New shield system - JeromeGrasdyke?

[komninos]

Hi all,

This is just an idea if you like it please sign in.
The shields are given by only 1/4 of them in the texture map and them this is used to make the shield. This makes the creation of complex shield designs impossible. ie how can you make a Spartan Lambda or a Medusa head?

It would be good to take the shields out of the basic map in a file of there own. This is particularly good for the Hoplites and the barbarians since they painted there shield in different ways each one.
In that file there would be 9 shield textures that the game will use the 8 in random to paint the unit shields. The last one is going to be used from the back face of the shield.

If this is posible then just the shield with teh back face or just the one front face on a different file.

So JeromeGrasdyke can this be done in an update or a patch?

[Duke John]

Skinning for games is new to me too, but I don't think you should think about it that easily. The game can display 1000s of soldiers. To be able to do that you need to make compromises and that is partly done by placing the entire skin for a soldier in a single image. But it will probably be possible to make our own models (if Vercingetorix succeeds).

If so I then propose the following solution for your problem:
Make a small polygon over your shield. This polygon only contains the badge that you want to display. The shield itself is probably round so you will suffice with just making a quarter. To hopefully make it clear:

You want this:
_**
*##*
*##*
_**
This will cost you quite alot of space (surface of the characters is 12)

But you can also make the shield without badge (a quarter)
_*
**
And add that polygon and make a texture for it
##
##
This will cost you only 8 characters in total.

[JeromeGrasdyke]

Skinning for games is new to me too, but I don't think you should think about it that easily. The game can display 1000s of soldiers. To be able to do that you need to make compromises and that is partly done by placing the entire skin for a soldier in a single image. But it will probably be possible to make our own models (if Vercingetorix succeeds).

For those reasons (and a few others) this is very unlikely to be done by CA in a patch. But it looks like Vercingetorix is nearly there with his .cas tools, and with new models you can arrange the texture coordinates however you like.

But I'd give a word of warning about altering the size of the texture pages used by the soldier models. The engine will allow this (as people have probably already found out), but you can get the men to soak up more than their allowance of texture memory this way, which will cause problems with textures on other objects in the game. If you start to see objects without textures (white or grey) or objects with very blurry textures, you're hitting the physical limits on texture memory.