50 materials of 2,48k

[Veleran]

i have prepared a small terrain with 50 materials (the trees are one piece on it to hide the low res trunk base using the smoothing group) of 2048 x 2048 and i m not sure if its worth it.
Other engines like Udk (unreal tech) and crytech count every bit of ram and use dxt compression.

Calculate and it would be surely 250 mega just the terrain.
I wonder what Zidane would think.

[Zidane]

What think Zidane? Why?

[Veleran]

Zidane,you re a veteran level designer.Would you use less textures than these to reduce the texture memory usage-or would nt you mind?
I personally think the ram is more than enough.Anyway i also have in mind that the game should be small enough to fit in 1 giga, web space.

[Zidane]

I think tht you must use four or five materials, it's important reserve the VRAM

[zany_001]

Why are you using 50 textures for a small bit of terrain, anyway? You shouldn't need anywhere near that many to texture it and make it look good.

[Veleran]

Its because i thought to render baked shadows and lightning on the textures and use only flat ambient lightning for the meshes surpassing the scene lightning.

I don t know if you will like it,here is what it looks like with no shadows,
and one grass tile on the ground.

The barks and stones don t have their own textures yet (that s why texture seams are visible).
It s supposed to be a small fighting ground between two monsters/players (Gargolyle vs Ogre or Human Wizard vs Dragon) so i left some open spaces.
The ground is too dark-much darker than what the grass texture is,but i ll have to leave it this way for the moment and continue and finish the trunks textures.

Click on next arrows to see the rest images of this level (to the top left)

http://img3.imageshack.us/i/graveyard19.jpg/

[paradoxnj]

If I am understanding correctly, you are asking if you should use 50 textures on a terrain in RF. The answer to that is...it depends. RF uses software based transformations. This means the CPU is doing all the work. The GPU is basically idle. Textures are stored in video RAM, which means that you would be forcing people to use cards with 256MB or above. That might hurt your lower system specs.

[Veleran]

I thought everyone now has dual or quad core processors with 4 giga ram and above-that s why i thought their ram wont miss the 250 megabytes.
You mean rf uses 3d card's memory-i though it ignores the 3d card?
Someone with a 512 mb cards would have half of that memory taken by the textures?

[bernie]

I thought everyone now has dual or quad core processors with 4 giga ram and above-that s why i thought their ram wont miss the 250 megabytes.

You are joking aren't you? I only use single core processor on my win2k OS machine (which I use most of the time because I prefer win2k OS over the newer ones. I do have a PC with XP on it which i only use occasionally and I have a laptop running vista I hardly ever use. I do know some folk still use windows 98SE on old machines. Some folk don't have the money to keep pace with new technology especially in times of world recession.

[Veleran]

I too have an old computer,and if i assume that many who browse the net for free or almost free games (like rf titles)
might prefer to avoid the standard cost of games and probably have not upgraded for a long time.
I mean they might surely buy big titles,but also play flash and other small games for variation.

[paradoxnj]

System RAM and video RAM are 2 different things. It's the video RAM that would be the issue.