The last important piece of the puzzle is complete, "the mesh terrain". Success in using one single large mesh with no divisions which means a pentium 3 can have it all for breakfast.
By Making a composite material with 2 UV's, one tiled and the other one for the blend mask, more than 7 texture can be combined together similar to how a terrain brush works. You get to have max quality terrain textures, it blends super fine and best of all you can tile them as much as you want. This technique is not made using the terrain material or does it have to do anything related to the terrain, It's treated just like any other sc2 object which will be flash fast on performance. You can all say goodbye to the nightmare that is the terrain or reducing the far view of the camera for good, it's obsolete.
Disadvantage is that you won't be seeing what your doing so you'll have to find a way to paint the alpha masks somehow.
One more thing I would like to add is a model distance culling, that might be impossible for the terrain since it's one object but it's not hard for the rest.
Performance, Performance, Performance! :)
Terrain looks really nice. Sc2's terrain is pretty low quality, would have loved to have had something like this in my various campaign maps, but I don't know how to UV or anything, so :3
With your physics-based collision, could you make a fairly complex mesh and give it a collision mesh? That's something I tried to do with sc2 back in 2010, but needless to say, it didn't go very well. I made this heap of trash for a TPS campaign and it basically was the deathkneel of that project the moment I tried to get it into the game. https://i.imgur.com/BiH0Twv.jpg That was going to be a fairly large map, but it was much too big for the largest sc2 size, the smallest pathways could barely fit a ghost, and the collision was just... impossible, in essence. I suppose using your design, to bypass the size problem it would be a multiple-level mesh.
I tried to do something relatively simple like make a dress out of physics nodes and couldn't even get that to work, so yeah. I've long given up on any ambitions like that, but still interesting to finally see someone with equally high goals actually getting somewhere.
Think the largest changes came with HOTS, lots of improvements and fixes for most of the stuff like, physics and lighting. I tried once to make a fps with wings of liberty but I had a shadow problem which was that they would disappear if no terrain was drawn, the shadows were dependent on the terrain, also there was this annoying shadow glitch all fixed with the appearance of HOTS. There was physics but I think the domino physics engine was introduced much later but I am not sure.
Quote:
With your physics-based collision, could you make a fairly complex mesh and give it a collision mesh?
Yes with art tools it is now possible to use the mesh itself as a collision shape. The collision is perfect with no room for error, tried it already and works however I have yet to understand how gravity works and how to add a basic jumping function for a character. I didn't really see much people actually getting in to the physics engine more in depth so there are no tutorials. Not going to use a scripted physics since it fairly simple and pretty much obsolete.
Anyhow by playing with the art tools I actually got to better understand what the sc2 engine is truly capable of.
Mesh terrains are great stuff!
This one has only diffuse textures with a crack as normal
Yeah, I think it might have been 1.5 that introduced the larger portion of the physics engine. The game also has wind, which can be used on particles and such, but I am not exactly sure how it's configured yet.
Disadvantage is that you won't be seeing what your doing so you'll have to find a way to paint the alpha masks somehow.
If you're using photoshop, theres a way I learned a while back that might come in handy:
- Take each texture map and give it its own layer
- Take each layer and put it into its own folder
- Create a Blank Layer and fill it with White, Set the Layer to Multiply
- At the bottom of the Layer Panel, click the "FX" and choose "Blending Options"
- In Advanced Options, for Knockout choose Shallow.
- Duplicate this layer into each folder above the Texture layer
Knockout hides all pixels underneath it, by erasing on the knockout layer you can reveal the texture layer.
Once you're happy with the result, you can copy the knockout layer and paste it into an alpha channel, just
remember to deselect and invert (ctrl+i) the alpha channel after pasting.
Nice tip, I'll take a look at that file.
I found a better solution for that using this program. All that I need to do is replace the textures with black and white after the painting is finished, export each layer as a individual alpha mask and I can see what I am painting so it's fine. http://www.earthsculptor.com/
Nice tip, I'll take a look at that file.
I found a better solution for that using this program. All that I need to do is replace the textures with black and white after the painting is finished, export each layer as a individual alpha mask and I can see what I am painting so it's fine.
http://www.earthsculptor.com/
This mesh terrain stuff really starts to become a valid option for me. Please make sure to create a detailed run through of every step as a tutorial of sorts so it is more easily accessible to everyone.
Actually I think I will.
