Then maybe you should decide before modelling and putting stuff ingame? Modelling standins is a waste of time, if no-one ever sees them. And you'll have to redo the UV map for the new models tooCaydr wrote:I haven't decided what specific weapons will go on what ships yet, so no. A pointless waste of time.It's also faster, and easier.
Excessive detail
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Guessmyname
- Posts: 3301
- Joined: 28 Apr 2005, 21:07
Yes this is the way. The FBI should have tags for multiple models, two or possibly more. Then The low detail one could be used for LODing. The LOD distance obviously set in game settings so that you can specify according to computer specs. The hitbox and pieces etc have to match exactly tough for this to work. So I guess something like reading in what pieces and where they are located from only one of the model files and then just get the polygons from the other, to make sure their the same.AF wrote:or you could write a small patch to allow a high nd low model detail reference in the unit fbi
Holy attitude, batman. I can't decide a ship's freaking armament before I've even started balancing the game.Then maybe you should decide before modelling and putting stuff ingame?
Re: "8800 isn't a big improvement"
Wrong. Almost 2.5x the performance over what was previously the best Nvidia card. My 8800 GTS 320 has been overclocked easily to a state where it beats the stock 8800 GTX in most situations (and maintaining a safe temperature).
Not only that, but...
Nvidia Geforce 8800 GTS 320mb: $259.99
Nvidia Geforce 7950 GT: $159.99
8800 GTS costs 62.5% more but delivers 245% the performance.
My unclocked 8800GTS 320M gives a 60% performance boost over an over clocked 5200ultra running spring at stock speeds.
The 5200 ultra on average lasts 600% longer in an endurance test running spring despite the inferior drivers, cpu, and system ram.
In theory an 8800 should be better by a huge margin, however in practice this isn't the case.
In the mean time, who do you believe? A set of benchmarks on a review site? Or hundreds of disgruntled 8800 users threatening class action, who've also been running the card for several months now?
I have a better model than you caydr. I've been running it for at least 4x longer than you. I've researched and suffered from the problems myself. I'm not a 5200 user who thinks he knows what hes talking about, I've had almost 6 months of hands on experience dealing with this day in day out. Do not ignore what I say because a set of benchmarks on a website says otherwise, especially when there are many other users saying what I'm saying.
The 5200 ultra on average lasts 600% longer in an endurance test running spring despite the inferior drivers, cpu, and system ram.
In theory an 8800 should be better by a huge margin, however in practice this isn't the case.
In the mean time, who do you believe? A set of benchmarks on a review site? Or hundreds of disgruntled 8800 users threatening class action, who've also been running the card for several months now?
I have a better model than you caydr. I've been running it for at least 4x longer than you. I've researched and suffered from the problems myself. I'm not a 5200 user who thinks he knows what hes talking about, I've had almost 6 months of hands on experience dealing with this day in day out. Do not ignore what I say because a set of benchmarks on a website says otherwise, especially when there are many other users saying what I'm saying.
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Guessmyname
- Posts: 3301
- Joined: 28 Apr 2005, 21:07
Surely you have some idea of what the balance will be?Caydr wrote:Holy attitude, batman. I can't decide a ship's freaking armament before I've even started balancing the game.Then maybe you should decide before modelling and putting stuff ingame?
GEM is set in a TV show, isn't it? (I can't remember which one - sorry) If so, there's probably some technical info one the ships lying around that will give you their armaments. Find that, arm it up and if it's imbalanced, try messing with the weapon tdfs - it's hard to edit s3o models, mainly because the model can only have 1 texture (not counting the glow / reflectivity texture). If you really want to switch around weapons and such, I'd suggest using the 3do format until you've got the loadouts nailed down. Switching pieces out and so on in 3do is much, much easier and quicker.
The game is based on another game from 1994 and it has virtually no technical information.
Have you ever designed a mod with firing arcs in mind? This isn't TA where virtually anything can fire in any direction. There are limits both for gameplay and realism. I can't just decide off the top of my head that it the game will be fun turret X has arc Y in position Z. This kind of thing has *never* been done before, not in any other game or mod, not with this complexity.
