New tool I am working on, feedback wanted [message #473286] |
Sun, 19 August 2012 23:17 |
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Renegade supports a feature called "alternate materials". That is, when a building is killed (or when it goes low power), the materials on its meshes get changed. This can mean changes to such things as vertex materials, shaders, textures and texture coordinates.
This feature was originally created for use by the Westwood light-mapping system (so as to change the lightmaps over to "dead" ones when the building is killed/low power and as far as I can tell is not supported by the w3d export plugin at all.
I am the process of writing a tool that will let you make use of this feature for your own maps. (and before anyone says otherwise, no, using tiles for your building exteriors and interiors rather than terrain is not the answer, it uses more RAM, GPU, CPU etc)
The current thinking of how this would work is that you would produce your mesh with the texturing/materials/etc for the normal state and export it. Then you would change the materials without changing the geometry (there would be details available of whats safe to change and whats not) to create the "dead" state and export that. Then you would take both w3d files and run them through a tool that would combine both w3d files into one w3d file.
Does anyone have any comments on this idea? Does anyone have any suggestions for a better way to do this? Or a way to make it easier for the modelers?
Jonathan Wilson aka Jonwil
Creator and Lead Coder of the Custom scripts.dll
Renegade Engine Guru
Creator and Lead Coder of TT.DLL
Official member of Tiberian Technologies
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