Hi guys,
its (once again…) one of this “what should I do” questions 
I have a static/isometric cam (for example like in Diablo) around 5m over my hero.
As far as i can tell - when the mipmaps are on (on the ground) I see 2 phases of the mip maps.
Now my question is, when I do not see objects far away from my cam(they are always in the same distance) should I use Mip maps?
as far as I can say - in dungeon hunter there are no mipmaps http://phonereport.info/forum/?bb_attachments=847&bbat=248&inline
You dont need mipmaps in your setup - they will just waste memory and other resources.
Thanks that was what I wante’d to hear 
I’m not use mipmap. I saw many game in PS2 not use mipmap technique too.
Can somebody please explain a bit more how mipmaps are not useful in this case? (this camera view)
I used a similar camera view, and the mipmaps are being turned on (while playing), on the terrain texture. If I turn them off, it looks better, but I’m not sure how much performance/speed is affected.
So could you please give me a few more details why they’d be useless here?
Thanks!
if you are at a fixed distance to the texture and the texture is basically mainly visible at a 1:1 pixel to screen pixel aspect (which you are targetting normally to get the most from your assets), the mipmap just does nothing other than degrading the visual quality off center (if you use a non-ortho cam especially).
Mipmaps are in real 3d views important where you have some serious distance difference between near and far and objects where the effect amount of screenspace occupied by a specific texture is much smaller than the base texture. In that case mipmaps are basically needed to get a good quality and good performance as it otherwise would rasterize the base texture although a 1/4 as large for example could do too.
And do you know how the iPhone hardware rasterizes things?
I’ve got a large plane with a 1024x1024 texture on it (that’s the ground plane).
When running around it, the mip maps show the texture ‘in phases’, and the camera view is isometric, like in dungeon hunter.
So should I turn off Mip Mapping for that 1024x1024 texture, for best performance?
And one more question: I’m using some texture for a river, and it’s got an UV offset script that animates it flowing. The texture is 256x256 and it’s got MipMaps off, but it shows in the game like it’d be like 32x32 (really low res).
That only happens on the iPhone, not in the Editor.
Let me know if you have any idea why this:
renderer.material.SetTextureOffset("_MainTex", new Vector2(offset, 0));
would mess the texture up like that.
Thanks a lot!
That’s because you’re not using trilinear filtering. Anything that has mipmaps, and is flat, takes up a big portion of the screen, and is at an oblique angle to the camera, will likely look terrible if you don’t use it.
Don’t have a clue about your offset, though. I use matrices in shaders for the same effect and haven’t had this problem.
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Trilinear works on the device? I didn’t think it did.
I’ve had a few moments where I’ve slightly redesigned some art to avoid sharpness issues
Sure. Aniso doesn’t though.
–Eric
How big is the performance hit?
I haven’t done any real tests, but my game seemed to run the same speed (60 fps) with the main texture set as trilinear as it did when it was bilinear, so I left it at trilinear because it looked better.
–Eric
I have been messing with filters and mip maps for our new game.
When it comes to terrain I agree that not only mip maps for bilinear filtering are important (I don’t see any visual difference with trilinear) because flat sourface with a tiled texture loves filtering.
but I have a bunch of buildings sharing some 1024x1024 textures (I am happy even iPod Touch 1G is able to handle this stuff) and what I see is that if I turn mip maps off, quality increases (obviously) on distant buildings. Even more, texture seams are invisible, while mip maps show seams sometimes on distant characters.
Bilinear filtering is just adding blur to my “high res” textures, I am more worried about how blurry they look like than showing pixels at closer looks.
About performance, I am on early betas, right now I don’t have to worry about that, it’s running smooth.
If you don’t see any difference with a flat, textured plane, that approaches being aligned with the camera’s z-axis (from the perspective of the camera), and you have mipmaps on, you may need to put new batteries into your eyeballs. :shock:
well, tell me the difference here with your new batteries, mine may be really crappy. :lol:
Lightmap material (lightmap 512x512 bilinear)
base color tiled (256x256, changing filters)
those screens taken from Unity iPhone emulation on Mac, then zoomed 2x with photoshop (from 150 high to 300 pixel each)
so imagine the difference you see on a iPhone screen…
I need to get really close to the screen to convince myself I see a difference there :shock:
I can’t even discern a meaningful difference when viewing those on my iPhone.
However, that doesn’t matter - this isn’t much of a problem in screenshots. It’s the weird shifting that results when moving the camera that causes a problem. Bilinear filtering with mipmaps has one terrible problem, and not using mipmaps has another.
Also, do make sure that you don’t have the anisotropy slider on. That’s not going to translate to the actual iPhone.
oh, I understand, it’s a movement problem. Makes sense, I will check it.
And yes, I am aware no aniso on iPhone.