Is there a way to [preferably] prevent, or at the very least permanently remove, particles (specifically, smoke particles from muzzle flashes and explosions] from actors, without having to resort to modifying the actual models with a plugin on blender or 3ds?
As much as I would like to fix the models myself via blender, the .m3 plugins are no longer being maintained and I will often find them to glitch up, causing errors and models to partially disappear.
If there was a way to tell a model to prevent particles from appearing, that would make my job a lot easier.
Currently, the only thing that would appear to help me is the "Destroy Particles" actor message, however I haven't been able to get it to do anything for me thus far. Are there particularities with this actor message that I'm not aware of?
Will making the textures invisible still cost computational power? I primarily want to remove the smoke particles because they just slow down the game needlessly.
If you are using that many, then you need to rethink your map. Alternatively if performance is an issue then you just need to change the Action actors of all the units so they do not create the launch models in the first place.
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Contribute to the wiki (Wiki button at top of page) Considered easy altering of the unit textures?
I already thought of that, but that's not in the best interest of the map. Do invisible textures still bear any kind of impact on performance?
Yes they do still have a performance impact. Although they might be culled from certain fragment/pixel calculations due to being invisible (no colour, no z depths, possibly no fragment but I am unsure), they will still have vertex and geometry overhead as there is no way to tell that they will be invisible until at least the fragment shader (possibly later as they might not be textured then) and they will not be invisible if certain layers are activated such as wireframe.
As far as I am aware lighting has practically no performance impact in StarCraft II due to the more modern approach adopted by the shader pipeline and how powerful modern GPUs are. A scene with several hundred lights, eg marines firing all at once and even casting shadows with their nuzzle flash, seems to not affect performance in a noticeable way. StarCraft II is almost always CPU limited in most cases of low frame rate.
Particles are a big performance killer, especially at high visual settings. Not only do they often rely on a large number of blend operations to work, they also use a lot of CPU power for particle movement physics and ordering the particles to be rendered. Fortunately users can turn down particle quality setting in game which will reduce the CPU overhead by reducing the update rate and density of particles.
Is there a way to [preferably] prevent, or at the very least permanently remove, particles (specifically, smoke particles from muzzle flashes and explosions] from actors, without having to resort to modifying the actual models with a plugin on blender or 3ds?
As much as I would like to fix the models myself via blender, the .m3 plugins are no longer being maintained and I will often find them to glitch up, causing errors and models to partially disappear.
If there was a way to tell a model to prevent particles from appearing, that would make my job a lot easier.
Currently, the only thing that would appear to help me is the "Destroy Particles" actor message, however I haven't been able to get it to do anything for me thus far. Are there particularities with this actor message that I'm not aware of?
Texture Select By ID can fix most of them by making them use an invisible/blank/black texture.
Contribute to the wiki (Wiki button at top of page) Considered easy altering of the unit textures?
https://www.sc2mapster.com/forums/resources/tutorials/179654-data-actor-events-message-texture-select-by-id
https://media.forgecdn.net/attachments/187/40/Screenshot2011-04-17_09_16_21.jpg
Will making the textures invisible still cost computational power? I primarily want to remove the smoke particles because they just slow down the game needlessly.
If you are using that many, then you need to rethink your map. Alternatively if performance is an issue then you just need to change the Action actors of all the units so they do not create the launch models in the first place.
Contribute to the wiki (Wiki button at top of page) Considered easy altering of the unit textures?
https://www.sc2mapster.com/forums/resources/tutorials/179654-data-actor-events-message-texture-select-by-id
https://media.forgecdn.net/attachments/187/40/Screenshot2011-04-17_09_16_21.jpg
I already thought of that, but that's not in the best interest of the map. Do invisible textures still bear any kind of impact on performance?
Probably
Contribute to the wiki (Wiki button at top of page) Considered easy altering of the unit textures?
https://www.sc2mapster.com/forums/resources/tutorials/179654-data-actor-events-message-texture-select-by-id
https://media.forgecdn.net/attachments/187/40/Screenshot2011-04-17_09_16_21.jpg
Yes they do still have a performance impact. Although they might be culled from certain fragment/pixel calculations due to being invisible (no colour, no z depths, possibly no fragment but I am unsure), they will still have vertex and geometry overhead as there is no way to tell that they will be invisible until at least the fragment shader (possibly later as they might not be textured then) and they will not be invisible if certain layers are activated such as wireframe.
As far as I am aware lighting has practically no performance impact in StarCraft II due to the more modern approach adopted by the shader pipeline and how powerful modern GPUs are. A scene with several hundred lights, eg marines firing all at once and even casting shadows with their nuzzle flash, seems to not affect performance in a noticeable way. StarCraft II is almost always CPU limited in most cases of low frame rate.
Particles are a big performance killer, especially at high visual settings. Not only do they often rely on a large number of blend operations to work, they also use a lot of CPU power for particle movement physics and ordering the particles to be rendered. Fortunately users can turn down particle quality setting in game which will reduce the CPU overhead by reducing the update rate and density of particles.