Warzone 2100 Forums

  Retaliation - 160 polys. Now working on Cobra.

  Attachment: New Retaliation body .3DS.

for those of us that want to follow the progress and dont have 5000$ to spend on 3ds.. please post screanshots of your work??
photobucket.com is a great place for a free account to post forum screens for use.

DFStormbringer wrote: for those of us that want to follow the progress and dont have 5000$ to spend on 3ds.. please post screanshots of your work??
photobucket.com is a great place for a free account to post forum screens for use.

blender can import 3ds files

  I'll post screenshots, alright. But it hasn't textures yet. I'll just assign materials from autocad for it not to hurt your eyes  ;D

Bug, Viper and Cobra, from left to right.
I'll post Leopard, Retaliation & Scorpion in the next ^^

  Cobra is now finished (reduced the polygons from the screenshot point) with 120 polys.
  I also forgot to mention that my .3DS models show no glass, as I'm not already creating textures for them, and adding smooth shaped glasses (like on screenshot's bug and viper) as additional solids would augment polygons in a useless way. I'm just remodelling the vehicles in ways the player would see them (like, I'm not adding smooth shapes to under the bodies, as there's no point in that, and would raise poly count the same way as adding solid glasses).

  Attachment: New Cobra .3DS.

Now working on Scorpion.

  Scorpion is finished at 118 polys. Now going to Panther.

  Attachment: New Scorpion .3DS.

That doesn't make sense, because the problem of Waruzone 2100 that it doesn't have Gouraud Shading and fills the surface only with unfiltered textures. Thats why it will never look so good in wz2100.

  For me the fact that 30 polys looks better than 10 polys makes sense. That's why I'm posting those files.
  Also, I think Warzone 2100 can compete with great titles of RTS, in popularity. I'm helping the way I can, in the case I'm sending Models to the dev team to decide wether they will be of any good or not. Sorry if this makes you mad, but I am waiting for replies from the dev team: a single "stop" or "continue" would be enough for me.

  And, alright, it will never look so good in WZ2100, but it could look better. And let me make myself clear that any texture on the screenshots I post here is merely illustrative.

  I've finished Panther at 64 polys. Have anyone of the dev team looked into my models? Well, I will wait for replies for starting Retribution.

  Attachment: New Panther .3DS.

Olrox wrote:   For me the fact that 30 polys looks better than 10 polys makes sense. That's why I'm posting those files.
  Also, I think Warzone 2100 can compete with great titles of RTS, in popularity.

just so you know ive seen a couple posts state that because of the early years this game was compiled that the program code generates 90% of its graphics from the CPU and not the GPU..
meaning ALOT of things that are in todays games.. bumpmapping.. real time lighting.. active deformation of meshes.. gourad shading.. several levels of texture filtering and antialaising.. are impossible without redoing the code on a large scale if not starting from scratch..

it leaves me to wonder.. if the games internal code is left to deal wiht the graphics.. will raising the polys of each unit by a factor of 10 cause that much more stress on he games code to the point that the hard time it has compiling pathfinding be made only that much more worse?

dont get me wrong im all for a beautifful warzone.. the thought of having the camera in low follow mode.. PITCH black out.. forget fog of war.. NIGHTTIME missions.. only able to see a bit ahead of the units .. as far as their tiny lil headlights will iluminate... crossing a filed to suddny find yourself bumper to bumper with an enemy squad..  the muzzle flash of the cannons blowing out the tide bore holes as the shell is propelled foreward  causing a mightly explosion to erupt from the enemy as bits of the armor is blasted off the enemy tank.. more sparks are seen as MG fire bounce off everything.. causing momentary glows of the night as the tracer rounds rip through the night..

but.. i just dont think that WZ in its current state.. can handle all its possible potential.

Grim (you may have seen his gfx pack) just recently said that WZ's gfx engine is not yet at its limits.
But esp. when creating models, you have to take care about a few things.
So I guess before you continue, you talk to him to see if he can give you some tips. He's been into modeling and texturing Warzone (but not solely) for years, so I guess there are some things one could learn from him.
Olrox: You can usually meet him on IRC, US timezone.

DFStormbringer wrote: just so you know ive seen a couple posts state that because of the early years this game was compiled that the program code generates 90% of its graphics from the CPU and not the GPU..
meaning ALOT of things that are in todays games.. bumpmapping.. real time lighting.. active deformation of meshes.. gourad shading.. several levels of texture filtering and antialaising.. are impossible without redoing the code on a large scale if not starting from scratch..

it leaves me to wonder.. if the games internal code is left to deal wiht the graphics.. will raising the polys of each unit by a factor of 10 cause that much more stress on he games code to the point that the hard time it has compiling pathfinding be made only that much more worse?