Just added a terrain as large as the map itself and pretty much high poly, runs as well as if it weren't even there in the first place (almost, having all those trees and unoptimized mesh rocks slows it down a little), it's fascinating. A well optimized terrain will be a perfect piece on the cake. Working on this and I will be coming with the proof to, soon enough.
How do you make units follow the terrain when it becomes hilly when using the mesh as terrain? If you're making a tutorial then just answer it there I guess.
Also after doing some testing with terrain removal I noticed and saw such a minimal difference that I doubt it would matter.
How do you make units follow the terrain when it becomes hilly when using the mesh as terrain? If you're making a tutorial then just answer it there I guess.
This can't be done without HOTS and Art tools :\
Use the terrain sample I posted for this!
1. From 3ds max add a "Helper object" >>> "Sc2 Physics"
2. Select a "Convex hull"
3. Align it to the mesh
4. Pick mesh button, select the mesh terrain
5. Set "Planar angle" to 0
Final steps
6. Go to "Utilities" >>> "Properties lister" and select physics. There will be a extra option available one "Shape tipe" pick mesh.The dummy (Green) should take the exact form of the mesh.
7. Very important! Select the "Walkable checkbox", makes it so the unit can walk on the terrain, you can make bridges the same way etc.
Quote:
Also after doing some testing with terrain removal I noticed and saw such a minimal difference that I doubt it would matter.
First of all I would like to know your pc specs, if your pc is a powerful beast then you won't feel much of a difference in the first place. If you got a over average pc, I recommend you set everything on max settings and max resolution aldogh if it's powerful enough it still might not slow down and to be honest, even powerful beats are at least a bit affected by a full terrain in far view [Tested this at a friend on a -I 7 I 5 but you get the idea of the stress test)]. If it does then you will notice the difference between having and not having a terrain. It is very visible on older computers, actually the difference is from heaven to the earth!
What exactly did you mean with "minimal"? Did it improve performance very lite or does it run just as slow?
I don't know what kind of tests you did but hers what I recomend:
1. Use a rts\fps map.
2. In the editor go to terrain object and pick "Hide Terrain Cell". Hide the entire terrain!
3. Just in chase, In the trigger editor there's a action called "Show/Hide Terrain", use it!
4. Place a lot of HQ models in the map and I do mean a lot.
5. Set the camera's "Field of View" to a (fps standard), larger than usual.
6. Set the camera's "Far Clip" To max (999999999999999....).
Note: Have a terrain with varying height.
Test the map with terrain on and off! ________
Ok now why would I bother with the optimization in the first place? Because my PC is weak? No, because sc2 lacks just that!
Even if some people don't feel much strain because of their awesome computers those with bad pc's will definitely hate it. Now I know what most people say and that is to just buy a new one! However it's not about that. Technology also means performance and optimization, even new games follow some rules and traditions and for good reasons. If you ever looked into Unity engine or Unreal you'll notice straight away how the models lose detail in the distance and trees are being replaced with billboard objects. Sc2 Doesn't have any appropriate Distance Culling like a fps so you should play fps in sc2 at your own risk and what I meant by that is that the video card and parts will heat up for mostly nothing. Why strain your pc uselessly when things like optimization are available, it's pointless so I feelt like sharing some info with people who visit since we are on topic about optimization.
<<From unity Documentation>>
Optimizing Graphics Performance
Good performance is critical to the success of many games!
Where are the graphics costs
The graphical parts of your game can primarily cost on two systems of the computer: the GPU or the CPU. The first rule of any optimization is to find where the performance problem is; because strategies for optimizing for GPU vs. CPU are quite different (and can even be opposite - it's quite common to make GPU do more work while optimizing for CPU, and vice versa).
Rendering is not a problem, neither on the GPU nor the CPU! For example, your scripts or physics might be the actual problem. Use Profiler to figure this out.
GPU has too many vertices to process. How many vertices are "ok" depends on the GPU and the complexity of vertex shaders. Typical figures are "not more than 100 thousand" on mobile, and "not more than several million" on PC.
CPU has too many vertices to process, for things that do vertex processing on the CPU. This could be skinned meshes, cloth simulation, particles etc.
CPU optimization - draw call count
In order to render any object on the screen, the CPU has some work to do - things like figuring out which lights affect that object, setting up the shader & shader parameters, sending drawing commands to the graphics driver, which then prepares the commands to be sent off to the graphics card. All this "per object" CPU cost is not very cheap, so if you have lots of visible objects, it can add up.
