Max sub systems pr ship; not a legitimate reason from my perspective Big mesh 2500 polygons+ 150 subsystems that has an average polygon count of 20 = 2500+(20*150)=5500 polygons for 1 ship. Ehhhh, we don’t all have the latest CPU and GFX card, and more memory don’t solve Rendering speeds for GFX cards, remember more polygons means slower Frames pr second.
Limits for FS2 and FRED2; already did, 400 ships possible. Have not touched weapons yet as I’m looking at max ship types. When I get the time
Ships.tbl is set to 1000000 bytes, instead of 390000 bytes but what good is this if you cannot have above 130 ship types, the current setting. That is why I’m looking at this rather than going ahead and code new stuff.
Nameplates: you simply need a box where you can assign an insignia in FRED2. And of-course the corresponding code in FREESPACE2 to project this texture.
PCS already has the ability to put in an insignia on any kind of model so I / we would not need to wait for any further development of PCS for this kind name plating to work. Of course I’m not talking about the standard insignia 64*64 size, but a texture that is max 256 in height and max 256 in length. More than adequate for "name plating", this is the most easy and in-expensive way to do it, and thus it ensures backward compatibility with POF files that has no “name plating” data. So in essence we need no extra data part in the POF file. We can use the POF file as they are right now.