Did you actually look at the code ?? And no large portions of Warzone's graphics are _not_ handled by the CPU; very large portions are handled by the GPU. Yes warzone is currently more CPU intensive than it is GPU intensive but this can be changed *without* starting from scratch. As for anti-aliasing it is handled quite perfectly already by the GPU (you just need to tell your GPU's driver that it should apply anti-aliasing). Then as for some of those features you mentioned "bumpmapping", "active deformation of meshes"; why would you even want that ? Especially bumpmapping seems rather useless to me for objects that averagely take up somewhere between 20x20 and 60x60 pixels of your screen.

DFStormbringer wrote: dont get me wrong im all for a beautifful warzone.. the thought of having the camera in low follow mode.. PITCH black out.. forget fog of war.. NIGHTTIME missions.. only able to see a bit ahead of the units .. as far as their tiny lil headlights will iluminate... crossing a filed to suddny find yourself bumper to bumper with an enemy squad..  the muzzle flash of the cannons blowing out the tide bore holes as the shell is propelled foreward  causing a mightly explosion to erupt from the enemy as bits of the armor is blasted off the enemy tank.. more sparks are seen as MG fire bounce off everything.. causing momentary glows of the night as the tracer rounds rip through the night..

but.. i just dont think that WZ in its current state.. can handle all its possible potential.

Again; what do you base this conclusion off? Is it just pure pessimism or ? As for that scene you described above; sounds more like an RPG or FPS scene to me, you won't find that high level of detail (as you described) in Supreme Commander either.

just so you know ive seen a couple posts state that because of the early years this game was compiled that the program code generates 90% of its graphics from the CPU and not the GPU..
meaning ALOT of things that are in todays games.. bumpmapping.. real time lighting.. active deformation of meshes.. gourad shading.. several levels of texture filtering and antialaising.. are impossible without redoing the code on a large scale if not starting from scratch..

no making wz to take advantage of those fancy features is not hard,but we cannot simply assume everyone has a super card that is capable of handling all those features elegantly.And the texture flitering/antaliasing can be forced by driver settings i think.imo the majority of warzone players are definitely not the ones with geeky rigs/the ones judge a book by its cover,otherwise they would probably go playing some big titles rather than playing a game that is 8 YO or so.Just my 2 cents,and I could be biased.  ;D

it leaves me to wonder.. if the games internal code is left to deal with the graphics.. will raising the polys of each unit by a factor of 10 cause that much more stress on he games code to the point that the hard time it has compiling pathfinding be made only that much more worse?

the pathfinding has little to do with the graphics,currently most of the graphics works are done by opengl,they are accelerated by hardware unless you are running soft implementation of opengl or running opengl in software mode.

dont get me wrong im all for a beautiful warzone.. the thought of having the camera in low follow mode.. PITCH black out.. forget fog of war.. NIGHTTIME missions.. only able to see a bit ahead of the units .. as far as their tiny lil headlights will illuminate... crossing a field to suddenly find yourself bumper to bumper with an enemy squad..  the muzzle flash of the cannons blowing out the tide bore holes as the shell is propelled forward  causing a mighty explosion to erupt from the enemy as bits of the armor is blasted off the enemy tank.. more sparks are seen as MG fire bounce off everything.. causing momentary glows of the night as the tracer rounds rip through the night..

but.. i just dont think that WZ in its current state.. can handle all its possible potential.

From warzone's perspectival view,most of these little details are barely noticeable even if they are implemented,warzone already has a decent particle system,though the most noticeable/successful example of wz particle is probably the fireworks

discarding armor is easy,just create some random darkened debris objects with random direction when certain tank is hit by certain weapon.

mg bounce is possible too,but with the size of warzone's units/mg 'bullet',it will not be as impressive as those in fps games.

real-time light sources are performance killer,though you can make some fake light by appending some transparent texture to the rocket trail or whatever as long as you dont need them to illuminate other objects/terrain.

most of the eye candy stuff you mentioned are more code-wise than graphic-wise though

wz is not very cpu intensive,it seems so because most of the time is wasted on waiting for gl functions to finish,also redundant gl calls will increase cpu usage significantly.