NWN_baba yaga wrote...
very interesting thought. I wonder why bio never used it from the get go so the whole game would have been much larger in scale;)
Primarily because you are actually LOSING space for detail, by converting that space to distance between things. If you make a photograph using a micro-dot camera, sure the data is there, but you can't see it without englaring the view anyway, and by having that much more so called detail, you are crapping all over the ability of the game to move fairly quickly. (I am not even talking about running).
IE, you have a scaled down PC, he has this wonderfully designed WWF style champions belt around his waste, but you can't see it in game. So, complete waste of effort on the artist side for the design and texture work, and a huge lag inducing mess for an old engine.
As far as base texture sizes go, 2048x2048 is typically wasted in most pre-2010 games, much more so in a zoomed out view in such a scaled down version. Most 2048 textures are just huge duplicated fairly flat, boring, things. Going 2048 for an entire creature's texture can make sense, but since the game already breaks that creature into multiple pieces each assigned it's own texture OR a UVW mapped section of the same texture, the engine completely re-loads the full texture each time is has to grab a piece of it, overlaping the same memory space so no extra memory loss, but it is typicaly a waste to go 2048x2048 anyway unless you are mapping onto a very large object.
I know, I know, I typically sound like a nay-sayer to these sorts of ideas. Folks put silly counter arguments abouit win98 only requiring 1mb, but that is ludicrous, most specifically because we are not truly discussing the OS, but the way this game was designed. It can, does, will, use up to 640, beyond that, it pages ram in/out. Where if the Aurora engine had been written in/for a true multi-threaded OS, it could and would use however much ram you provide.
The game also has limitations in what it will offload to the GPU. It just doesn't use the newer systems to even a 10th of their possible power. It was coded as a 16bit app, with vid cards typically only having 128mb of ram at the time, or a max of 256. Why? The OS, remember we are talking win98?,only recognizes something on the order of 968 meg of total ram space, it reserved either 16 or 64 meg (can't remember) for bios functions, and reserved everything above 640 for other purposes, only part of which was ram space for a vid card. It doesn't matter what OS your PC or Mac is using, the app is 16 bit, with all of a 16 bit apps limitations. There is no way around that.
All you have to do is have a util running that shows proper core usage rates... then watch whatever core on your multi-cored processor, that you have assigned NWN to run under... it takes FULL control of that core, pages in and pages out sections of ram continuously. If you also have a util to watch the vid card gpu usage you will find that it seldom even reaches 50% usage, and ram usage for the gpu doesn't really matter all that much because the gpu can pre-cache all it wants to pre-cache, but NWN reloads and overwrites it continuosly regardless.
There is no economy of scale here. In fact, you are running a very high risk of overloading the engine to the point that it crashes because it just can't clean up after itself well enough.
Gawd, I wish it were otherwise, you have no idea how much I wish it were otherwise, But you can't get an ostrich egg to hatch an elephant, even if you have an incubator and some guy claiming his bird nest will allow gene enrichment. You can take a magnifying glass and hold tiny paintbrush to create a fully detailed map of the united states on something the size of a dime, but when you reach 50, your eyes go and you can't see the darned thing anyway.
Again, I am NOT knocking you guys for the ideas/thoughts etc, but you have to realize that this old engine just can't handle what you want to acomplish. If we had the ability to truely re-write the code, ie if Bioware were to release the code, we might stand a chance. Injection modding the way nwnx works can improve some features, but it still can not make a 16 bit app work like a multi-threaded 32/64 bit app. Nwnx folks have tried for years to improve the memory limits, but it is just not possible without having the real engine code and the ability to completely re-compile that engine. Overlaying something on top still leaves the limits in place in 99% of the cases. Besides, if we were to get an option to add a new feature, I would want multi-Z-level access/usage.
Ok, I have likely bored you all to tears and overstepped the boundries here by quite a bit, but I hate to see folks waste valuable custom content creativity on attempting something that truly would have very little usage in game, meaning that time and energy could be used to create something new and exciting within the limitations of such an old game and that would be more likely to be used by more builders.
There have been many folks attempting to create a more usable map type system... something more creative and usable than what was accomplished by the Darkness Over Daggerford team. That was basically what you are attempting here, but using a different scale type of system etc...No team has ever really finished that overland map system though, and I think you will likely end up in the same sort of boat as you hit the frustrating limitations of this engine.
Shoot.... there I go again...
