1.3 Pawn rendering

[Chicken Plucker]

Hello. I've been modding for RimWorld for at least 4 years now. Ever since 1.2 I've decided to switch to high resolution textures to increase the level of detail with my apparel mods.

I have invested a lot of time and my own resources to try and make a very high quality mod series for 1.2. When the announcement for 1.3 came out I got very excited, only to find this:


This is the new and "improved" rendering system for the apparel pawns, and I use quotation marks more as a question because I understand this will be good perhaps for the long term when you want the game to have better performance.

But what was then all the effort I've spent on 512x512 px apparel? What of the other artists modding apparel for this game, which mind you is hard enough having to do 15 textures for one piece of apparel. What was the point in actually bothering to scale the resolution and trying to hit that vanilla style plenty of the players seek if it just looks like a blurred mess?



This is the stuff we make. This is how it looks for 1.2 in comparison to what's above:


I'd like to mention the elephant in the room. I'm using Camera+ for the screenshots. It can be argued "The game was never meant to be played with Camera+, so there's no point in seeing textures that close in the first place"

That's perfectly valid, but the game was also never meant to be played with mods. Mods are optional, so by that argument, there's no point for Camera+, no point for the mods I've been working on with the other artists who have sweated to get things done. Maybe just play the game without anything?

There's another possible retort here, and that's "The game was never intended to be so detailed, so you're wasting your time doing these high resolution textures." I'm sorry but I'll go back to my response above.

The game wasn't intended to be played with any mods either, so should none of us try anymore? If the response will be that "this wasn't intended to be x because it's a mod" then I'm surprised that a game designed to be extremely moddable by the community, a game that has gotten most of it's attention from modding is suddenly gonna mug off modders because they're just optional. I argue the community that modders are a huge part of, keep the game alive. If apparel modding is gonna be like this, I won't speak for anyone else, I will personally see no point in creating anymore apparel mods for this game no matter how much I love it. No matter how much detail I put in, as an artist who wants a certain level of detail, it can end up looking about the same as some other image resized from Google because of how pawns are rendered in 1.3. Maybe this sets a precedent about the kind of quality expected from newcoming artists who want to make something. "Hey yeah, let's not bother with apparel mods. Can barely see it in-game."

So enough crying, here's my suggestion:
Could we please have a clearer picture for the pawns in 1.3 or some kind of settings to scale the graphics?



EDIT: So I want to make this clear. It turns out this affects pawns in general. This new rendering system affects the textures for:
- Hair mods
- Custom race mods
- Apparel mods
- Custom body texture mods
- Animal mods/Creature mods in general

That's more than just apparel mods affected. Mind you, even if you're doing standard 128x128 px art your work still loses detail. Artists investing their time to create any kind of quality now have to look out for this feature that downgrades what they make.

EDIT 2:
I want to add that I don't understand programming and how this works. I am sure perhaps this was a compromise the devs had to make to boost the game's performance or some other heavily weighted decision for the future of the game, or perhaps just a bug for the unstable build and both of those are good. I'm just asking to improve and build on this change (if it was intended) please, not for any kind of rollback or just demanding to "make it work" without any consideration.