Ideas - for engine improvements

[Cubic Circle]

*Monsters attacking with other tags than projectiles, such as a monster who attacks by spawning (shooting) other monsters.
*Higher resolution colour maps.
*Poison attack types, that continues to drain a set amount of vitality for a set amount of time.
*Bleeding, same as above, but blood seeps from the target at same rate.

These are just a few.

Cubic Circle

[William Wallet]

I've always liked the idea of better colourmaps. I've tried every trick under the sun to make mine more respectable - in the old days I'd even throw textures onto my shadow maps to give extra detail.

[mauglir]

High resolution color maps were considered more than once. There are a lot of reasons why this was never touched, but a big one is that the 8-bit colormaps already make for gigantic file sizes, which makes for long downloads and slow loading times before games start (this has been partially helped by some new code Myrd worked out), but 16 or 24 bit colormaps would just make that issue far worse.

High resolution color maps would really require a totally different file type than the current .bmp and .pict formats in order to resolve the size issue. But, that kind of change would mean significantly altering the graphics engine.

Then there's the issue of the other graphics in the game. It wouldn't look very cool if you had 8-bit trees sitting on a 16-bit terrain, not to mention 8-bit monsters. Sure, it'd be possible to upgrade ALL of the graphics in the game, but by the time you finished, you'd be half-way to Myth III territory, and then you may as well just go 3D for everything.

So, while it sounds like it'd be an awesome change, I don't think it'll happen. Sorry.

[iron]

its not so much the original image depth that counts here. If you're using any kind of hardware renderer, the 8 bit sprites and mesh textures are already converted to 16 bit and sized/blended by the graphics card.

The thing that makes colormaps look a bit vague is the number of pixels per mesh cell, which is fixed at (from memory) 16. If we doubled that to 32 you'd get tons more detail, however colormaps would need to be 4 times as large. There'd be a considerable slowdown in rendering, with such a huge increase in graphics being sent to the video card.

The only real way of getting better rendering appearance would be to use a wholly new engine that has detail layers ala Myth III, or even that uses textures for everything rather than a complete painted colormap like all the Myths do. By now we're talking about a new game, as there's no way in the world you could bring something like that into Myth and still keep the old rendering methods for all the existing maps.

[The Elfoid]

I'd like a higher resolution allowance in the menus. Currently, every time I start a game my resolution changes. It also means if I'm multi-tasking, I can't look at other stuff e.g. webpages outside of a 640x480 resolution. In a game, this is a lot higher.

[Graydon]

Use windowed mode. If you dont have a mac, wait for 1.5.1, then use windowed mode. Or was windowed added for windows yet? I know openGL made it in... Myrd/ Iron clarify?

[Myrd]

There is no windowed mode for Windows.

[William Wallet]

Heh.

I've learned to live with the old colourmaps anyway - you can still make some respectable stuff. If it didn't look any good they wouldn't have made Myth in the first place.

[The Elfoid]

I'd like it so that in Myth III the units don't vanish when you zoom out if there is a lot on screen. I thought I lost a fight but suddenly 18 stygs appeared...

[skrew (at work)]

id like to see a reduction in the general lag when there is alot of media on maps simply so that the maps can be played at reasonable fps for people with low end comps

[WaaMatt]

Does anyone playing Myth II still have a computer from that era? That is, 1996-1999? Mine is from the end of '99, but it's holding up quite well (400 MHz G3 iMac DVse - the first graphite one!).

As far as 16 and 24 bit, how about TIFF? PNG?

With OpenGL I'd think there'd be a way to have higher res 8-bit maps and not take a huge performance cut. Am I wrong? Too much work for something no one is getting payed for? : )