I've made some marble patterns but there seems to be a slight problem with them that I just noticed. If you are scrolled all the way in, they are nice and crisp but if you scroll out they seem to get covered over with a blurry film. Does anyone know how to correct this?

Most are 2 colorable patterns. I have the blue channel filled in with black.

I believe that this is the result of the way the game renders textures in general. When you save a file in .dds format, you generate a series of "mipmaps", which are lower resolution versions of the texture... half size, quarter size and so on. The lower resolution versions are what's displayed when the camera is farther away. It's a trick to conserve texture memory.

If you open the .dds file you will get the option to view the mipmaps (at least in photoshop, not sure about other apps). Then you can preview what they look like. Or just reduce the resolution of your pattern to check it out.

You may even be able to edit the mipmaps individually... not sure about that

I do know about the mipmaps and have viewed them when saving as a .dds file. The smaller they are the blurrier they get when in 2d preview. There is that sharpening tool on the .dds save popup but I haven't played with it much yet. Maybe I should try that out and see if it helps.

Well, you can save textures without mipmaps, they still work fine. At least in GIMP you can choose whether you want to generate mipmaps or not.

Oh yes, enabling anisotropic filtering in your video card settings makes a HUGE improvement, textures look VERY crisp from a distance.

Presumably that drags down performance though, especially if everybody starts doing it :O