So for example, if you have a thousand triangles, it will be much, much cheaper if they are all in one mesh, instead of having a thousand individual meshes one triangle each. The cost of both scenarios on the GPU will be very similar, but the work done by the CPU to render a thousand objects (instead of one) will be significant.
In order to make CPU do less work, it's good to reduce the visible object count:
Combine close objects together, either manually or using Unity's draw call batching.
Use less materials in your objects, by putting separate textures into a larger texture atlas and so on.
Use less things that cause objects to be rendered multiple times (reflections, shadows, per-pixel lights etc., see below).
Combine objects together so that each mesh has at least several hundred triangles and uses only one Material for the entire mesh. It is important to understand that combining two objects which don't share a material does not give you any performance increase at all. The most common reason for having multiple materials is that two meshes don't share the same textures, so to optimize CPU performance, you should ensure that any objects you combine share the same textures.
However, when using many pixel lights in the Forward rendering path, there are situations where combining objects may not make sense, as explained below.
LOD and Per-Layer Cull Distances
In some games, it may be appropriate to cull small objects more aggressively than large ones, in order to reduce both the CPU and GPU load. For example, small rocks and debris could be made invisible at long distances while large buildings would still be visible.
This can be either achieved by Level Of Detail system, or by setting manual per-layer culling distances on the camera. You could put small objects into a separate layer and setup per-layer cull distances using the Camera.layerCullDistances script function.
Realtime shadows are nice, but they can cost quite a lot of performance, both in terms of extra draw calls for the CPU, and extra processing on the GPU. For further details, see the Shadows page.
And going back to the development I present the first ever Playable/ Collidable/ Walkable terrain mesh in Starcraft 2. Larger than the actual map a bit, you can imagine a village can fit in the depression area ther. Was rather lazy so I painted it fast to see how it would look in sc2. I will combine more layers like AO, detail map, "Terrain mesh normal" and a colormap.
This is awesome, I didn't expect less of you, Tobyfat50! I am really looking forward to this. Also, thank you for sharing the walkable mesh tip! I'll be checking this thread, keep up!
You may improve this stuff with ambient lighting&fog + some random dust particles here and there to make it completely mindblowing. Btw, how about performance?
This is very important, and please don't laugh but I didn't know about it. Could not imagine such a small checkbox could be missed and cause 3 people to reinstall sc 3 times. Always have this checked before you export otherwise your models will turn out purple on other people's PCs and put all textures in the "Assets\Textures" folder.
I certainly send some wrong samples for the terrain that might of appeared purple so I will resend the files. Don't mind it!
Quote:
...how about performance?
The performance problem has been almost eliminated for most people with better computers but it's still not ready yet. I added small detail culling for small rocks and grass, cutting from the camera distance wasn't a desirable idea and not to pleasant. This optimization is similar but with the entire map and sky visible at long range. What I need to do now is to add LOD to trees, rocks and other models.
With the current optimization, a lot of trees and grass it runs a bit slow on Ultra but it was to be expected on my Pc and it's I should say, normal like in most games for me. It runs best on medium but I can make it happen even on ultra. I'll be adding more options for the player to choose like terrain with "Double Lambert" (causes the material to use a harsher lighting gradient. Terrain in StarCraft II uses this setting, so for a doodad to blend seamlessly to the terrain, this setting may be necessary), grass with opaque blend instead of soft, etc, of course some visual candy will be lost in the process.
The terrain! Even as optimized as it is it slows my pc a bit on ultra because it uses a composite material with all 8 layers, unfortunately this is the best solution and replacement for sc2. Fortunately I can tune it down a bit since I loaded it with unnecessary stuff like AO and the likes of which is unneeded in terrains in general.
This has been my performance log for the moment, next time It will be even better. Guys with at least dual cores have nothing to worry about the greatest evil was the sc2 terran witch is gone now, even my friend who has a better pc than mine was amazed at the difference, worked perfectly on his pc btw, on Ultra. o.o
Commit doesn't export a bunch of textures in our tests thus far. So, we first "export" with "make dds" then export with "use mopaq paths". Yes, this confused us for a long while as well.. this also applies to previewing.
Actually I save my texture from photoshop to get the compression I want. DTX 1 is the best compression for diffuse with no alpha and specular. For textures with alpha I use DTX 5 but for saving size I use DTX 1 whenever I can. I tried the other formats but they cost too much size for better quality and it's not even noticeable.
