better actor texture support.

[scott]

while the texture system for actors works as it is it is highly ineficiant, especialy when working with lots of different models and lots of different textures.

as it is, if you had 500 different models with the same texture then genesis would load the same texture 500 times, and if this is a large texture say 1024x1024 .bmp each would be 3mb, 3x500 = 1500mb!!! when there only needs to be 1 3mb file to load.

it would be nice to have a texture library such as the .txl that RF already uses, however a nice system would be an automatic library generated when new models are added,and if the same file name already exists gives you the option to rename it or replace the old one, with the ability of adding new UV co-ordinates to models from milkshape or max by loading the new model (as milkshape at least cant have 2 textures on the same area) and strips it bare of everything and keeps the UV co-ordinates.

after DX9 has been implemented this would really start to optimize genesis a little and i hope but not sure, that it cant be that hard to implement as we already have a texture library that the code could be taken from.

[paradoxnj]

I wouldn't expect too much from this DX9 update. The engine itself is designed for a BSP. This means that it will render one poly at a time. To make the engine batch efficient and optimized will take almost an entire rewrite. The Destiny 3D team, which I was a member of, tried to do this and realized that it would be easier to write their own engine instead of fixing Genesis. I would suggest taking the path that AndyCR is taking in using another engine or writing a renderer for RF using DX9.

[Jay]

while the texture system for actors works as it is it is highly ineficiant, especialy when working with lots of different models and lots of different textures.

as it is, if you had 500 different models with the same texture then genesis would load the same texture 500 times, and if this is a large texture say 1024x1024 .bmp each would be 3mb, 3x500 = 1500mb!!! when there only needs to be 1 3mb file to load.

it would be nice to have a texture library such as the .txl that RF already uses, however a nice system would be an automatic library generated when new models are added,and if the same file name already exists gives you the option to rename it or replace the old one, with the ability of adding new UV co-ordinates to models from milkshape or max by loading the new model (as milkshape at least cant have 2 textures on the same area) and strips it bare of everything and keeps the UV co-ordinates.

after DX9 has been implemented this would really start to optimize genesis a little and i hope but not sure, that it cant be that hard to implement as we already have a texture library that the code could be taken from.

Actually it might already be implemented (i mean that it's only loaded once), as i have done a terrain with a 2048x2048 texture and then sliced it into 9 parts (12MBx9->108MB, i had a 64MB graphics card then, so way too much) and RF still took the same space in memory when run. I too first thought it might slow down everything, but seemingly there seems to be a thing that prevents that... However, having the actor materials pointing to a filename in the same directory would have greatly lowered the filesize as then the bitmap would only have to be stored once on the harddrive.

But I am not sure about this.