MR.D's Core remakes

[MR.D]

huh?

[BlueTemplar]

A few days later, and I had scoured the TA Universe message boards to find the rest of these beauties, all created by the same person about five years ago.

Lord Doomer, wherever you are, I salute you!

[smoth]

why would i want to start on a jeffy. its not like mine and Mr Ds are the same thing.

he asked, it is not my fault he didn't like the answer.



so, what model are you doing next?

[MR.D]

Well after the CV is done, all that is left is the Minelayer.

Or the Wolverine artillery, which is 3d party like the Garpike.

I was thinking about a factory maybe, just to round off the LVL-1 vehicle branch, maybe the Reaper or Croc later on, then either Naval or try my hand at some Air units.

[smoth]

cool, I look forward to the minelayer, are you going to do the mines also on the same uv?

[Zpock]

If you use the same texture for more then one unit, does spring render those units together without loading the same texture multiple times?

[MR.D]

If you use the same texture for more then one unit, does spring render those units together without loading the same texture multiple times?

.3do units use a tile set for all textures, it pretty much only has to load those textures once, and they get shared globally by many units = efficient.

.s3o can use that same tileset, or unit specific UVW_mapped textures.

Uvw mapping brings a higher quality standard to textures, but at the cost of a little more memory usage.

[Zpock]

It's not impossible to imagine that when rendering .s3o units, the renderer groups units with identical .s3o textures and renders them in one pass, so that if you have 2 units sharing the same texture, they dont have separate ones in the video cards memory... altough I'd be suprised if this is done?

[FLOZi]

I'd be surprised if it isn't

[MR.D]

I suppose that it only makes sense, that if a mines are built, only a Minelayer, or some of the combat engineer units that can build mines will be building them, so why not just add them into the UV-map.

Sounds like a plan to me.

I only wish that the Minelayers still had access to the Nuclear heavy mines.

[Zpock]

Mines are separate units so if they share UV/texture with the minelayer and the optimization I was talking about before does not exist, you'd be loading the video card with the same textures of 6 units 6 times instead of 6 different ones one time.

I'm interested to know what the case is tough, it would make sense to do it if it's actually there, the mines could probably use shared texture space easily for example...

[MR.D]

Well, if there is only 1 texture map which is assigned to both the Minelayer and all Mines, it shouldn't need to load into memory anything more than the 1 texture map because its all being shared.

I'm not sure why this wouldn't be optimal for a situation, vs using a seperated texture map for each individual mine + the minelayer itself....

[FLOZi]

zpock's concern is that the engine may re-load a texture for each unit type even if that texture file is already loaded.

I doubt that is the case though. S44 has been working on the assumption that the engine is optimised enough to only load a texture once since it's inception.

[MR.D]

I think Rattle and I solved what might be a small issue to what was causing the detail of my textures to get eaten too fast..

I've been using dxt-3 compression on all my textures, and from the get-go, it compresses and pixelates it to hell, on all channels, even the 1024x1024's have huge pixelated spots all over it.

Take that and multiply it for each MipMap phase, and viola..its instant texture wash...

Anyways, after a long time of looking at it, I'm going to redo the Slasher and Instigator textures completely after I wrap up the Core LVL-1 vehicles list, and try and find a compression setting for these .dds so they don't get washed down from the source and update every model I've gotten released thus far.

Most of them will be a simple 5 min job each, because I still have the origional .bmp's that I started with before converting them to .dds.

But there are also some little tweaks I need to add into the Raider, Goliath and Weasel, such as the glow map for teamcolor to help brighten them up, the first model I used glow in the teamcolor area was the Garpike.. a bit late I agree ^^.

[MR.D]

Just for fun, I made a render scene of all my units so far.

Now if I could just figure out how to use the Alpha channels in the scene with Max.

[Neddie]

I would prefer you divorce the mines from the minelayer, because the mines can be laid by other units and I'm trying to work on them for CA...

[Argh]

Now if I could just figure out how to use the Alpha channels in the scene with Max.

Just paste them into a new texture, and use that texture as the alpha level of the Material.

[Gota]

You thinking an intro for a singleplayer or what?

[Neddie]

I would prefer you divorce the mines from the minelayer, because the mines can be laid by other units and I'm trying to work on them for CA...

By work on, I mean, reconceptualize, model, balance and implement.

[MR.D]

Core-lvl1 vehicle factory now added in, check 1st thread for download.