Question of the day: How to change a doodad model with triggers to another model?
I need to know this so I can switch trees for example with billboards at a far distance from the camera. I noticed there is something called low quality model in the data editor what does that do?
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Look really nice, nice job!
Ok this is revolutionary!!!
The last important piece of the puzzle is complete, "the mesh terrain". Success in using one single large mesh with no divisions which means a pentium 3 can have it all for breakfast.
By Making a composite material with 2 UV's, one tiled and the other one for the blend mask, more than 7 texture can be combined together similar to how a terrain brush works. You get to have max quality terrain textures, it blends super fine and best of all you can tile them as much as you want. This technique is not made using the terrain material or does it have to do anything related to the terrain, It's treated just like any other sc2 object which will be flash fast on performance. You can all say goodbye to the nightmare that is the terrain or reducing the far view of the camera for good, it's obsolete.
Disadvantage is that you won't be seeing what your doing so you'll have to find a way to paint the alpha masks somehow.
One more thing I would like to add is a model distance culling, that might be impossible for the terrain since it's one object but it's not hard for the rest.
Performance, Performance, Performance! :)
Terrain looks really nice. Sc2's terrain is pretty low quality, would have loved to have had something like this in my various campaign maps, but I don't know how to UV or anything, so :3
With your physics-based collision, could you make a fairly complex mesh and give it a collision mesh? That's something I tried to do with sc2 back in 2010, but needless to say, it didn't go very well. I made this heap of trash for a TPS campaign and it basically was the deathkneel of that project the moment I tried to get it into the game. https://i.imgur.com/BiH0Twv.jpg That was going to be a fairly large map, but it was much too big for the largest sc2 size, the smallest pathways could barely fit a ghost, and the collision was just... impossible, in essence. I suppose using your design, to bypass the size problem it would be a multiple-level mesh.
I tried to do something relatively simple like make a dress out of physics nodes and couldn't even get that to work, so yeah. I've long given up on any ambitions like that, but still interesting to finally see someone with equally high goals actually getting somewhere.
Think the largest changes came with HOTS, lots of improvements and fixes for most of the stuff like, physics and lighting. I tried once to make a fps with wings of liberty but I had a shadow problem which was that they would disappear if no terrain was drawn, the shadows were dependent on the terrain, also there was this annoying shadow glitch all fixed with the appearance of HOTS. There was physics but I think the domino physics engine was introduced much later but I am not sure.
Yes with art tools it is now possible to use the mesh itself as a collision shape. The collision is perfect with no room for error, tried it already and works however I have yet to understand how gravity works and how to add a basic jumping function for a character. I didn't really see much people actually getting in to the physics engine more in depth so there are no tutorials. Not going to use a scripted physics since it fairly simple and pretty much obsolete.
Anyhow by playing with the art tools I actually got to better understand what the sc2 engine is truly capable of.
Mesh terrains are great stuff!
This one has only diffuse textures with a crack as normal
Yeah, I think it might have been 1.5 that introduced the larger portion of the physics engine. The game also has wind, which can be used on particles and such, but I am not exactly sure how it's configured yet.
If you're using photoshop, theres a way I learned a while back that might come in handy:
- Take each texture map and give it its own layer
- Take each layer and put it into its own folder
- Create a Blank Layer and fill it with White, Set the Layer to Multiply
- At the bottom of the Layer Panel, click the "FX" and choose "Blending Options"
- In Advanced Options, for Knockout choose Shallow.
- Duplicate this layer into each folder above the Texture layer
Knockout hides all pixels underneath it, by erasing on the knockout layer you can reveal the texture layer.
Once you're happy with the result, you can copy the knockout layer and paste it into an alpha channel, just
remember to deselect and invert (ctrl+i) the alpha channel after pasting.
added ref file
Formally Kinkycactus
Nice tip, I'll take a look at that file.
I found a better solution for that using this program. All that I need to do is replace the textures with black and white after the painting is finished, export each layer as a individual alpha mask and I can see what I am painting so it's fine.
http://www.earthsculptor.com/
This mesh terrain stuff really starts to become a valid option for me. Please make sure to create a detailed run through of every step as a tutorial of sorts so it is more easily accessible to everyone.
Actually I think I will.
Just added a terrain as large as the map itself and pretty much high poly, runs as well as if it weren't even there in the first place (almost, having all those trees and unoptimized mesh rocks slows it down a little), it's fascinating. A well optimized terrain will be a perfect piece on the cake. Working on this and I will be coming with the proof to, soon enough.
