Re: [Opengate-devel] Texture sizes

[Gary L. <Ult...@gm...>]

eGore wrote:
> As he has done for the "Lady Kickstart" he uses very high quality textures. These are very good for renderings but that does not work out in the game.

We already use smaller textures in game. The size of the lady kickstart textures are at 38% of thouse 
you can find (but probably can't open) in the templates directory. It's 1 MB (compressed) instead of 8 
MB (compressed). But we can lower the size if desired. It's currently optimized for a screen resolution 
of 1024x768 pixels.

> we have to set up rules for the textures then. My recommendation is:
> 
> 1.) 1024x1024px for the ships.

Besides that I hate rules it's not that easy. As you already noticed I didn't use U/V-Mapping as someone 
would expect. The texture of the lady kickstart for example isn't just 1 texture of a specific size. 
It's a bunch of 44 textures. If someone knows a good way to move all the 44 textures (each covers 
between 1 and 5 faces of the ship) on 1 image, this would decrease the loading time and perhaps also 
increadibly decrease the required rendering time of ogre (which means more frames per second) without 
decreasing the quality (texture resolution). Maybe this should be our main goal. If this isn't enough we 
can still make it ugly for additional speed.

> * diffuse
> * specular
> * normal

Especially the normal maps make things look really cool. Carsten made some tests with a normal map on 
the Wake station some time ago. Older graphic cards don't support normal mapping. Thouse players would 
have less visual entertainment but additional speed. In my oppinion the diffuse and the specular maps 
are not worth their effort and required rendering time of ogre. We should also consider that each map 
(texture map, normal map, specular map, diffuse map, whatever map) requires the same amount of bytes of 
your RAM. Nevertheless a normal map would make much sense for the Tauseti ship style we currently use.

Regards,
Gary