posted 01-19- 07:18 AM            

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I'm not around much so I'm not sure who is in charge of this stuff....so...

I understand you guys are doing some remapping of the textures. Have you guys thought about using a 512x512 tif file instead of the 256x256? They use these larger files in flanker 2 and fs 2000 and they are a thousand times better in visual quality.

I have managed to get my hands on a copy of 3d max, not sure if its legal or not, so maybe someone could show me how to remap textures with it. Or should I get this AC3D or will autoCAD 14 work?

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posted 01-19- 07:41 AM               

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256 X 256 is the max size for a texture in SDOE... however it is possible to use multiple texture files for the same plane, so one 256x256 texture can be used for the wings, and another for the fuselege. I do this for my WWI planes... for that matter, you could use three! This allows for more resolution, but the down side is that SDOE is almost maxing out most video card's texture memory right now. Once this happens, some textures do not show up and/or show the wrong texture.

I don't know much about texture memory issues though, what is the limit?

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-Sv =FC=

WWI in SDOE!

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posted 01-19- 09:00 AM            

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well, we did 10 seperate files with the p38jmod, so i dont see how they can be that close to being maxed right now. that is unless people are still using 12 meg and smaller cards. with a 512 x 512 you get four times the area of a 256 x 256 map.

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posted 01-19- 09:49 AM               

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There is no problem with video memory if you want to fly a mission with one type of plane sporting a high res texture, but when you start adding different aircraft types you very quickly hit the texture limit. This is particularly the case if the cockpits of those aircraft are accurately textured.

The new mapping is purely an implementation of MH's work to rectify the errors in the original sm files.

From a personal perspective the 256x256 skin is perfectly adequate as I am more interested in flying the aircraft than staring at an external view. This aside, you can get a surprising amount of detail in these relatively small textures.

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Yardstick painted this

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posted 01-19- 01:36 PM            

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The 256 x 256 is very limited. You are limited with the amount of nose art and other features that you can get with a texture that is only twice the size. With the high fill rates of the newer video cards, it is perfectly acceptable to have higher resolution texture maps.

I am well aware of the detail that you can get from the small texture maps, but with SDOE being the tinkering man's sim, I'm suprised that no one has readjusted the textures to allow better quality textures.

just my penny.

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posted 01-19- 01:37 PM            

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The 256 x 256 is very limited. You are limited with the amount of nose art and other features that you can get with a texture that is only twice the size. With the high fill rates of the newer video cards, it is perfectly acceptable to have higher resolution texture maps.

I am well aware of the detail that you can get from the small texture maps, but with SDOE being the tinkering man's sim, I'm suprised that no one has readjusted the textures to allow better quality textures.

just my penny.

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posted 01-19- 01:58 PM               

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The Ge-Force with 128MB of high speed ram will do-away with the problem of measly texture sizes for ever. Personally I really dislike small textures. Yardy's right about flying inside the aircraft, but I like to see my intended victim in all his textural glory!

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posted 01-19- 02:44 PM               

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DanW,

We can't use textures larger than 256x256 because the game doesn't support it.

Here's part of the doc:

Textures may be stored in TIFF or Silicon Graphics RGB and INTA image file formats. Textures on disk are stored at full resolution and converted dynamically into the appropriate format for whatever 3D graphics driver is being utilized. This conversion takes place when an ".sm" file is initially loaded. The converted textures are then saved in a cache file for future reference. This conversion process is the reason that initial load times are sometimes quite lengthy.
The lower left corner of the texture is the origin of the UV coordinate system. Positive U is to the right, and positive V is up (the width and height of the texture are both "1" in the UV system).
filenameID is an index into the NameList of the path to the image file containing the texture (sec XXX).
texindex is an unique number associated with this texture that is referenced by each polygon using this texture. Zero may not be used. Also note that the reference in SmPoly is only 16-bits (sec 4.7).
width and height are the desired size of the texture. The texture will be resampled to the closest supported size when first used. Supported sizes are:
256x256, 128x128, 64x64, 32x32, 16x16
Do not worry that your texture isn't square. It will be scaled to fit one of these sizes, then the texture UV coordinates at each polygon vertex will be scaled so that everything will come out looking OK.

