Some Interesting Things We Found Out During FLF 1.5's Development Part #1 In the course of developing Front Line Force 1.5 we (the 2 coders, omega and I) hit upon some stumbling blocks which I thought I would post (to save other mod-makers time if they hit it)
I'll be posting problems as they come to mind (1.5 was a several month project, so not everything is crystal) Part #1 - Texture Corruption Texture Corruption - The Half-Life engine apparently does not properly manage textures on dynamic objects such as player models, w_textures, etc, etc. The list of textures is fixed-size and doesn't clear at map change, so once you exceed it you'll start getting corruption issues. For example, our player models had 17 textures each. Additionally, we had 6 sets of players models (desert camo, arctic camo, etc, etc) - this added up to around 566 textures (there was additional overhead, i.e. each model had 2 full sets of textures to support a 'blinking' effect via manipulating pev->skin) this added up to 408 textures. Pushing these numbers, after only one map change we began seeing corruption (texture limit @ 1024 perhaps?) http://www.flfmod.com/david/arms_blending_off.jpg is a modest example, it got much worst. The solution we used to this was to combine all the skins on each model into one texture (i.e. instead of a texture for head, a texture for legs, etc, etc we had one big texture that was mapped to the model) This is more intensive on the modeler to get the coordinates right, but solved our problem nicely. Next time - hitbox issues! david _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlcoders
