[Lynx]

I experimented with prettying up WCS ships cockpits, and found that a combination of textured and glowmapped cockpits along with shine and environmentl mapping looks quite good and realistic on most ships when you don't get upclose, but I believe I once read somewhere that gkowmaps cause quite a slowdown. Is that true? Would it lead to a significant loss of performance if every fighter had a glowmapped cockpit, at least for LOD0 and 1?

[aldo_14]

I've not noticed one, myself.  But why for LOD1?

[Taristin]

...glowmaps are a significant performance drain?

No. It wouldn't be bad. Especially since you could use a fairly small map for the cocpit. And also, since it'd be possible to use the same texture for every cocpit, if you wanted to. Even with different UV mapping to make them look like different cocpits.

So whoever told you glowmaps are a major drain is wrong. (They can be, mind you, just as anything else can be, but in and of themselves, they're not)

[Lynx]

It would be probably noticed at least for LOD1 when the glow suddenly dissapears, even if it's not that strong, hoever it wouldn't be necessary for the rest of the LODs.

[Bobboau]

there is no slow down, or visual problem with glow maps, if your looking for a reason not to use one sorry, but they are like the least resorce intisive effect available, if you have one small part of the ship that will need glowmaps this would be one good place to break the one texture per ship rule, especaly if this one part of the ship is going to be in a seperate subobject anyway

[aldo_14]

Could probably use a pretty low-res glowmap in particular for LOD1, I believe.

[Lynx]

just what I wanted to hear Bobbau:)

[magatsu1]

how about extending the draw-distance between Lod0 and Lod1 ?

Where do I do Shine and Glowmapping  BTW ? Is it PCS or in the model proggy ? My SCP ships look frankly s***e with no mapping (kinda like textures with no mapping)

[karajorma]

Maybe you're thinking of animated glowmaps like the ones LS has included in his shine 1.5 package. They do cause a slowdown.

[Taristin]

Originally posted by magatsu1

Where do I do Shine and Glowmapping  BTW ? Is it PCS or in the model proggy ? My SCP ships look frankly s***e with no mapping (kinda like textures with no mapping)

*assumes you're joking*  

*pretends you weren't joking*  You make shine and glow maps in your image editting program.

[karajorma]

I'm assuming he means where do you assign the textures rather than how you make them

You don't actually assign glow and shine maps. Both are based on a texture map. The game simply looks for something with the same filename as the texture map with -shine or -glow folllowing it.

[magatsu1]

Maybe I mistook it for specular. Or whatever.