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posted 01-19- 02:53 PM               

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I agree with Yardstick. The curent texture size is just fine. Also though very nice the P38 mod is a memory hog. Couple this with JT's wonderful cockpits and people will get lag and loss of frame rate. Add another plane or 2 and the game becomes playble online. I would stick with current texture size as it is a happy trade off between quality and performance.

As for nose art, you can simply add a seperate texture to get more deatail.

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Zoycite {GS}
GUNSLINGERS

visit The War Paint Factory

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posted 01-19- 03:36 PM               

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Dan,
I think now that more planes are becoming available, the cummulative effect of using lots of texture memory needs to be considered.... at least for plane pack candidate planes. The P38jmod is one plane, but if all the planes used that much texture, even 32 MB cards would start running out. This becomes less and less true with each new video card that comes out, but I think we're still at the point where we should work with the understanding that not everyone has upgraded their hardware yet.

For plane pack candidates, I think there should perhaps be set guidelines for how much texture memory is to be used. What do you guys think....

-fighters: no more than 1 MB
-bombers: no more than 1.5 MB

I'm just guessing here, if anyone has a better sense as to what the limits should be, please correct me.

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posted 01-19- 04:09 PM               

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I'd say don't use any more textures or polys than the planes that shipped with the game. If you do, make it an optional part like the canopy mods.

So far it looks like my yak will have less textures than the 190 since the wings are smaller so I put the spinner map in with main plane texture. It takes some elbow grease to get the planes FPS friendly, but they can look just as good with less polys and textures if you get creative.

I have a 32 meg TNT2 ultra card and I made a mission that put all the planes that come with SDOE on the runway at the same airport. Some of them showed up with no textures : (

TS

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posted 01-19- 06:24 PM            

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oh well, i tried...

back to flanker 2.......

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posted 01-19- 08:11 PM               

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Nice to hear from you again DanW.

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posted 01-19- 09:00 PM               

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Pity me.. I'm running SDOE on a 4mb ATI Rage with 3D charger chip.. ok I overclocked it.. but still LOL... that said.. I still get pretty good graphics with little loss of FR, just wish I had the S*** you guys are using, would love to see it in Full Detail!

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posted 01-19- 09:06 PM            

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see, i was just toying around with this cool zero and it got me all riled up. i wasnt suggesting that you guys include hi res stuff in any plane pack. it has too much stuff as it is anyway. i was just suggesting that maybe someone who has the know how and the talent remap the textures for those of us who don't fly online and dig taking screenshot after screenshot. guess im the minority here.

oh well..

dan

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posted 01-19- 09:30 PM               

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Minority? Ha!! No one wants some nice looking Pacific planes more than I do! Just check out the screenshot of a Midway campaign in progress: this is a shot of Midway bombers discovering Kondo's Invasion Fleet a day before the big carrier battle... and I have the Japanese attack on Midway mission done too- the Zeros look great!

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posted 01-19- 09:41 PM               

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Holy crap, Dan! Now I se what you mean with the nose art...if anyone has not seen this man's work- check out his site at Paintaholics.com and go to SDOE the Ultimate P38 series- there are like 6-8 different 38's with great nose art!!

Hey Dan- I was wondering- on the "cover page" of that section, you gave the hanger all lit up. Is there a way that would be possible when say you're flying a night mission? We need lights on the runway and in the buildings and what you've got there is just the ticket if it is doable.

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posted 01-20- 05:18 AM            

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Jeeves,

That's just an altered screenshot unfortunately...I touched it up in Corel.

Sorry

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posted 01-20- 04:38 PM               

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Bummer...you had me hopeful for a while though I hope in another month or two, you might be around to play with some new skins for all the new planes coming out!

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posted 01-21- 09:01 AM            

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Yeah, I'll be around. First order of business is winning the contest with JT's P47. After that, we should have kinds of stuff to do. I'm gonna attempt to learn remapping, so I can do the planes how I want to do them. Granted, I may be the only one that uses them, but the screenshots will rule.

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