Prydon Modelling

[Chillo]

Ithael trying on some of the helmets...




I hallowed out the eyes in the helmets, to add more detail.

[Urre]

Awesome! Now animate them too, so someone *cough* can add support for visible helmets! It'd be awesome with armors too. Boots could be a bit overboard. Helmets and armors, yes, that's cool...

[Chillo]

[Rodinius]

[FrikaC]

[Urre]

I'm all for anything that works! I like the idea of making it a skin, and adding shoulder pads as a separate entity following ithael around (just like the helmet, weapon and shield). Other than that you could make a separate model using the armor instead, and when you equip the armor the model gets entirely replaced. On the other hand I wouldn't recommend that if you want to save resources to some extent, but seeing as your skins seem to be so insanely large anyway I don't think it'd matter and/or be a point of interest. I'd personally be interested in seeing better use of skinmap area and smaller skins.

Why's that? Well, it works like this (someone correct me if I'm way off here): Quakes palette allows only 256 colors, meaning small files (hooray), but once an OpenGL driven engine (like prydon's official multiplayer client DarkPlaces) loads the file, it needs to convert it to full 24 bit color in memory, meaning that you can get an absolutely ridiculous memory usage if you have large skins on your models. It's just like having the same skin, but as an 24 bit TGA. Try converting one of your skins to that, and see how big it is (uncompressed TGA). Now consider the fact that you have like, what, 8 skins on Ithael alone, along with very many weapons. That could bring any computer down and crying. And now we're not even considering the map models, monsters, npc's and map textures.

Am I wrong?

Then, beyond that, OpenGL engines convert images to powers of two, meaning a skin that's for example 200x800 would be converted to 256x1024 (I think) ingame, making an even larger skin you originally designed (and the stretching can sometimes create minor artefacts in the end result), so it's all lost if you don't use powers of two. I'd personally suggest dropping the dosquake support and using skins the size of 256x256, 256x512 and 512x512 and certainly smaller too if it's a small object (like most of the weapons), but most preferrably not larger skins than that.

[Error]

[Urre]

Error: maybe not, but most games don't have as many objects loaded at once as an RPG game without dynamic loading/unloading (darkplaces supports dynamic loading, but not unloading), they only have their set of say 10 weapons, 3-7 character models, and the map. Many games even have a lot fewer character models loaded at once. An RPG (ish) such as prydon has all these, plus loads of items, and due to the way Quake works, they're all loaded at once, and kept in memory.

It might be fine, I'm actually not sure, I'd like to hear other views. As it seems right now, we're dropping old-quake support, and only doing the newer engines thing, which I personally am fine with. With this, one can expect more powerful computers than what it took to run Quake, I just want to know where the line goes.

[LordHavoc]

[Urre]

That's cool stuff.

Chillo: wanna share with us what your r_texturestats say in DP when playing with your new models?

[Urre]

I hope I'm not killing the thread with negative critique (spelling?) . It's all good Chillo, keep up the great work!

FrikaC: you have any time anymore with your old (yet awesome) hobby projects, now that you got that cool job and all? We want more prydon!

[CocoT]

Chillo : Awesome!

[Madfox]

[Madfox]

[Chillo]

I haven't posted in a while, but don't worry. I'm still around and I'm still modelling for prydon. I'm on vacation and i don't have the best access of internet i had back home, but i packed my CPU with me and i'm using it where I'm currently staying. the only problem is, the CPU isn't hooked up to the internet. I'm using one of my relative's computers, because it is at least hooked up to the internet. But, once I get home, I'll have a lot of pics to show you of models in progress.