Nanolathe

[Balthazar]

Well, the old topic again
Zuzuf - nanolathe should be animated using green quads, not circles. It can be sprites or quad polygones, but not circles.

You can thinks about it when you`ll have time

[zuzuf]

the nanolathe parts are sprites, look here: gfx/part.tga
you can change it, try with a square texture, and post a shot. I don't remember if there are other features that uses the same texture.

[Balthazar]

Hm... there are some kind of limitation. If I use green box as sprite with size near 1/2 of part.tga - then in game it looks really like box.

But if I use green box with size more than 1/2 of part.tga, then it looks more like circle, and if size of box = size of part.tga - it looks like 100% circle.

I wonder why, looks like because of some kind blending option. Or maybe there are spherical mask for transparency...


I`ll post some screenshots... Any suggestions?

[zuzuf]

that's strange, the particles are drawn using alpha blending, so alpha channel is important in the part.tga file. Also particle textures are stored on a same texture to avoid switching between too much textures, but this has side effects, on particle sides it can merge sides of two textures but since until now all the particle sprites sides were fully transparent, there was no problem. When you draw a box with half the size of the texture it works because of mip-mapping (which might blur a bit the particle texture when it is far from the cam)

[Balthazar]

Well, yes, I suppose it`s because of mip-mapping effect. Anyway, square particles looks pretty nice, but there are to few of them, so if you`ll set particle generation three times faster it will make very similar to TA effect.

[zuzuf]

well the problem is that currently the particle engine is too slow and it's very difficult to optimise it because it handles very complex particle behaviours like particle size variations (you can set even the second derivative!!), rotation, colors, ...

Currently I am replacing, everything using colors as GL_FLOAT with GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE which won't change graphical aspect but will reduce bandwidth requirements since we only work with 8bits color channels.

[theotherhiveking]

yeah optimization!!

[Balthazar]

In that case maybe we should use more simple particle engine ? Yes, smoke is nice, but perfomance is more important. I`m not aware well enought in particles, so it`s up to you

[zuzuf]

well you cannot imagine having all the particles of the same size ... so we can't use point sprites which would have greatly increased performances. On GLSL cards we could use that but with lots of modifications to current particle engine.

Maybe you're right we should have a much simpler particle engine. But currently it's not what is reducing performances, it's drawing features, which is very slow ...

[Balthazar]

We cannot do all at once, so there are always something, that can be done later

[AF]

A major optimization could be a second particle system running alongside that is much more lightweight with a smaller featureset.

[Balthazar]

Bingo !

[zuzuf]

good idea, that should greatly speed things up!

[Joram]

Concerning Nanolathe, I think they are too much spread across the unit, so it looks rather silly
(like if the commander was spilling nanolathe without aiming)

[Balthazar]

Well, maybe you right... Maybe we shoul reduce size of nanolathing box to 70% of original size? (0,7*width 0,7*height 0,7*depth)