@Tobyfat50: Go
How do you make units follow the terrain when it becomes hilly when using the mesh as terrain? If you're making a tutorial then just answer it there I guess.
Also after doing some testing with terrain removal I noticed and saw such a minimal difference that I doubt it would matter.
This can't be done without HOTS and Art tools :\
Use the terrain sample I posted for this!
1. From 3ds max add a "Helper object" >>> "Sc2 Physics"
2. Select a "Convex hull"
3. Align it to the mesh
4. Pick mesh button, select the mesh terrain
5. Set "Planar angle" to 0
6. Go to "Utilities" >>> "Properties lister" and select physics. There will be a extra option available one "Shape tipe" pick mesh.The dummy (Green) should take the exact form of the mesh.
7. Very important! Select the "Walkable checkbox", makes it so the unit can walk on the terrain, you can make bridges the same way etc. First of all I would like to know your pc specs, if your pc is a powerful beast then you won't feel much of a difference in the first place. If you got a over average pc, I recommend you set everything on max settings and max resolution aldogh if it's powerful enough it still might not slow down and to be honest, even powerful beats are at least a bit affected by a full terrain in far view [Tested this at a friend on a
-I 7I 5 but you get the idea of the stress test)]. If it does then you will notice the difference between having and not having a terrain. It is very visible on older computers, actually the difference is from heaven to the earth!What exactly did you mean with "minimal"? Did it improve performance very lite or does it run just as slow?
I don't know what kind of tests you did but hers what I recomend:
1. Use a rts\fps map.
2. In the editor go to terrain object and pick "Hide Terrain Cell". Hide the entire terrain!
3. Just in chase, In the trigger editor there's a action called "Show/Hide Terrain", use it!
4. Place a lot of HQ models in the map and I do mean a lot.
5. Set the camera's "Field of View" to a (fps standard), larger than usual.
6. Set the camera's "Far Clip" To max (999999999999999....).
Test the map with terrain on and off!
________
Ok now why would I bother with the optimization in the first place? Because my PC is weak? No, because sc2 lacks just that!
Even if some people don't feel much strain because of their awesome computers those with bad pc's will definitely hate it. Now I know what most people say and that is to just buy a new one! However it's not about that. Technology also means performance and optimization, even new games follow some rules and traditions and for good reasons. If you ever looked into Unity engine or Unreal you'll notice straight away how the models lose detail in the distance and trees are being replaced with billboard objects. Sc2 Doesn't have any appropriate Distance Culling like a fps so you should play fps in sc2 at your own risk and what I meant by that is that the video card and parts will heat up for mostly nothing. Why strain your pc uselessly when things like optimization are available, it's pointless so I feelt like sharing some info with people who visit since we are on topic about optimization.
<<From unity Documentation>>
Optimizing Graphics Performance
Good performance is critical to the success of many games!
Where are the graphics costs
The graphical parts of your game can primarily cost on two systems of the computer: the GPU or the CPU. The first rule of any optimization is to find where the performance problem is; because strategies for optimizing for GPU vs. CPU are quite different (and can even be opposite - it's quite common to make GPU do more work while optimizing for CPU, and vice versa).
Rendering is not a problem, neither on the GPU nor the CPU! For example, your scripts or physics might be the actual problem. Use Profiler to figure this out.
CPU optimization - draw call count
In order to render any object on the screen, the CPU has some work to do - things like figuring out which lights affect that object, setting up the shader & shader parameters, sending drawing commands to the graphics driver, which then prepares the commands to be sent off to the graphics card. All this "per object" CPU cost is not very cheap, so if you have lots of visible objects, it can add up.
So for example, if you have a thousand triangles, it will be much, much cheaper if they are all in one mesh, instead of having a thousand individual meshes one triangle each. The cost of both scenarios on the GPU will be very similar, but the work done by the CPU to render a thousand objects (instead of one) will be significant.
In order to make CPU do less work, it's good to reduce the visible object count:
Combine close objects together, either manually or using Unity's draw call batching.
Use less materials in your objects, by putting separate textures into a larger texture atlas and so on.
Use less things that cause objects to be rendered multiple times (reflections, shadows, per-pixel lights etc., see below).
