Level of Detail and higher resolution textures please

[strich]

I personally find the default zoom level too small and I like to zoom in a little but unfortunately it looks like Factorio isn't currently employing any Level of Detail (LoD) to higher texture resolutions when zooming in. It causes the game to get a bit blurry and unsatisfying.
I think if the game is going to stay in 2D it should at least ensure that the textures are the best resolution possible.

[muzzy]

The problem is that the textures are taking way too much VRAM already, higher resolution textures would make it impossible to keep everything loaded at the same time. So, the game would need to start loading textures on demand and that'd require quite a lot of engine changes. If not done properly, you'd risk having lag and freezes during the game, and it might take quite a bit of development time to get it right.

Since the VRAM utilization is a problem already, something with the graphics engine needs to change in the next few months anyway. We'll see what they choose to do.

[CobraA1]

Perhaps some form of automatic detection of the amount of VRAM on a system? My own video card has 4 GB of VRAM (plus 4 more GB of system memory being shared with it, for a total of 8 GB) - plenty more than enough for high-res textures.

[strich]

Indeed many systems these days can support much higher resolution textures. The devs would do well to ensure their game is at least future proof in this regard.

[Tenebrous]

As commented on in Marwin's stackexchange post, the problem is with the massive atlasses being used - they should be much smaller to allow them to be swapped in/out of the GPU as needed.

[hikkiko]

And the game engine cannot swap them. To solve it devs should recompile the game with another graphic engine, perhaps in another language...

[Tenebrous]

And that is the opposite of a simple fix