Spring RTS Engine

I dunno if this is even possible, but I'm going to ask anyhow. I'd like to know if it's possible to limit the renderer to use X-size mipmap (or lower) of a DDS file. Why? Scalability, of course- allowing people with lower-end machines to run a fairly high-end game without too many FPS problems. I have not seen any FPS problems at all, in my current game, but new features may change that picture, and I'd like to know if there are any methods we could use to mitigate this problem and provide a good experience for as many users as possible.

I think which level you use is less important than what's the largest level you have. Most games can downscale the textures on load, just forcing a higher MIP would not decrease the memory footprint.

So, would it have to re-scale the textures, or load an alternate texture-set? I mean, if I have to make a lower-resolution texture set, that's just a couple of hours of busywork...

I think it can rescale (or more exactly just cut the lower MIP levels out) but I don't think Spring can do that yet. Obviously Lua won't help. You want a texture detail slider in the settings, right, not a lower texture resolution for everyone?

Right in one. However, it sounds like Trepan's anticipated that, by giving us the ability to do LOD swaps.

Have an SDZ heirarchy like this:

Mod file
-relies on "high resolution graphics" file
--relies on "content" file

For people who have crappy graphics cards or whatever, they just swap out the high resolution graphics file with a low res one.

Would that work?

Also regarding making a lower res texture set taking a few hours, it would only take about 5 minutes to set up a simple batch process and hit play. Do you have Photoshop? I can describe how to set up that kind of batch if you want.

No, that'd make your checksums differ and mark you as bad sync.