Combine objects together so that each mesh has at least several hundred triangles and uses only one Material for the entire mesh. It is important to understand that combining two objects which don't share a material does not give you any performance increase at all. The most common reason for having multiple materials is that two meshes don't share the same textures, so to optimize CPU performance, you should ensure that any objects you combine share the same textures.
However, when using many pixel lights in the Forward rendering path, there are situations where combining objects may not make sense, as explained below.
LOD and Per-Layer Cull Distances
In some games, it may be appropriate to cull small objects more aggressively than large ones, in order to reduce both the CPU and GPU load. For example, small rocks and debris could be made invisible at long distances while large buildings would still be visible.
This can be either achieved by Level Of Detail system, or by setting manual per-layer culling distances on the camera. You could put small objects into a separate layer and setup per-layer cull distances using the Camera.layerCullDistances script function.
Realtime shadows are nice, but they can cost quite a lot of performance, both in terms of extra draw calls for the CPU, and extra processing on the GPU. For further details, see the Shadows page.
https://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Manual/DrawCallBatching.html
As a map maker that focuses mostly on TPS I can definately say that the terrain impacts the performance the most.
And going back to the development I present the first ever Playable/ Collidable/ Walkable terrain mesh in Starcraft 2. Larger than the actual map a bit, you can imagine a village can fit in the depression area ther. Was rather lazy so I painted it fast to see how it would look in sc2. I will combine more layers like AO, detail map, "Terrain mesh normal" and a colormap.
And I present today a small piece of the fps engine...
Terrain without the terrain
Testing fps Mod
ULTRA
MEDIUM
MEDIUM
ULTRA
Working On LOD optimization of rocks and trees and... everything :P
A video will be coming sometime soon :D
My god man. This looks more incredible every time you post screenshots.
It almost looks like Skyrim or Oblivion. Very very well done, an inspiration for sure.
This is awesome, I didn't expect less of you, Tobyfat50! I am really looking forward to this. Also, thank you for sharing the walkable mesh tip! I'll be checking this thread, keep up!
You may improve this stuff with ambient lighting&fog + some random dust particles here and there to make it completely mindblowing. Btw, how about performance?
This is very important, and please don't laugh but I didn't know about it. Could not imagine such a small checkbox could be missed and cause 3 people to reinstall sc 3 times. Always have this checked before you export otherwise your models will turn out purple on other people's PCs and put all textures in the "Assets\Textures" folder.
I certainly send some wrong samples for the terrain that might of appeared purple so I will resend the files. Don't mind it!
The performance problem has been almost eliminated for most people with better computers but it's still not ready yet. I added small detail culling for small rocks and grass, cutting from the camera distance wasn't a desirable idea and not to pleasant. This optimization is similar but with the entire map and sky visible at long range. What I need to do now is to add LOD to trees, rocks and other models.
With the current optimization, a lot of trees and grass it runs a bit slow on Ultra but it was to be expected on my Pc and it's I should say, normal like in most games for me. It runs best on medium but I can make it happen even on ultra. I'll be adding more options for the player to choose like terrain with "Double Lambert" (causes the material to use a harsher lighting gradient. Terrain in StarCraft II uses this setting, so for a doodad to blend seamlessly to the terrain, this setting may be necessary), grass with opaque blend instead of soft, etc, of course some visual candy will be lost in the process.
The terrain! Even as optimized as it is it slows my pc a bit on ultra because it uses a composite material with all 8 layers, unfortunately this is the best solution and replacement for sc2. Fortunately I can tune it down a bit since I loaded it with unnecessary stuff like AO and the likes of which is unneeded in terrains in general.
This has been my performance log for the moment, next time It will be even better. Guys with at least dual cores have nothing to worry about the greatest evil was the sc2 terran witch is gone now, even my friend who has a better pc than mine was amazed at the difference, worked perfectly on his pc btw, on Ultra. o.o
Commit doesn't export a bunch of textures in our tests thus far. So, we first "export" with "make dds" then export with "use mopaq paths". Yes, this confused us for a long while as well.. this also applies to previewing.
Actually I save my texture from photoshop to get the compression I want. DTX 1 is the best compression for diffuse with no alpha and specular. For textures with alpha I use DTX 5 but for saving size I use DTX 1 whenever I can. I tried the other formats but they cost too much size for better quality and it's not even noticeable.
Question of the day: How to change a doodad model with triggers to another model?
I need to know this so I can switch trees for example with billboards at a far distance from the camera. I noticed there is something called low quality model in the data editor what does that do?