believe Anet should implement the option for High quality textures everywhere.

This isn't about supporting mods, this is about making the graphics of a game better in the same fashion as an unofficial mod.

This is about giving people freedom of choice as computer hardware advances.

Why should I, who have a 8800 Ultra OC, be limited by what others deem too hardware intensive for their 5 year old PCs? Those people can continue to play the game as they are currently, but others can play it with better eye candy.

Because it requires a -image download, so more download for people, meaning more server load, etc...

There's no need. When the game was origionaly written, this was probably a bigger worry than it was today. Don't worry about it, it's a simple mod, and A-Net doesn't care about it.

Time spent working on this is time not spent on some other project, and they have better things to do.

IIRC the reason I was told they wouldn't make it official was because of the increase in load times/download times. HR textures are 4x the size of the low res ones, so it'll take you 4x longer to load into zones and load new players (which is true). The reason your framerate doesnt get effected, even on old cards, is because rendering textures of any size really isn't the bottleneck of the rendering pipeline. Most people probably don't notice that everything takes 4x longer to load, because stuff stays invisible untill it loads, so you really don't even know it's loading. GW "streams" info from disk in low amounts, so you can load stuff while playing at good framerates, rather then have the game freeze for a second every time a new player loads into the outpost. The drawback to this is that it can take awhile to load something like a texture. Player models are invisible untill the texture is loaded, so thats why you wont really notice an increase in load times, because you don't "see" something loading.