Hi, The further away from the camera, something is, the less detail the textures seem to show. I have found that only directly up in front of the camera is when all the detailing put into a texture really shows. As soon as its a little bid away from the camera, there doesn''t seem to be much detail showing. I was wondering why this occurs? Is it something you can turn off and stop from happening? It seems to occur with all different engines, modellers and programs I''ve tried.

What you are probably seeing is the results of mip-mapping, where slightly blurred textures are used in place of the high detail one when it is a long way from the viewpoint. This is done to avoid aliasing effects that you would get if you tried to sample a large and detailed texture down into just a few pixels onscreen. For an example, try looking at older games like Doom where they don''t use mip-mapping, and see how the detail in the texture causes shimmering effects and other weirdness when looking at objects a large distance from the viewpoint.

It is possible to turn it off (in game code, that is), but largely you wouldn''t want to, as the alternative is to have the unsightly visual artifacts I mentioned above.

[ MSVC Fixes | STL | SDL | Game AI | Sockets | C++ Faq Lite | Boost ]

As a texture gets further away it srinks, and takes up less space on the screen. Since the number of pixels used to display the texture is less, it''s detail degrades.