124th Armored Infantry, on training on New Brazilia. Enlarge to see details.
That's a
non-custom version of Brazilian Battlefield there, folks. Expect the worlds you play in to look very different than they do right now- and at a decent framerate, I should add
Speaking of framerate, I'm aware that for people not running the latest hardware, 0.55 was probably a major dud. Expect it to be fixed, for the most part, when I release the next version. I have done a lot of under-the-hood stuff to address performance, from shrinking the sizes of bitmaps to consolidating sounds to cutting down on needless particle-spam. Should run at a playable speed if your machine meets minimum spec, and you aren't playing vs. 3 KAIK on a giant map.
Also, while I'm here, did anybody but me know that you can set shadows down to 128? Try it: just type "\shadows 1 128", and see for yourselves...
Big, big performance gains, and due to whoever has been changing that adding a nice fuzziness, it looks good. So, no more experimentation with blob-shadow code for me, there isn't any need
@Speedy: I'll PM you with a request for a test-piece. I like the basic design on that cannon, maybe we can work something out.
@Keithus: Check your PMs, I've finally posted the files you requested.
As for the occlusion pass... meh, idk how to do that, the only tool I have available that will do that is Blender, which I hate, since it was designed by a bunch of retards who threw out everything good about CAD/CAM interface design, and I'm not planning to learn. My one serious try with Blender to do baked lightmaps was a complete time-waster, tbh- the results were not worth the time investment, as I'd have to do a bumpmap for proper shading.
Bug Trepan, get him to finish proper bump / normalmap support that runs at a decent enough speed to justify the time investment, it'd result in better beauty for less time involvement, and I could do a simple bumpmap and skip all of the darn bevels, giving me a fair amount of time back, per model, and resulting in higher quality at render time.
Every time, it comes back to the fundamental limitations of .S3O. I wish JC would come back, long enough to write a new format, or at least a way to shut down rendering of some of the ARGB channels (for speed's sake), or put them to a new use via shaders that were model-specific, but that's unlikely.