MerricksDad wrote...
You mean the TXI? Yeah I know what you mean. I would personally like more information on the non-arturo procedures. Some of those, if you supply them certain variables, bog the engine down in the extreme, but for at least a few seconds, the magic they do on the texture is exactly what I want. I've looked all over the web trying to figure out exactly the mechanics behind them, but I've got nothing but poking and prodding.
A note about the proceduretypes and why I never got around to writing the Big Book of TXI's. The second of the two reasons might be a novel viewpoint but my testing bore it out:
First, it was very, very difficult to get a handle on how things worked and even what things actually worked. I found I was flying blind, even with a debugger. A testing session involved starting the toolset up 50+ times with different settings just to see if you could happen on something interesting or find the right combo.
The
second reason was that after being able to reproduce all the proceduretypes with the possible exception of wave (?), I took a breather and thought about all the stuff I'd seen (water, live, perlin, arturo, cycle)...and came to the conclusion that in most cases it was easier and far more efficient to simply prebake the distortion (or whatever) I wanted into an animated sprite sheet and then use a plain old proceduretype cycle to display the
pre-baked frames. Yes, you eat it on the file size of the image but if your animated texture is part of a static placeable you eat the extra loading time
only on level load and they're never unloaded until the level changes. The upside is if you have a good effect
generator or even a
passable one, you can generate some nice looking sprite sheets to use with the method.
I had six variations on
this (each variation with a
different colored dot in the center so I could be sure they were all different) all loaded up at the same time on a 512 meg NVidia 7300 with no problems. Same for similar creations from the caustics generator (the second link, above).
The intense level of GPU work required to do some of these distortion proceduretypes made the ones that did work only good for special cases, whereas a proceduretype cycle was much more flexible and
a hell of a lot faster.
Not saying proceduretype cycle is always better but my interest in the other types dropped considerably when I saw how their performance compared to cycle, especially when the fps on the cycle was tuned down to something reasonable.
EDIT: BTW, that "bigfire" sprite sheet has an alpha channel but it doesn't necessarily 'need' to have it. That was just to pad the image date to make each instance as 'fat' as possible. I was doing tests about how much gfx data NWN could seemingly push into an otherwise-capable (memory-wise) graphics card. Never hit a wall on that.
Modifié par OldTimeRadio, 17 mai 2013 - 09:34 .
