CGTC - textures overhaul mod for the Caucasus map

[Rob Mason]

Sorry to be a pain but neither your Megadrive or Googledrive download links are working.

[LucShep]

53 minutes ago, Rob Mason said:

Sorry to be a pain but neither your Megadrive or Googledrive download links are working.

No problem.
But the links from the URLs are working fine here.

Make sure you're downloading the latest 2.84.1 version (refresh page please), and not the 2.84 version that was up earlier today (that has now been deactivated). 

Edited May 21, 2023 by LucShep

[aceviper]

Hey Luc

New version......wow!!!

Absolutely awesome and stunningly beautiful.

Caucasus is a picture postcard with this mod.

Just  flying around enjoying the scenery is a joy.

Btw your trees and forests are great too.

You are a credit to the modding community....I salute you sir!

[KCOOL]

This is great. Thank you so much.

Your trees and forest are gorgeous.

I just did a couple of test fights, but I believe Taz techniques treat VRAM better, key for VR.

Is there any way to combine this awesome and beautiful mod with VRAM savings?

Best

Edited May 21, 2023 by KCOOL

[LucShep]

Thank you @aceviper and @KCOOL.

 

10 hours ago, KCOOL said:

This is great. Thank you so much.

Your trees and forest are gorgeous.

I just did a couple of test fights, but I believe Taz techniques treat VRAM better, key for VR.

Is there any way to combine this awesome and beautiful mod with VRAM savings?

Best

 

If you mean using the CGTC mod with Taz Optimized Textures mod, then by all means, use them. There's no conflict/problem with CGTC. (I use them too, a "must have" IMO).

If you mean adopting similar solutions of those into this mod, well hmmm...  not sure how to make it short for you.

So, all DCS maps have a few negatives with the format/size of textures too, fortunately not as bad as with the Core and Liveries (much better situation with Maps).
The Caucasus textures are all 8Bit DDS, and not the huge and problematic 32bit DDS (which Taz successfully rectified with the mod I mentioned).
But, for example, there are still too many DXT5 DDS format textures that could be DXT1 DDS (these are half the file size!), and there's the odd texture that could be smaller too.
Which means, yes, some textures that could be 2 to 4 times lighter in file size.

The problem is, the way that they're packaged. I don't think anyone has found a way (yet) to change/force a different technique to the texture ZIP packages in Maps (no such problem with aircraft related packages). For certain textures and respective ZIP packages, if you change size and/or format (to DXT1 and/or half size, for example), once repackaged and combined, it breaks the rendering of all related textures (fully black textures instead). If it wasn't for this, yeah, I'd have optimized things better already. 

I believe it was in the old CGTC thread that I once swapped posts about it with Taz (he was still experimenting with tree related files back then), I'm sure he's aware of the issue.
If he ever gets to a practical solution (I haven't), I'm all for it and would certainly adopt the method for CGTC, that's for sure.

Edited May 21, 2023 by LucShep

[Bucic]

I'm glad I enabled forum signatures. This is awesome! IF I don't ditch Caucasus for good this week. I'd describe my experience with Caucasus as... "small ArmA3" in DCS

[Sn8ke]

Been doing DCS since the OG Lockon. No caucus terrain mod looks as realistic as this.