Raveen wrote:QUOTE (Raveen @ Oct 3 2006, 01:13 PM) I say, I say, I say!
What goes Click Click Dead?
Rav's Hard Drive... /glare.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":glare:" border="0" alt="glare.gif" />
Belters texs may well need to be started again, depends on what I decided to back up. New HDD will arrive later this week and I'll take a look once I've got windows installed.
Try Spinrite 6 its a Super recovery tool... It will recover almost all HD sectors.. If not, it make sure u can access the HD anyway. Read the instruction well.
Zap
Last edited by Zapper on Thu Oct 05, 2006 9:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Life suck's and then u play Alleg.
-.. ..- -.- . -. ..- -.- . .----. . -- .. ... - .... . --. .-. . .- - . ... -
Fortunately it was merely the windows installation that got borked so I'm now back up to speed. I've bought a new and bigger HDD so I'll probably use the old one soley as a backup data store from now on. As for the belts texs, they're nice and safe now. However I think I'm going to have to resample the original texs because the versions that I'm working on didn't work out too well due to the nature of belts texs. I'll run them through GIMPs upsampler and see if it gives me a better base to work from. The hanger is done and looks pretty nice so far but I've got a long way to go with the rest.
Spidey: Can't think of a reason I'd need to know anything
Raveen wrote:QUOTE (Raveen @ Oct 6 2006, 10:59 AM) Fortunately it was merely the windows installation that got borked so I'm now back up to speed. I've bought a new and bigger HDD so I'll probably use the old one soley as a backup data store from now on. As for the belts texs, they're nice and safe now. However I think I'm going to have to resample the original texs because the versions that I'm working on didn't work out too well due to the nature of belts texs. I'll run them through GIMPs upsampler and see if it gives me a better base to work from. The hanger is done and looks pretty nice so far but I've got a long way to go with the rest.
Cool
Zap
Life suck's and then u play Alleg.
-.. ..- -.- . -. ..- -.- . .----. . -- .. ... - .... . --. .-. . .- - . ... -
Okay, executive summary time /mrgreen.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":D" border="0" alt="mrgreen.gif" />
Do we have enough working high-res textures to make it worth while adding support for them to R3?
Adding support for them could delay the release a few weeks or more depending on how long it takes people to get the new textures and actually fly with them.
If we save them for R4, the R4 beta should have support for them shortly after R3 goes live, and I am thinking the Christmas time frame for release of R4.
DOG PROPERTY LAWS:
2. If it's in my mouth, it's mine.
[unless it tastes bad, then it is yours.]
Right now I've got all the rocks done that's ~9 textures. They might still need some contrast/brightness adjustments, which it'd probably be best if a lot of people used them in game and gave thier opinions.
I've got 1 environment basically done, and some others wouldn't be too hard. I could get rough drafts for 7-8 more out in a week or two.
I don't really mind if you release it now or wait until R4. At the very least it'd encourage people to attend the tests.
Last edited by Adaven on Sat Oct 07, 2006 6:53 am, edited 1 time in total.
Christmas time is a good assumption. But im afraid that even then we would only have 2 factions finished.
We still need to start Bios and Rix....
At the moment all the textures are in the resolution we need, but the quality varies. So u could release the code and the textures and after that we could continually update the textures with a manual download announcement.
One out standing question we have with this solution is. Will the engine handle multiple resolution textures with good performance. I found that the load time of the hirez textures creates frame drop when they are loaded into the memory. So whatever we chose(release date or method of release) we still need to test the performance on the beta servers and get the different user-stories and GFX setup test!!
Zap
Life suck's and then u play Alleg.
-.. ..- -.- . -. ..- -.- . .----. . -- .. ... - .... . --. .-. . .- - . ... -
The high res texture patch has been applied. I am in the process of making it available on the beta server for download.
Aside from the link in Adaven's sig are there other high res texture's available? (Note some of the current textures are already 512 so if you switch from 256 to 512 you will notice the difference).
So we don't swamp Adaven's site I'll move his zip onto the beta server and post a link. I just wanted to know what else I should be including.
For those of you who just can't wait, and are savvy about these changes, stick them in a Textures SUBFOLDER of the current artwork folder. You can leave the old version alone. The new client will first look in the Textures subfolder and then the artwork folder. So 'regular' alleg won't see the new textures at all.
Thanks to Y_P for bringing us this new feature and thanks to those that have put in the time to make the new textures.
Dog
DOG PROPERTY LAWS:
2. If it's in my mouth, it's mine.
[unless it tastes bad, then it is yours.]
Cool beans. Thanks for hosting the rock pack, It's just on some freebie host and I imagine its not too fast to download off of either.
I've got a 3-4 environments almost done that I'll try to get up by the end of the week.
One additional note. Even just the 9-10 asteroids is like 70-80 MB's of textures. All that data gets loaded on the vid card when you launch from base (or first check f3). I normally have a ~10 second hang up when I first launch, and a smaller one when I first change sectors. After that things are back to normal and my 128mb Radeon 9600 handles everything fine.
I've so far been unable to tell any real performance difference when I throttle down the full res textures w/ the client. I've actually been playing R2 with those textures and still have the initial hang ups even though everythings is scaled to 256^2.
What I'm trying to get at is that if the full res textures are really too much for some people's system (especially once we start getting faction textures done) then a separate download pack for 1024^2 and 512^2 might be wise to have. If anyone wants to go ahead and do that for the rocks it'd be great, although I can get around to it later this week as well.
Alleg stores its textures as uncompressed bitmaps, and 80-odd megs takes some time to push through even a PCI-E connection. And unless I’m mistaken, it sits in video memory uncompressed, so if your card runs out, your computer will have to constantly (as in every frame) re-send the texture. Eew.
Modern video cards can decompress textures in hardware, and it’s extremely fast, but alas, Alleg has no mechanism to either compress its textures or to read a pre-compressed one off the artwork directory.
Downscaling textures takes time, too, but Alleg only has to do it once per session, iirc.
