Free Allegiance Forums

What am I to be doing?

Should I be using max size bmp.mdls?

Does the Allegiance engine actually take a 2048 and reduce to 512 if you're changing your max texture size to 512 in the game. Will this hurt people with slower computers? I'm concerned if some people can't see properly displayed textures

Quia showed me this png thing. I can't make it work, at least it won't display textures propery in mdl-view. Is mdl-view incompatible with png textures?

I need to know

I fully intend to make hires textures available. I am wondering, however, if I am wasting my time in making 512x512s for the autoupdate, and making the hires textures available for optional download, in case of problems associated with displaying these hires textures properly. Am I wasting my time?

Alleg uses whatever size is available, IIRC.

And bmp.mdls take up a good bit of space.

Also - I don't believe that mdl-view supports text mdls

Weedman wrote:QUOTE (Weedman @ Oct 22 2008, 06:15 PM) What am I to be doing?

Should I be using max size bmp.mdls?

Does the Allegiance engine actually take a 2048 and reduce to 512 if you're changing your max texture size to 512 in the game. Will this hurt people with slower computers? I'm concerned if some people can't see properly displayed textures.

I'm not sure where the scaling occurs, but yes, the engine will scale down the 2048 file to whatever the max texture size is and display that. There isn't that much of a performance gain from doing so, because you still have to load the larger file. This may change with the new DX9 client.

QUOTE Quia showed me this png thing. I can't make it work, at least it won't display textures propery in mdl-view. Is mdl-view incompatible with png textures?

I need to know [/quote]
MDLView can't handle the files produced by MDLThing, giving you beautiful white models. Allegiance reads them just fine.

QUOTE I fully intend to make hires textures available. I am wondering, however, if I am wasting my time in making 512x512s for the autoupdate, and making the hires textures available for optional download, in case of problems associated with displaying these hires textures properly. Am I wasting my time?[/quote]
The main problem with putting hires textures on AU is the size, for all the people on dialup, that's why there's a whole set of IC, Rix, and Bios bases here at 2048 that are hidden away where nobody sees them.

While there HAVE been problems in the past with getting hires textures to show up properly(Half transparent bases/ships, confusion about file locations, buggy files that crash games..) they've all been sorted out. There's just not that many people working here in this sub-sub-sub forum, so the knowledge is a bit hard to find. I should write a FAQ or something.

I think a standard needs to be defined for "new" content.

I'm down with pngs then, it is a shame they won't display in mdlview.

1024 or 2048 text pngs is what I will shoot for, if I'm heading in the wrong direction, Kage stop me.

I think we have three quarters of the population of this sub-sub-sub forum posting in this thread.

A png with a text mdl takes up a lot less space than a regular bmp mdl - So all of Faction X's textures will be run through that. It also allows for multiple models to use the same texture.

Aww, be fair Andon, there are a few more of us than that(who are as irregular as I am! )

Is there a consensus on how long is too $#@!ing long to wait for AU to finish? 5 minutes? 10 minutes? 20? Or a general limit on the size of files you can put on AU?

Well, something that may take 30 seconds for me, on broadband, can take several hours for someone on dailup. I think it's more of a size restriction than anything else. Send a message to TE about it

for a dial up download try to keep the size under 25mb for a quick easy update (about 5 minutes according to my calcs)

i remember fully well, 1 mb on dialup took ~5 minutes.

I think you need to tailor your texture sizes to the model. 2048 for Bases and caps, 1024 for medium ships and you can probably get awau with 512 for small ships although 1024 would maybe be better. If you have bigger textures then Mesial can always host them for you as optional extras.