Defines the filter priority to improve Mip-Mapping quality.

Graphic modules use Mip-Mapping to calculate down scaled versions of the image set using the solidity texture property. This improves performance and visual quality. By down scaling the image information is lost. There exist different ways to calculate the down sampled images. The most common solutions are Averaging, Minimum and Maximum.

Averaging is the default Mip-Mapping technique used and calculates down scaled image pixels by averaging over pixels from the the next higher level. For most images this technique yields good results.

The Minimum and Maximum technique use instead the smallest respective largest value of pixels from the next higher level. In contrary to averaging this favors either holes (minimum) or solid geometry (maximum).

In some situations using averaging causes problems. These are two examples.

With foliage averaging the solidity can cause the foliage to grow thinner over distance. This causes bushes and trees at distance to loose their density. By using maximum filtering solidity is favored and foliage grows denser over distance. This can be visually better looking than thinning out.

With shutter blinds the lower part of the image is holed all the way to the border. By using texture transformation the blinds can be pulled up leaving most of the image open. Averaging can now cause the hole pixels on the bottom of the image to smear with the solid pixels causing the hole to vanish over distance. This can cause textures where the player can see through to suddenly become totally solid. By using minimum filtering holes are favored and the texture is ensured to keep the hole part at the bottom intact.

This parameter is a hint to the Graphic Module if holes or solid geometry should be favored. A value of 0 favors holes. A value of 1 favors solid geometry. A value of 0.5 averages between the two. The actual implementation in the Graphic Module can be different but this texture property helps to shift the calculation into the right direction to get good results.

Mip-Mapping is one situation where Graphic Modules can use this texture property to deliver better results. Another situation could be alpha dithering or percentage alpha filtering to improve the visual quality.

The source has to be a single component value in the range from 0 to 1. This texture property can not be set dynamically.

The default value for this texture property is 0.5.

( TODO: example image )