kmead Posted January 1, 2002 Share Posted January 1, 2002 Dan, I know you are tremendously busy creating all the textures/skins for the all the fine multi-faceted vehicle models for CMBB. I have a question that I suspect it would be easy to answer. The increased number of surfaces you are covering with those presumeably higher resolution textures on each surface, requires a higher level of hardware to display all of your magnificent work. I am one of those pitiful souls with a mangy iMac or two that suffer the heartbreak of non-upgradeable video ram (6mb for the one and 8mb for the other). Sadly with the deplorable state of the furniture industry I work in I will not be buying that sweet G4 or some other fine product to replace my plebean computers. Which brings me to my question: If I were to buy CMBB and then duplicate all of the textures, then using a Photochop action reduce the size of the textures to one half or even one quarter (from 512 x 512 to 256 x 256) of their original size will they still map to the models correctly and run the software in a decent sized window on my miserable machines (all right the better of the two)? Would there be any possibility of there being room on the original CD to allow it to come with those scaled textures as standard (and therefore with two options for the install, lores and hires)? Or lacking that would a list of the ranges of texture names that should be adjusted be available to permit us to quickly make the changes when we receive our prized CDs? Thanks in advance for your answers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kwazydog Posted January 1, 2002 Share Posted January 1, 2002 Hi Kmead, Charles has just recently coded CMBB to downsample textures to fit neatly into cards with lower VRAM limits. It does a good job of this, with the differences between textures when downsampled 1 level being very hard to notice. This means that CMBB should run fine on your system without having to use system RAM to store textures and without you having to manually downsize textures. Of course they wont look like they do on a 32mb or 64mb card. Incidently, CMBO didnt do this as we designed our origional textures to fit with the smaller cards of the time, which is why people will notice slow downs if they load so many high res textures they max out their cards VRAM. If anyone has noticed slowdown as they have installed more and more high res textures, this will be why... Dan Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pzman Posted January 1, 2002 Share Posted January 1, 2002 Does that mean that my 16mb video card will have to use the lower ress settings of CMBB? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kwazydog Posted January 1, 2002 Share Posted January 1, 2002 No exactly Rob, What it means is that a 16mb card will automatically downsample the textures so they will all fit into its VRAM. If it doesnt do this, then it would have to use your systems RAM for textures, something which can slow your frame rate down dramatically. Yes, the quality of the textures on a 16mb card will look slightly less than those on a 32mb card, but the trade off is that frame rate will higher than it otherwise would have been. Dan Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pzman Posted January 1, 2002 Share Posted January 1, 2002 Ok thanks for clearing that up. :cool: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jeffsmith Posted January 1, 2002 Share Posted January 1, 2002 What a Company New Years Eve and they answer pre-production technical questions Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Redwolf Posted January 1, 2002 Share Posted January 1, 2002 But do we get an option to turn that automatism off? For some uses, I don't mind a heavy slowdown, e.g. for screenshots. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kmead Posted January 1, 2002 Author Share Posted January 1, 2002 Many thanks for the speedy answer! As usual you guys have managed to think through even minor issues (well major to me) to make your customers experience great. Thanks again for taking the time and this is one for the FAQ for CMBB I would imagine. Heres to a happy new year! :thumbup: :beer: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kwazydog Posted January 1, 2002 Share Posted January 1, 2002 Hehe, indeed, shouldnt you guys be out celebrating or something Redwolf, currently the process is automatic depending on available VRAM, but I will ask Charles about the possability of having a toggle for this feature... Dan Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jeffsmith Posted January 1, 2002 Share Posted January 1, 2002 <blockquote>quote:</font><hr>Originally posted by KwazyDog: Hehe, indeed, shouldnt you guys be out celebrating or something Dan<hr></blockquote> New Years should be celebrated with those who mean the most to you.... My daughter and the CM Board (My Wife is working an overnight as a couselor) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Måkjager Posted January 1, 2002 Share Posted January 1, 2002 Karl...there is always those as "requested mods" Måkjager never forgets a bud regards Måkjager/...slightly drunk from tooooo many beersssss wirh me Daaaaaaa Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tuomas Posted January 2, 2002 Share Posted January 2, 2002 Maybe there is a workaround to this VRAM thing. Every damagelevel could have a .bmp number adressed to it, but unless the bmp would be found the game would use the stock bmp (the undamaged one). Same solution could be used for helmets so that every nation had their own bmp for their national helmet but they would use stock