Spring RTS Engine

Teregen uses really inifficiant plasma cloud algorithms when it generates textures. The trick is to find 32x32 segments that are close to exactly the same, or serve the same porpous and design tiles to replace them. For instance, if you have several large grassy fields, try to squeese as many tiles into them as possible. With some skillful manipulation it can be done without a knowticable loss in texture quality. Use of larger tiles or randomly placed tiles also helps things to look just that little bit better and shrinking map sizes a fair bit.

Have you tried reducing the colour depth of your terrain texture.bmp to 8 bit 256 colour, this will reduce the overall filesize "marginally" and without any loss in quality, but as Agorm has already pointed out using a .jpg won`t help,it only saves some memory whilst mapvonv is compiling the map,but the end result compression is achieved through the .dds format via nvdxt.

Masse wrote:

NOiZE wrote:Good tiling goes unnoticed!!!

NOT IN SPACEMAPS ! they are not supposed to be only stars everywhere !
it needs to be all kinds of funky colourful gas "clouds" everywhere... NO BORING AND PLAIN REPETIVE STARS EVERYWHERE... and blood !

actually we dont know for sure what kinda map caydr is doing

I like a few nebula's and a lot of black and twinkly stars...also try to splatter LESS blood everywhere and throw in some dismemebrments, for fun and veriety. A decapitation can make a battle all that more interesting. Also if you'r in a blood frency, whatch Hostle!


Now, on topic, Cyder if its big and cool, i'll LOVE IT!

Odd... I render out in terregen and yet i still add teh tiles over the top for some bits... unless your map is an expanse of constanly changing terrain im sure theres room for a few tiles.

You have to remeber... 1 tiles dont have to be 32 x 32 ... I normaly replace with 512 tiles. this means that actully im just just adding loads of 32 x 32 tiles, but you dont notice the tiling, but it does save space in teh map. Also alot of my maps i compress at more than 2... and they come out fine.

Not certain, but i think that the compression actully just reduces theamount of tiles it allows.. because i've watched it map make loads and tiles are always the same file size.

plus tiling often only notices on teh mini map... which dosnt matter. in game you cant se them if its well done.

aGorm

i would much rather have a 40 mb map that looks great than a repetive tiled piece of flying horse shit looking 1.5 meg thing

cyclerboy wrote:i would much rather have a 40 mb map that looks great than a repetive tiled piece of flying horse shit looking 1.5 meg thing

Agreed, but if used correctly you don't have to sacrifice any quality for tiling at all. I want a map that both looks good and is properly optimized for size. "it's alot of work for the mapper" is not a good excuse to make a map that is lacking on either end.

I don't like 40MB for a single map, even if looks realistic. Just learn to tile.

I'd rather have eighty 0.5Mb beautiful handmade tiled maps than one single 40MB terragen render map.

As you can see now, I got the filesize down to 25 megs by increasing compression without damaging quality to a noticable degree. It's Altored Divide, btw. Impossible to tile that thing.

I don't mean to be elitist but regardless of what a few people insist, I don't think it's possible to play a lag-free game with someone with a slow connection, so why design maps with them in mind so heavily? 25 MB can be downloaded in a little over a minute on any modern connection - that's the speed even on my rather slow cable connection.

If a map is really well done, like AD is by all accounts, I think even 56k-ers would be willing to overlook the large filesize. And I did test this map quite a lot to make sure there wouldn't be multiple versions needed before it was playable.

If someone is on dail-up they should not be playing this.

The lag is ridiculous when they play.