Different ships must have different inherent strengths and weaknesses. In TA, you change a handful of values and it's ready to test. With G/E/M I need to take into consideration all kinds of unusual things. 16 turrets sounds like a lot, right, so you might think it doesn't matter if the arcs don't make perfect sense. But how interesting is a game where all ships have equal firepower distribution over their entire surface? Logically different ships are equipped for different things. Destroyers in GEM are intended for fighting smaller ships mostly, although they can be good against larger ships in adequate number. They have a fairly wide set of firing arcs and this allows them to be more effective targeting fast ships. Cruisers have mostly forward-firing arcs and this means they have a lot of difficulty attacking fast-moving targets. Etc... But you can't just decide without even seeing things in play, especially when such a thing has never even been attempted before.
Have you ever designed a mod with firing arcs in mind? This isn't TA where virtually anything can fire in any direction. There are limits both for gameplay and realism. I can't just decide off the top of my head that it the game will be fun turret X has arc Y in position Z. This kind of thing has *never* been done before, not in any other game or mod, not with this complexity.
Different ships must have different inherent strengths and weaknesses. In TA, you change a handful of values and it's ready to test. With G/E/M I need to take into consideration all kinds of unusual things. 16 turrets sounds like a lot, right, so you might think it doesn't matter if the arcs don't make perfect sense. But how interesting is a game where all ships have equal firepower distribution over their entire surface? Logically different ships are equipped for different things. Destroyers in GEM are intended for fighting smaller ships mostly, although they can be good against larger ships in adequate number. They have a fairly wide set of firing arcs and this allows them to be more effective targeting fast ships. Cruisers have mostly forward-firing arcs and this means they have a lot of difficulty attacking fast-moving targets. Etc... But you can't just decide without even seeing things in play, especially when such a thing has never even been attempted before.
Last edited by Caydr on 23 Jun 2007, 22:55, edited 1 time in total.
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1v0ry_k1ng
- Posts: 4656
- Joined: 10 Mar 2006, 10:24
imo use the nicest graphics that high end machines can handle smoothly and force people to upgrade, why make things look crap when the technology is around for affordable prices to make them look sweet.
300 quid for a decent upgrade to your rig, thats what, 7-8 days of unskilled work at the very worst. commersial games are getting better and better looking, dosnt make sense making spring look like ball cuz the minority are too lazy to go and borrow, buy or steal a new gcard
300 quid for a decent upgrade to your rig, thats what, 7-8 days of unskilled work at the very worst. commersial games are getting better and better looking, dosnt make sense making spring look like ball cuz the minority are too lazy to go and borrow, buy or steal a new gcard
You people are crazy. All of you. Its quite possible to produce very nice looking content (more or less on par with good commerical games) without using a bazillion tris.
Proof?
Here:
That looks good. Period. Any guesses on the tri-count?
964. In fact, NONE of the new models we've made for 1944 are over 3000 tris. Are dooming ourselves to crappy looking content in the name of efficiency? Hardly. I'm somewhat biased, but I'd say that the majority (if not all) of our new content is pretty awesome. And none of the models are using anything close to the numbers Caydr talks about. Just because we *could* use 10k tris on that ISU and still not see any slowdown in a few years doesn't mean that spending that much is a good idea when it looks fantastic at 964.
Caydr's biggest mistake here is equating tri-count with artwork quality. By arguing with him with that given as the first assumption, you're not really getting anything done.
Proof?
Here:
That looks good. Period. Any guesses on the tri-count?
964. In fact, NONE of the new models we've made for 1944 are over 3000 tris. Are dooming ourselves to crappy looking content in the name of efficiency? Hardly. I'm somewhat biased, but I'd say that the majority (if not all) of our new content is pretty awesome. And none of the models are using anything close to the numbers Caydr talks about. Just because we *could* use 10k tris on that ISU and still not see any slowdown in a few years doesn't mean that spending that much is a good idea when it looks fantastic at 964.
Caydr's biggest mistake here is equating tri-count with artwork quality. By arguing with him with that given as the first assumption, you're not really getting anything done.
