Looking great! I do have a question after seeing the RTS view. Is that fog-of-war? Or just fog? Most of your other RTS screens didn't seem to have fog-of-war or line of sight. What's the plan for that in the final game?

Well the Fog of war has always been in the RTS view, I suppose I don't show many screenshots of it.

It only applies in the RTS view, when you're controlling a character you can see anything he sees. There are all kinds of strategic advantages to that. There is fog, and fog of war in that screenshots. The fog is a light gray, the fog of war makes things darker.

You can usually see about 25 meters on any side of a gang member in the RTS view. I suppose I can grab some more screenshots of the RTS view next update to give you a better feel for how it'll be.

- Dan

Looks like you invented a way to hold a rocket launcher "gangsta style" [cool]

Amazing. What is your release strategy?

Quote:This is some gangsta' shit right here

Gangsta' shit indeed!

Just in case you don't spot the comment I made a couple of posts back: are you using DXT compression on your textures? It's something you could apply directly to the minimap size problem, but DXT has the massive advantage of hardware decompression support on pretty much every card since the original GeForce. So you don't need to decompress the textures as you load them, which you would with something like PNG. They may take up a little more space on disk, but they tend to be a big saving in-memory.

superpig - Yup, I responded to your previous comment as well :-). As far as DXT compression I've already got all my textures saved as .tga with compression, though I'm sure DXT would get a much better ratio. I can only save files in-game as .dds, .bmp, and .dib using the D3DXSaveTexture functions. Though I can load anything from .jpg, .tga, .png, etc. I'll go back and edit my mini-map saving code to enable DXT compression on them, and I'll save 'em as .dds files instead of .bmp that should cut the size down a lot.

Also since maps will be downloaded in real time as you connect to a server, it will really cut down on load time...if you don't happen to have a particular city on your computer already.

Right now the mini maps weigh in at about ~1MB, as uncompressed .bmps, that's really too much, I'll let you know how it changes with the DXT compression, as a .dds file.

jdaniel - Well I've already got a publisher for the game, Strategy First. Once the game is complete it'll go into testing for a few months to ensure it is a stable, quality product. Then hopefully it will go to retail worldwide. They'll do full page ads in magazines, and their own marketing campaign as well. I can't wait for that to happen. :-)

Thanks for the comments guys.

- Dan

Quote:Original post by dgreen02
superpig - Yup, I responded to your previous comment as well :-).

Ah, but did you respond to my response to your response? [grin]

Quote:As far as DXT compression I've already got all my textures saved as .tga with compression, though I'm sure DXT would get a much better ratio.

I don't know whether it would get a better ratio - I suspect not - but the point is that when you load a TGA image from disk, you have to decompress it (because the hardware can't understand the TGA format). Obviously, doing this takes a little time, and it means that the video memory you use is greater than the size of the file on disk.

By comparison, when you load DXT-compressed images from a DDS file, you don't decompress them - all modern hardware can understand the DXT compression scheme automatically, to the extent that the hardware can read a texel from the compressed image at pretty much the same speed as from an uncompressed image (possibly even faster, because DXT involves swizzling the texture to be more friendly to hardware accesses). As a result, they should be slightly faster to load (because you don't need to decompress them as you load them, you just map them into memory) and they'll use the same amount of video memory as they do disk space. The tradeoff is that they'll probably be a little bigger on disk.

The fact that they use less video memory might even improve your framerate a little bit - smaller textures (in terms of video memory) mean (a) faster bus transfer times when a texture is copied from system memory to video memory, and (b) more textures can fit in video memory at once, so less paging needs to be done.