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I get what you are going at Andon on the rocks. The original rock textures I released had that problem because of a couple really giant craters that were unmistakeable even from long distance (there's better ones floating around, but I don't know if they are in mesial's installer yet). I think if you keep the sizes of features (craters, cracks, protrusions, etc) on the smaller side they will still maintain the illusion we want.

Now, I was thinking we were going to use the original .cvh's for the rocks to keep from having to put stuff on autoupdate (and to stick to canon). However, if we come up with a new set of really good generic rocks, We could probably convince the dev team to edit the code to use 3-4 different models instead of two. Then we'd put low poly versions of the new rocks on autoupdate for the people with low end systems and can have optional packs for people that want high poly stuff. I know we don't want to limit low end PC's, but one or two more rock models/texture's per sector shouldn't lock out the windows 98 crew. Again, I wouldn't worry dogbones about it until we already had the artwork solidly done first.

And unfortunately, even though R4 can read 32-bit images, it doesn't know what to do with the alpha channel, so I don't think you can get transparencies to work.

High #'s of polygons would be no problem if you guys have figured out how to export meshes w/ LOD (since the game already supports it). 35,000 polygons at 200m away could be 2,000 polygons 3,000m away.

Transparency requires more than just adding an alpha channel to a texture. I'm not sure how this is different over old versions of direct3d, but alpha blending needs to be enabled when the transparent components of the mesh are rendered, the meshes should be drawn in the correct Z-order, and the z write and lighting must be disabled.

Adaven wrote:QUOTE (Adaven @ Nov 9 2007, 02:46 PM) Then we'd put low poly versions of the new rocks on autoupdate for the people with low end systems and can have optional packs for people that want high poly stuff.

that was my plan, i didn't have a way to get the original CVH for a rock, and i had no way to be sure if i had managed to get it, it wouldn't have been rotated by 108 deg in an export /import. (see my rocks thread)

Orion wrote:QUOTE (Orion @ Nov 9 2007, 03:49 PM) High #'s of polygons would be no problem if you guys have figured out how to export meshes w/ LOD (since the game already supports it). 35,000 polygons at 200m away could be 2,000 polygons 3,000m away.

i did make a highpoly rock with multiple LODs too (using original tools)