I am not sure what topic to put this post in, but since alot is said about textures in here, thought maybe this would be the right place.

I am wondering if there is a way to make textures clearer. For instance. Build a box, so that it is 256 by 256 and add a 256 by 256 texture to it. Now get up close to it....looks bad up close...like your zoomed in. Scalling it down and usch I have found to be a great help, but still you can't seem to make it look good up close no matter how much you scale the texture down.

So my questions is: is there a way to make your textures look fairly nice while right up next to them? Is there a secret to this that I know not of? Is there a work around? Or someway to do someething within photoshop or anpther paint program to help make them clearer while up next to them?

if the answer is no to all that, then what is the "best" way that each of use have come up with the make them look there best?

use detail shader for level blocks, you can find it on wiki
the main thing is to choose the right detail texture

I don't quiet understand the Wiki shader thingy. Can anyone explainhow that works..or give me a better idea of how it works, or what exactly it does?

Google always helps

It puts a detail texture on your original one, giving it more structure and making it look as if it had a higher resolution.

There is one other solution that will always work, although it requires more time and code on your part (and no shader), if you want the optimal quality of your game and FPS at the same time, make multiple quality textures for almost everything that can be viewed at a distance and up close, with low, medium and high rez. What will be done is you code each object so that when the player is closer, the highest rez texture is shown, while when the player is farther away it is swapped out to a medium and then low quality texture. When done at a distance this is close to impossible to see the transition in action. And overall because of a lower rez texture being used at a distance and only higher rez textures being used on things directly around you, this makes the most FPS friendly solution out there.

@Trooper119: Isn't that just what MipMapping does? o_O *confused*

About the "shader" - thing; DetailMapping can be realised using the ffp, so it doesn't require and PS/VS. And anyone who doesn't even have a T&L card [which is required for ffp] can't run any game anyway

@trooper
I think I might be able t o code that in...but to do that I need to know how to "change" the textures...I can get the distance part, but do we have somoe sort of keyward to load and unload textures from blocks in c-script? I know how to add a texture in Wed, but don't know how to in script itself.

I'm no expert, so what Sebe is saying may be true, and a lot easier, but I've haven't heard of how to do what he says, and like I said, I'm no expert, so I'm not really sure what the function/variable would be to change a regular blocks skin, but if you transphered everything over to skins on entitys you could simply make it do at each distance go to
distance < 100
entity.skin = 1
distance > 100 && distance < 500
entity.skin = 2
.
.
.