Yes, increasing the polygon count to try and use polygons for certain details instead of using the texture can make the end result worse off. Things like that little square panel on the tank above. If they'd put a polygon box there, either they would have to split up the mother polygon it's sitting on in loads of ways and then totally screw up their edge topology. Or put it on top of the polygon, as a separate object, then the shading will probably look like crap and the box will not look connected to the rest of the model. Not to mention, UVing/texturing that little sucker in a good way will be almost impossible and take lots of unnecessary time.
Painting the shadows and stuff on the texture to make it come out, is win.
A high poly model can't be textured the same way as a typical low polygon .s3o model. You have to do all the details properly, going all out, and then use procedural textures + decals to texture it, and then do a proper render. So this is why a inbetween high-poly and low-poly model will fail.
Another example: Those wheels on the other hand, are a good choice for using polygons to add detail. They are not hard at all to UV/texture, can all reuse the same texture etc. Probably a third or even half the polygons on that model is in the wheels. But the important part is that it dosn't screw up the mesh topology, and is easy to texture, so no problems. Painting the wheels instead is also sometimes a good choice, but WW2 tanks didn't have much sideskirts so in this case modeling the wheels directly make sense. On a tank with sideskirts covering up most of the wheels (and more importantly the empty space between wheels/track that will give you trouble trying to texture it), like a modern tank such as the abrams, using a texture for the wheels is probably better.
Painting the shadows and stuff on the texture to make it come out, is win.
A high poly model can't be textured the same way as a typical low polygon .s3o model. You have to do all the details properly, going all out, and then use procedural textures + decals to texture it, and then do a proper render. So this is why a inbetween high-poly and low-poly model will fail.
Another example: Those wheels on the other hand, are a good choice for using polygons to add detail. They are not hard at all to UV/texture, can all reuse the same texture etc. Probably a third or even half the polygons on that model is in the wheels. But the important part is that it dosn't screw up the mesh topology, and is easy to texture, so no problems. Painting the wheels instead is also sometimes a good choice, but WW2 tanks didn't have much sideskirts so in this case modeling the wheels directly make sense. On a tank with sideskirts covering up most of the wheels (and more importantly the empty space between wheels/track that will give you trouble trying to texture it), like a modern tank such as the abrams, using a texture for the wheels is probably better.
Awesome!Nemo wrote:You people are crazy. All of you. Its quite possible to produce very nice looking content (more or less on par with good commerical games) without using a bazillion tris.
Proof?
Here:
That looks good. Period. Any guesses on the tri-count?
964. In fact, NONE of the new models we've made for 1944 are over 3000 tris. Are dooming ourselves to crappy looking content in the name of efficiency? Hardly. I'm somewhat biased, but I'd say that the majority (if not all) of our new content is pretty awesome. And none of the models are using anything close to the numbers Caydr talks about. Just because we *could* use 10k tris on that ISU and still not see any slowdown in a few years doesn't mean that spending that much is a good idea when it looks fantastic at 964.
Caydr's biggest mistake here is equating tri-count with artwork quality. By arguing with him with that given as the first assumption, you're not really getting anything done.
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Guessmyname
- Posts: 3301
- Joined: 28 Apr 2005, 21:07
Ouch, there goes one of the main benefits of using a pre-existing universeCaydr wrote:The game is based on another game from 1994 and it has virtually no technical information.
Actually I did, but abandoned that project (another space mod, funnily enough) because Spring didn't support some of the gameplay at the time. I generally went with what looked best - most ships couldn't fire behind them, most ship's armament was on top (mainly to make it more visible to the player), so low flying ships usually had an advantage etc (One of the things I wanted to do was have low flying fleet be slower and higher flying fleets faster, with altitude being configurable by the player)Caydr wrote:Have you ever designed a mod with firing arcs in mind? This isn't TA where virtually anything can fire in any direction. There are limits both for gameplay and realism. I can't just decide off the top of my head that it the game will be fun turret X has arc Y in position Z. This kind of thing has *never* been done before, not in any other game or mod, not with this complexity.
Good luck at any rate