geman or stock russian helmet depending on the side. Besides I don't think you usually have many nationalities on the same side. If you would program the game this way we atleast should have much room for improvements when our computers get better. I don't know how easy or hard this would be to implement, but judgigng from CMBO it should be doable because atleast the winter bmps were added this way. And BTW. is VRAM a suchs limiting factor after all? I think nowadays AGP display cards use computers RAM to store these textures. I don't know about macs though. -TNT- Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Porajkl Posted January 2, 2002 Share Posted January 2, 2002 Hello Kwazy! Now that we are talking about graphics, I'm wondering if the sky will be more than 8-bit? Now it gets not-so-pretty in that 256 colors... Thanks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kirill S. Posted January 2, 2002 Share Posted January 2, 2002 is there going to be an option to measure the framerate? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Schrullenhaft Posted January 3, 2002 Share Posted January 3, 2002 Tuomas - AGP texture storage in main memory is very slow compared to on-board video memory. It's possible that BTS will put the hooks in for several things to allow for numerous additional bitmaps, but with certain VRAM memory sizes there may be very large slow downs as textures are called from the AGP memory pool in main memory. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
antaresqc Posted January 3, 2002 Share Posted January 3, 2002 hello everyone and hello kwazydog ! I have a question for you.. I have a 800mhz Duron with 256 megs of memory and a GForce 2MX graphic card with 32 megs and when I play VERY-large scenarios and smoke start popping everywhere I notice a very heavy slow-down.. of course i've downloaded all those pretty mods with high resolutions for almost everything on the battlefield.. the way you explain how CMBB works.. does it mean that we'll get the same graphic quality without the slowdown ? Thank you Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Schrullenhaft Posted January 3, 2002 Share Posted January 3, 2002 I can't answer directly for Dan (KwazyDog), but smoke uses transparencies, which can slow down video cards quite a bit when a lot of it used on screen. CMBB is probably going to be a bit slower on the same hardware than CMBO (using the default textures). A bit more texture management code has been added into CMBB that CMBO didn't have, which is designed to primarily benefit those players whose cards have less than 32Mb. I don't know if the code will start down-sampling textures if there are a lot of textures called up for a game (a large map, with doodads and a large variety of AFVs, etc.) that might exceed a 32Mb card's VRAM. Dan and/or Charles will know the answer to that. If you use a lot of high-res (or almost exclusively high-res) textures, then your currently moded CMBO may perform the same as CMBB with default textures. I believe almost every texture in CMBB is higher res than the corresponding texture in CMBO. Whether they're as high-res as your mods I don't know. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tuomas Posted January 3, 2002 Share Posted January 3, 2002 <blockquote>quote:</font><hr>Originally posted by Schrullenhaft: Tuomas - AGP texture storage in main memory is very slow compared to on-board video memory.<hr></blockquote> Yes I understood that when I re-read Dan's original post. <blockquote>quote:</font><hr>It's possible that BTS will put the hooks in for several things to allow for numerous additional bitmaps, but with certain VRAM memory sizes there may be very large slow downs as textures are called from the AGP memory pool in main memory.<hr></blockquote> Screen resolution also affects available memory for textures, right? For example if I play 1600*1200*32 I have 32 MB-7,5 MB=24,5 MB left for textures or if I play at 1024*768*16 I have 32 MB-2 MB=30 MB. Are you saying that CMBB will automatically detect available texture memory? -TNT- [ 01-03-2002: Message edited by: Tuomas ]</p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Schrullenhaft Posted January 3, 2002 Share Posted January 3, 2002 I believe that is what it will have to do in order for the texture down-sampling to be effective. Otherwise, as you point out, someone may be using a high resolution and have less than some pre-assumed amout of VRAM for texture storage. They would then start suffering from 'AGP Texture swapping' over the AGP/Memory bus. I don't know if there is a DirectX call for finding out available texture memory or if this is something that may be dependent on the video driver (or more likely the video driver's support for a certain DirectX call). As far as I'm aware it will have to be done within the info that DirectX provides (on the PC, I'm not sure what infot the RAVE API provides on the Mac). Another issue for VRAM availability other than just the memory consumed by the 2D screen resolution is the storage of vertices and other buffer functions since the video card is also manipulating the polygons that the textures map to, leaving even less memory for the textures. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SpazManOught Posted January 23, 2002 Share Posted January 23, 2002 Its a call to the driver. Had a problem years ago with some game getting the wrong memory size for my card, making the game look crappy, can't remember offhand what it was but it was sorted with a driver update. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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