Religious communism

[Stazi]

For the last few days I've been testing usability of 1024x1024 textures for units. The goal is to avoid the hardcoded limit of units' folders and place more units in one texture. It works flawlessly but they are some exceptions.

As we know, grid is always 256x256. When I put an original 512x512 unit texture into a new 1024x1024 (I was aiming for 4 units in one texture) I have to reduce the frames' rectangles by half. It makes a unit appear in game half of its original size. To counter this I tried to use SCALE parameter in unit_prod file. The problem is the max value of it is 225. Default value for cavalry units is 138. It means than even if we use the max 225 value a unit is still about 40% too small. There are two solutions to this:

- the 1st is reducing the scale of all units and buildings in game. It's easy for units but it may cause some problems with 3D buildings. I haven't tested this much but if it wouldn't cause too much trouble, as a side effect it makes battle maps virtually bigger with more room for tactical manoeuvres. With this method we can place 4 high-res (512x512) units in one texture file.
Hmm.. I'm curious how the scale works with siege engines... tests, more tests needed.
EDIT
Rescaling all buildings is not a feasible option cause it needs repositioning of all buildings on all battle maps. A LOT of unnecessary work.

- the 2nd is to increase the size of new units by about 50% (not 40% to still have some room for scale manipulating). It makes units look 2 times more detailed (512x512 to 768x768) but reduces the number of units we can place in one file. Generally, with increased unit size, we can have 2 standard units or 3 mounts (as their animations are a lot simpler).

Concerning the mounts. Some of them has special hardcoded features (e.g. armored horses). I think all new mounts that use the same hardcoded texture/folder will keep those features but it's a little hard to test (the same should work for special elite units that use FacShield folder). If you know any sure method to test it let me know. Any other ideas, shoot.