Quote:
Originally Posted by privateer
Seems you have the concept down Mate.
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I am glad to hear it, and always grateful to you for having put us in the right direction
Maybe I have found yet another application for this brilliant concept. As you know, stock SHIII, IV and 5's ship cargo meshes are modelled as an entire block of crates, barrels, etc. rather that being composed by individual elements. The zone that their damage box is assigned to, is set as 'not destructible', but as soon as as you switch it to 'destructible' the trick becomes evident. Well, during a test carried out with Rongel's help, we were able to put aboard the ships of a whole convoy some custom made cargo models, each one composed by 60 iterations of the same barrel mesh. No stuttering was reported until Rongel made the barrels to explode. Due to the way I set their zone, the first damaged barrels started a chain reaction, and the huge explosion which followed caused severe lagging (Rongel, correct me if I am wrong).
The main cause of the lagging was probably the triggering of 80 explosion effects, or rather than the physical animation of so many individual objects at once, or both. I any case I have already thought of a workaround for avoiding this and, most important, the whlole test had demosntrated the validity of the concept you have pointed us to
Quote:
Originally Posted by Targor Avelany
@gap and privateer:
Understood the concept. Thank for very good explanation. I assumed that something along those lines should exist, as it is basic concepts of inheritance and child objects.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by privateer
Considering the comment in regard to limitations that we currently have with the gr2 files for every model hat we will be working on we will need to decide if we should be doing it dat or gr2 files based on what exactly we are looking from it: animations, ability to link/child it out, add properties.
We currently can do a lot with dats, but I'm still not sure how well the interlacing the dat and gr2 files could be. I know TDW, for example, was able to merge dat animated file on a gr2 model: his flag mod. So far in my attempts I was it able to achieve even that. And that is a simple repetitive animation.
But now I'm just thinking aloud. A little rumble. 
Will continue working on the balloon tomorrow |
This is the work plan I am suggesting:
I think we should keep the GR2 model you are currently working on as air unit, for usage as land based balloon. This will have a couple of important advantages:
- Ability to use multi textures on the same model through cfg file settings, which we would loose if we made the balloon body external from the main unit file. Just make sure to use the cfg#TXR tag on balloon's main material, for letting us to set different roundels (or no roundel) throughout the campaign.
- Ability to assign a LOD model to it, likewise other GR2 units (and unlike dat units). This is going to be especially useful where many balloons are gathered in a coastal area, reducing performance hit. On this topic, we should check if there is any special extended property that we must set properly for the LOD model to be shown at the wanted distance.
As for shipborne balloons, imo we should import them into a dat file for maximum compatibility with dat ships, and set them similarly to carrier's planes. Some remearks:
- Maybe it is better if we use directly the lod version meshes on data balloons (I think I have sent them to you already).
- We can make them more nice by giving them some swinging effects, and for completeness we could add to their meshes a simple winch model. Some of the pictures displayed in the websites I have linked on OH's thread show those winches.
- The lenght of shipborne balloon suspension cables should be a lot shorter than for land based balloons. I don't remember exactly their usual operation altitude, but again the websites I have used as sources have all the information we need.
- If needed, the "privateer concept" is a cheap way to model more than one shipborne balloon, each with different height and texture. This would be done by combining a single balloon body mesh (with different diffuse textures mapped on) and 2-3 cable meshes of different lenghts, everything packed in one file
- The smaller balloon model used on sea-going vessels (the one manned aboard by D-Day landing crafts) would be a nice addition, but we can let it for a future expansion of the mod.
That's all for now. What do you think?
