How many texture files can a ship have?

[Nielk1]

Can I see some example of your work? It just sounds absurdly high for something like BZ2 and good game design/modding requires you to use the smallest resolution possible while also achieving a high level of detail. If you really insist on using textures that large make sure they are well optimized and you make great use of all that space. How does BZ2 handle LOD or Culling?

MipMaps come into play now. BZ2 should pick the resolution best fit for the area of the screen being rendered.

[Commando]

I've been tempted to look into 1920x1200 monitors for a while. Hate that x1080 feels so short when getting bombed.

[NostalgicRCB]

My 22inch NEC Multisync CRT monitors have been doing 2048x1536 at 86hz since 2002. When will LCD's ever catch up far as resolution and quality? The super bright mode puts most LCD's to shame especially during gaming. I refuse to invest in anymore LCD technology except for the few I own until FED & SED monitors come back on the scene. I visited my Uncle for Christmas this year and he had a brand new Sony LCD tv. It was the first LCD that I didn't notice image tearing or had bad viewing angles and I've run the gauntlet of them every time I'm in Best Busy. Best Buy sucks for pretty much everything as far as prices but I like browsing every so often.

Anyone that says CRT's suck clearly has never had a quality one or a good understanding of the vast differences between the two technologies. LCD's have always had the illusion of being brighter and clearer because they hike up the contrast so much. Years ago someone told me about Sun CRT's that where either 48bit or 64bit but I have no idea what he was talking about. I've seen a few SUN Crt monitors in person but they were never powered up because they had a propitiatory connector.

[GSH]

I think Nvidia's G-sync -- especially if paired to a 27" IPS monitor at 120+hz will quite probably be the first reason to upgrade my Dell 2405FPW monitor I've had for 7+ years now. G-sync allows for variable framerate -- the game's -- for maximum smoothness, no longer bound to the cycling of an electron gun.

I used to have a ton of CRTs, but the power consumption (i.e. heat -- and cost, once for initial heat, once to cool things down in a Texas summer) and back-breaking moves sold me on switching to LCD. Sites like http://www.anandtech.com and http://www.techreport.com do a good job of finding the gems in the sea of options.

-- GSH

[NostalgicRCB]

Yeah my monitors are like 70 pounds each so I don't move them often. The extra heat they put out keeps my room nice and warm so its economical since the heat isn't going to waste. I'm all for giving up these relics if I can find a affordable LCD that gives me the same feeling. What made me switch back to these is the frame rates in games didn't feel the same. At high speed everything is just smoother on a CRT because of the near instant response time. Most people don't know that LCD's on computers fake the signal of a CRT to the hardware. That Gsync technology sounds promising I will have to look into it.

I use a widescreen for internet and typing but for gaming I still prefer a 4:3 aspect monitor. Anyone else feel the same? I bet I'm the minority here.

[Zero Angel]

Yeah. Your average LCD screen cant even compare to a high-end CRT when it comes to color fidelity (TN monitors cannot accurately reproduce colors, like the more expensive IPS or IPS-like monitors, which have lower refresh rates and prone to ghosting), response time (2ms for TN monitors is good however) and refresh rate (90-110hz is the norm for high-end CRTs). I used to have a good Sony CRT, it was incredibly heavy but an amazing monitor.

1.2 looks like crap on a widescreen monitor because the stretching makes everything look squished. But 1.3 looks decent on a widescreen monitor.

[jaydenbz2]

WORDS OF WISDOM:

Think about the object:
-How much screen space will it take up? A unit can take up like 75% of the screen so viewing it that close you'd need a good amount of detail.
-So if the object is a small rock or a mine maybe a tiling texture will do...or a very small (64px) texture...saying that having one texture for many types of mines and small related things (an atlas of sorts) will be quite efficient, so you'd plan out all the mines, bombs, cannons etc and have them uv'ed and textured to one texture.

AS FOR TILING TEXTURES such as treads and any other tileable textures you should take advantage of them.
(Having 3 tracked vehicles saves time texturing when you use one tileable track texture, maybe faction specific...)

An object can support hundreds of textures iirc, in the 3d program (e.g 3ds max, maya, Softimage) just add them as separate materials.

Make LARGE TEXTURES first then scale down!!!

You can always scale down large, HI-RES textures to conserve memory, increase frame rate and overall memory usage, doing this will help people with slow computers or allow you to make larger, more complicated scenes with less lag.!!!

e.g 2048*2048 >> 1024*1024

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Have fun!! In the zone, got any questions just PM me:)

[NostalgicRCB]

Scaling down large textures doesn't always have best effect because you lose a lot of information when shrinking down the image. I do this a lot myself so I understand what you're getting at but designing good low resolutions textures at 512x512 or less is becoming a lost art in anything but the indie scene. Blood, Heretic, and Hexen always come to mind when I think about oldschool textures. I love those classics corridor shooters. Something you also need to consider is that most consumer 3d cards have a limit of what size texture they can wrap around a 3d mesh. If you have a workstation card this may be less of a issue.

One game I can think of that hasn't aged so well is the original Donkey Kong on the Snes. It looked amazing back in the day but now those 3d scaled sprites not so great compared to real pixel art. This brings me to another point is that LCD monitors can only display the amount of pixels that their native resolution supports. Anything higher or lower it doubles the size of the pixels or scales them to compensate. This is one area that CRT still prove superior is the fact they can actually support different resolutions (especially low ones) without looking like crap.

[jaydenbz2]

I understand the oldschool textures, it's called handpainting, low res textures are easy to handpaint and look good since there is less space to work with.

Making a large texture is good and rescaling works fine...TESTED.