[DaBrain]

I'm workin on something for SoL right now that needs a really big texture, actually two "objects" like this will be in the mission.

Well, a 4096² map would be perfect, but some older (ATI) cards do not support that. So I'd have to split it up into four parts., which makes it more difficult for me, causes seams, and isn't optimal for all cards that DO support 4096² textures.

I'm especially thinking about older Nvidia cards, like the Geforce 4 TI, that supports 4096² maps, but will have a hard time with SoL...

I don't know how much impact it will have on this card, to render eight 2048² maps instead of two 4096² maps, so maybe I'm worried about nothing, but wouldn't it be possible to make FS2 splitt up the maps into four parts if the card doesn't support 4096² maps?

I remember something like this in Quake 3, where a patch made it possible for Voodoo cards to display the full texture detail, by splitting up the huge maps into four 256² maps..

I'm pretty sure it's a lot of work to make the game alter the maps and the UV mapping of a model, but if I'm mistaken and it's not that hard to do, please consider it.


I'll soon (today) convert the models, so a quick general comment on this would be great

[taylor]

Bitmap section support (like what you mention for the Q3 thing) was removed from the FS2 code base.  Since it's not needed very often, but can incurr a substantial performance hit regardless, we just ripped it out.  I highly doubt that we will add it back, but I guess it's not an impossible thing to try and ask for in 3.7 (certainly won't happen before then however).

But also keep this in mind while you are working on the maps situation, just because a card can handle 4096² maps, doesn't mean that it will actually be good at it.  It could very well take longer to render those two 4096² maps than those eight 2048² maps.  That's the reason that I tell everyone NOT to have 4096 sized maps for production use, since the peformance can vary wildly even on cards which support 4096² maps.  The engine (hell, the genre in general) just isn't well suited for really large maps.  A FPS can easily to proceedural mapping, paging in stuff as it goes, etc.  Something like FS2 just can't do any of that stuff since you can always see the entire environment, not just peices of it.  In general you are going to be better off with those eight 2048² maps simply because of how the engine works.

[DaBrain]

Looks like another problem just came up.

A model only supports 16 textures, right? Well... that's pretty bad. Does it count for subobjects too?

[karajorma]

IIRC it's the subobject which has an 18 texture limit.

[Nuke]

im currently using 4096es of the ragnarok class, and it runs well on my 256 meg gf 6600. im not sure if the engine actually uses them. its important however to compress the **** out of em if you use em. that means 24 bit dxt1 no aplha, which gives you an 8 meg texture. anyone with a 32 meg card is sol. i find that if you add up the file size all ibxes and textures (dds you can use filesize but anything else you have to use 'h*w*bpp' formula) that you will be using at any given time. if theyre less than you target minimum card size, then you gotta cut back their size.

also if you want to get rid of seams use the 1 texel alpha 0 border feature. which should get rid of any seams and should allow the 2 neiboring textures to be properly blended.

[Bobboau]

I think SoL has one of those special case were ridiculously large textures are actually not a bad idea, at least until we give some option for multi-texture support.

[Nuke]

if you think about it if the maps aint moving theres really no reasont to use specular maps on terrain. if you use a really good map for your terrain you shouldnt need any other maps at all. but seriously if you add up all the numbers you can aim for a target of a 64 meg video card.