Some questions about custom textures

[HiroProtaganist]

Please bear with me if these have been asked before. I tried searching around on the forum VIA advanced search before posting.

I am curious what the correlation between the pixel size of the texture and the way it will appear ingame. From the hammer wiki

Texture Scale
Adjusts the size of the texture. A value of '1' maps one texture pixel onto one unit. Negative numbers mirror the texture.

By this I assume that if your diffuse texture was made at 1024x1024 and you built a 1024x1024
brush textured it and set the scale to 1 you would see no tiling. But if you set the scale to .25 then it will cover a 256x256 section and begin tiling. Is this correct?

Assuming the above is correct, what sizes do you typically make things like wood floors where they cover large areas without seeing the tiling. for instance i made this today it was created at 1024x1024 is this too large/going to affect gameplay for people. I have not brought into the game yet.

Thank you for any advice/tips/help you have to share with me.

[source-maps]

128x128 units brush will be covered by one 512 texture if the scale is on the default 0.25
so if you use a 1024x1024 texture it would cover a brush of 256x256 units with the default scale

anyway, 1024x1024 textures aren't bad for very large walls or something
but for a wooden floor you could easily get away with a 512x512 texture, tiling isn't that bad as long as it isn't obvious
would be better to break up the tiling with additional details like furniture models, overlays or decals, func_details (like cutting the floor up in pieces and put some loose boards scattered across the floor)

I hope this helps

edit: remember, 1024 textures are 4 times as large as 512 textures.. so if you use one 1024 texture.. you use 4 times as much resources

[mookie]

You've pretty much got it correct. Easiest way to see how it is is to put the texture in a map.

I doubt if 1024x1024 textures will give people problems, but probably making a lot of your textures large will have the same performance effect as using more textures.

That particular texture doesn't look like it will tile very well, because it fades from light to dark in vertical stripes. This means the floor you use it on will have very conspicuous (and large) light/dark striping on it. Usually what you want to do is make the overall coloration as evenly distributed as possible so that if you stepped back a bit and let your eyes unfocus the texture will look like it is all one flat colour. In the case of a wood texture like this, that would probably mean making the light/dark transition happen on a much smaller scale, and also not running straight up and down across the whole length of the texture.