[Woomeister]

Well either way it'll get rid of the white line, which makes for better screenshots

[T-Man]

better screenshots, those ones blow me away already!

[Woomeister]

Well the tiling problem is quite noticable, and it looks terrible on the Nemesis. DaBrains copies of missions are also missing the skybox were now using as well since I haven't updated the staff versions yet unless I've made other changes to the mission. My last set of shots have it in since I was working on those missions and added it.

[T-Man]

Could you use a random tiling system on areas of flat surface, so it uses a selection of possible tiles to texture certain areas?

[Woomeister]

The edge of the map produced a white line which can be seen on that pic in the top right. It's really bad on the Nemesis though. The texture had to be edited to get rid of it. I edited the DDS version of the map to fix it. DaBrain can do a better job removing it with the original texture.

I'm very strict with map amounts. Most ships only use 5-7 tiles for the main hull and 2-3 for turrets. This is to reduce the number of texture passes as possible to keep framerates up.  The Gigas for instance used over 16 tiles and broke the HTL map limit, it now uses 7.

[DaBrain]

I think it helped a lot already. The performance is very good.

We also got rid of the PCX textures. (Except for glowmaps)
DDS is far superior in both performance and memory usage. It looks better in most cases too.

This should reduce the loading time, because DDS textures can be loaded directly into the memory without any processing.

[Woomeister]

Overall DDS saved some disk space as well

[ToecrusherHammerjaw]

I've noticed that about DDS.  My only real complaint about that format is that ModelView doesn't register it, and can only view PCX textures on the POFs.  A bit of a problem for a guy like me, who likes to collect pics of every POF model he comes across.  It's my hobby.  I can find ways of converting the textures, though.

[Woomeister]

You can use the lab (F3 on mainhall) to view every ship in the table and take shots of them from there.

Or you can get a dds plugin so you can read DDS files and batch convert them to pcx. Shots taken in modelview won't have glowmaps so the ships will appear to be dead.

[ToecrusherHammerjaw]

Interesting. This whole time I've been using a combo of two shareware image editors to convert dds to gif, then to pcx.  That didn't go exactly as planned.  Somehow the word "unregistered" would appear somewhere on the hull of the ship. Where might I find one of these plug-ins?

[Woomeister]

Depends on what program you've got to convert the files with. If you have photoshop you can search for the Nvidia DDS plugin.

Remember though that the main hull textures have no lights and so won't look right unless you combine the regular map and the glow map together.

[ToecrusherHammerjaw]

That's probably fine.  All my previous 400 shots I've taken didn't have glowmaps, and I didn't mind.  I may have forgotten to use them with some models because I was too lazy, or too anal, or too old-fashioned, or all three.  All seem to be traits of Asperger's Syndrome.

[Woomeister]

Well just remember that all Shivan ships will be all black then, as the red is on the glowmap

[ToecrusherHammerjaw]

If thats the case, I could alter the textures myself, or put in new ones.  I'm mainly interested in capital ships, anyway.  This has helped me out, thanks.

[Woomeister]

Capship tiles are the same, any lights are on the glowmaps. This is the same for all Terran, EA, Vasudan and Shivan ships.

[ToecrusherHammerjaw]

BUMP! I think I may have inadvertently stumbled on a solution to this glowmap problem, or maybe not.  This concerns the seemingly glowing blue parts on the Vorlon ships in TBP.  When I used DDS Converter and Graphics Converter 2003 to eventually get the images into pcx, the blue parts were all black, like you said, Woomeister.  But then I used a program called Right Click Image Converter to convert the dds files first to gif, then used Graphics Converter 2003 to put them in pcx, and the blue showed up this time around.  I could be wrong about this, or I may have just discovered to holy grail of glowmap converting.  I don't know.  If someone knows about these two programs, and they ever try this, let me know if it works.  Thanks.

[Woomeister]

If you convert from dds-pcx the pcx file will be a true colour image. FS2 will only load a 256 colour pcx file. You need to open the pcx file in a paint package and convert it to 256 colour for it to work.

[ToecrusherHammerjaw]

Whatever I've been doing, it seems to have been doing just fine for ModelView purposes.

[T-Man]

Just for the record, I don't think Modelveiw is always WYSIWYG. Sometimes when i look at ships using it some of their textures are invisible, even though i know the textures are there in the VP.

[Woomeister]

Textures have to be 256 colour pcx and less than 2048^2 for modelview to load them. If they aren't proper sizes (like 256*256 or 512*256) then they don't look correct either.
Modelview will also delete the glowpoint chunk of our fighters if you resave them using modelview