On the topic of changing colors, adding graphics, and the whatnot, I
recently read an interview with the games' top Graphic artist/implementor
(the name escapes me right now, sorry), and he mentioned a few very salient
points with regards to this same topic. I, like most of you, thought that
there would be no problem adding more variation to the colors and the armor
that different types of armor could have to give them more variation. Just
download the new graphic in an updated file, right? Not so simple. Sure
that would be all it took to get the new graphics out to the clients, but
you're forgetting one major problem with adding colors and variations. This
game is a 3d game, not 2d, so all the objects in the game have to be
rendered on the fly by the graphics processor and the "colors and patterns"
in the game have to be able to fit into the texture memory of the video
card. Not everyone has the newest coolest video cards with 8MB of texture
memory, or even 4MB. A lot of people still use the "old" voodoo 1 cards
with 2MB of texture memory. They wanted to release the game in a timely
manner (so they skimped a bit on the amount of variation in the colors), and
they wanted it to be playable on a large number of client machines. Yes,
the game will load up as much texture memory as you have, so they didn't put
a limit of only a maximum of 2MB of textures in the video card's memory at
once (thank god or those of us with more wouldn't see very much benefit at
all from having better graphics cards). But they wanted the game to be
playable with only 2MB of texture memory available. That's why on older
cards (voodoo 1), when more than a few people come on the screen at once,
you start to slow down, and if you go into a zone where there's a large
number of players (like a bazaar in the tunnel to north ro from east
commons, where I've seen over 200 people on occassion), you're updates crawl
as the textures are pushed out from the System RAM to the video texture RAM,
to the video processor. The more texture RAM, the better this is, but even
with that many people with all the variations they already do have in the
game, the system WILL slow down. Don't anyone tell me you haven't had your
graphics slow down, or I'll have to beat you (only kidding). Now, if you
were to add a lot more variations (such as colors of armor, and more
character variations), you'd have to lower the "side" count of the polygons
(what the textures get added to...for an example of what you sacrifice when
lowering the number of sides to a polygon, take a look at the screen shots
of Asheron's Call....the graphics aren't that swell looking to me, but you
do have a lot of variations) in order to keep the same level of performance.
Okay, I think I'll stop there as far as the technical talk goes, I'm sure I
may be losing some people. But basically, if they were to add a color,
they'd have to put in the code to have the object now re-texture-mapped (not
a very dificult process no, but it will take processor time to do it on the
fly), and the texture count would go up significantly in a crowded room.
This is also why they broke the game down to the zones like they did. At
most you have around 2 or 3 large variations in the landscape. I.E. in the
East commonlands, you have some desert and some hills. If they were to add
another region, like a lake, or an arctic region, you'd have to load all
those textures into memory, or load them from system RAM on the fly, and
that would drag the performance way down. The landscape they decided to
limit so that they could increase the number of textures available on people
so that there could be the variations that they do have. okay, now I'm
done. I think. Any questions, send them my way, and I'll try to answer as
concisely as possible. for those of you that read this far, thanks for
staying with me.
Randy, aka Arianis, monk of the 13th order, Mithaniel Marr
Randall Roslewski
randallr@...
Arizona Dept. of Transportation
Network Support Specialist II
Exchange Administrator