Turtle Isle (age problems)

[dendwaler]

Thank you all guy's
This really is very valuable information for me.
I will start this weekend in revising the texturing.
It won't be to much work compared to the whole process of learning age building.
I will let you know what i gained after completing this.
And Plasmashop,.... i have never used it, but will start to try this out immediately .

edit:
And thx Teedyo for the mathematical approche i did not look to the problem in this way,
Its very plausible.

[teedyo]

Actually, I forgot to take Mip-Mapping into account, so that reduces the complexity a lot. Textures should be mip-mapped(power of 2 reduced copies) on export so all that is needed at run-time is 'best fit' modification.

[ddb174]

What Bob said - that's the important bit.
I may get rapped over the fingers over this, but I can't imagine any reason why a huge texture would affect performance, as long as it, along with everything else, fits, decompressed, into video memory, should it be absolutely neccessary to have one.

It's not the memory usage here that's the primary concern, but the time complexity for scaling those textures. It's O(n^2) to visit every pixel in an image. For arguments sake let's say it needs to be reduce by 1/4. It will normally be a much larger reduction. Then we have approximately 4(n^2) to visit every pixel and 3 neighbors to average. So for a 512x512 that's ~ 4x512x512 = 1,048,576 operations whereas for a 256x256 texture it's 4x256x256 = 262,144 ops. Now do this for every object that has a texture and you can see how it can add up. A 512x512 texture takes 4 times the processing time of a 256x256 texture. Put another way: If you get 30 fps using 256^2 textures, you may get only 7.5 fps using 512^2 textures. This is exaggerated of course; as it's ignoring the time to calculate the geometry.

No, this is mistaken. That's not how rendering engines work. (How it does work, however, is kind-of interesting, so those who like that sort of thing should look up the rasterization stage in a non-introductory graphics engine programming textbook.) Memory usage is a concern: You can instruct DirectX that you want to manage which data gets held in the video card's memory, or let DirectX handle that automatically. When that memory is filled, then it is constantly swapping textures in and out of video memory and that is *slow*. If you look at game modelers/texturers portfolios, you'll notice that they emphasize few vertices and/or efficient use of small textures.

But the author isn't a company trying to make a saleable game, so they probably don't need to worry about it too much. If only some people are able to use the Age, that's fine.

[teedyo]

Yes, I gave worst case for illustrative purposes. Something to always keep in mind is: what is the largest size any given texture will be viewed on screen? At my current resolution of 1600x1200; a full 512x512 texture would be ~ 4x4 inches(10x10cm). If the largest said texture will ever appear is 1x1 inch(102x102 pixels); the rendering engine will never use the 512 or 256 pixel sizes stored in the mipmap and they will be wasted space. Consider what would be the largest size on screen and use a texture 1 (power of 2)size above that.(rule of thumb) This reduces the storage requirements. The downside is that different monitors and set resolutions vary the dots per inch so this consideration should be applied to what one thinks the highest resolution the game might be played at. Testing is the only way to find the best trade-off of quality vs. performance.

[dendwaler]

well my clonclusion of this discussion is that reducing texture size will hardly harm the quality but will increase the performance.
So I started doing that.
The way rendering technically works seems interesting to me so i will read some wiki's about that.

Here is a new screenshot of a part of my age,
You can see here why its called

Turtle Isle.

[dendwaler]

I have reduced texture's like recommended and gained about 20Mb !
And in the mean time i have textured one of the rooms on turtle Isle.
Here are some pics of it.
I hope you like it.

[Chacal]

Gorgeous. All it needs is some work on lighting and shadows.

[dendwaler]

Gorgeous. All it needs is some work on lighting and shadows.

Thx,
and i agree about lightning, it was already on my todo list, but that is one of the last steps in building.
I am still busy on these places.
But i definitely do that.

More like this place

[diafero]

Looks nice - looking forward to visiting it

Btw, did you purposefully place your KI on the screenshots all the time? You can completely remove it by pressing the F2 key one or two times.

[Chuckles58]

Great looking screenshots, dendwaler.