Frame rates and Color Q's - Requesting some optimising tips

[Oroboros]

Hey all,

Just looking for some general speed and efficiency tips for map making.

1) Water

Having water in a map decreases frame rate on screen. Is this proportional to the amount of water on the map, the amount of water the player's camera is looking at, or some other combo?

2) Color indexing

I'm not sure if there's a maximum of 240 or 256 colors allowed for the terrain, units, pre-game screen, models and/or pregame journal entries. Nor am I sure if the entire map has to adhere to one palette, or if each component can use different palettes. Can someone clarify?

-Oro

[iron]

1) The amount of water the player's camera is looking at, though it comes down a lot to how good the graphics card is. Lots of models on the screen will create more of an fps hit than water.

2) 240 for colormaps. All others use 256, however...

the 1st color in the colortable is the background color.

the 3rd color is used for transparency. For your average unit/interface graphic/whatever its best if you ensure the 3rd color isn't actually used in the picture, thus avoiding unsightly holes in-game.

Each collection has its own palette. As all graphics for a unit are in one collection, all the sprites for that unit must therefore be indexed to one palette. But a different unit can have a totally different palette, ditto scenery and model textures etc.

For pregames, there's the solo pics and the multiplayer pregame. As they must all be in the one collection they must share the same palette.

[Oroboros]

Cheers, Iron.

Begs more questions, however...

Color table for terrain: 240 colors. Does that also mean color 1 is background, color 3 is transparency? So effectively 238 colors?

What's a 'background' color? What does it do?

What does the second color do???

-Oro

[iron]

for colormaps, just index to 240 colors. Doesn't matter what order the table is in. I believe myth uses the other 16 colors for mesh scarring, blood stains etc.

The background color is the color surrounding the sprite, typically blue. The 2nd color can be used by your image - just don't export extractor plates from Amber as the boundary lines use color 2.

[mauglir]

240 is not a hard limit. Badlands routinely indexed their cmaps to 242 or 243 colors and things worked fine. I think it just means there will be a fewer colors for blood and other mesh stains. Now, whether the extra two or three colors really makes a difference to your cmap, or not, remains questionable.

My recommendation is to just index to 240 colors, like Iron said.



Edited By mauglir on 1106602179

[ozone]

It would be nice to know what the exact colors myth adds to cmaps. This way you could include them in your cmap, meaning you could index to 256....hmmmm?

[William Wallet]

I did try a different index of 240 colours for each submesh of course, just to fool Loathing. It didn't work. It'd be a nice way to do things though wouldn't it?

[Graydon]

I never index to 240. I go 245.. quite honestly, I can get away with 11 colours for mesh stains etc.. especially since most mesh stains are just variations of greys, to a max of about 8 greys per stain... that still leaves room for your blood. And believe it or not, the extra 5 colours I use in indexing can really be the deciding factor in OMFG smooth, and bleh... 00gly. Experiment. You could even get away with 250 if you dindt plan on having any other stains beside dorf bottles etc... but you might notice some discolouration in your stains. GL