pwd, thanks!

Let''s just go with the forum that pwd has so kindly provided. It''s up and running right now, looks good, and is fully customizable.

quote:Original post by Polish
I understand that a procedural system like you described creates an infinite amount of diversity, but my question was how much do you really need and how much will be noticed?

Do you want your horse to look like your pal''s horse? Do you want your next horse to look like your last horse? While a table, or a gun can often look like another, a horse is a unique individual, and a major component of the game, and an individual to boot, as opposed to something like a car in a racing game. If you walk out of a saloon and see three horses tied to the hitching post, do you want to be able to identify your horse based on coloring? I would think that you would.

quote:Original post by Polish
At what point do you stop storing textures because it consumes so much space for the sake of diversity?

If the textures are precomputed, but procedural, you need only cache those textures which are currently ''in play'', i.e. - your horse and the other couple horses in view at the moment.

quote:Original post by Polish
Is it really worth it?

Anything graphical which is acheivable is worth it.

quote:Original post by Polish
I have no idea what kind of footprint a certain amount of textures for models take up, I''ve never designed a game before so I''m just learning here. Maybe you can incorporate hundreds of different skins with no noticeable down side?

You CAN incorporate hundreds of different skins, but not necessarily simultaneously.

quote:Original post by Polish
When it comes to real-time rendering, my main question was pretty much asking if my horse will look slightly different each time I log in, or if skins will change dynamically when moving in and back out of sight.

No, they won''t. Your horse always looks like your horse.

quote:Original post by Polish
Each breed can have distinctive coat colorings and markings right? (sizes, shapes too?) I''m not sure what I''m confused about. =)

Example of coat colorings are sorrels, palominos, bays, and greys, to name a few. These are, for the most part, independent of breeds. But those coat colorings are independent of markings, which are, for the legs, ermine, socks and stockings, and for the face, stars, stripes, blazes, snips, and bald.

Examples of breeds are Thoroughbreds, Quarter horses and Arabians. Most of those breeds can be any of the above coat colorings, and have any of the markings.

And then there are appaloosas, paints, etc. The point is, all of those colorings contribute to graphical beauty and realism and even gameplay.

Oddly, the concept of horse coloring is unique, specific and broad, unlike, say, the concept of zebra coloring, or leopard coloring, or cacti coloring, or whatever.

You might analogize it to sky coloring, in the sense that there is a large set of possible sky colors given time of day, altitude, weather, etc. And within each sky, there are particular colors which can occur at different positions in the sky, such as near the horizon, near the sun, near the zenith, etc.

Just like you wouldn''t make a sky''s zenith yellow and the sky near the horizon blue on a rainy day at 11:00 AM, you wouldn''t just make a horse black with a white rump, and call it a bay.

quote:Original post by bishop_pass
pwd, thanks!

Let''s just go with the forum that pwd has so kindly provided. It''s up and running right now, looks good, and is fully customizable.

works for me! sorry i''ve been a pain in the ass with getting one up..

Ok, for those who missed it, our new forum for this whole thing is right here!

You know, since we''re talking about gigabytes here, why don''t we write the software to DVD format? That way a person dosen''t have to download 20 disks just to play the game.

quote:Original post by Run_The_Shadows
That is, hands down, the most insanely large forum I have ever seen in my years of travelling this here wide internet.

Well, the idea is to separate the topics according to tasks, and prevent pertinent information from getting buried. I suppose sticky threads would have been another way.

But the point is, the forum also serves as a sort of filing cabinent at this point in time.

Some programs I wrote are currently harvesting and stitching together DEM data of the American West for tentative use in this project. Below is an OpenGL rendering of some of the data I have been processing. To go from DEMS to what you see below requires about 3 stages consisting of parsing, stitching, and formatting. It''s part of Inyo County, California.

What maps do you have on the Arizona Plateus? Also, I have an idea to create more realistic figures. I could use ZBrush to model the character''s and create the textures that will be applied to them.