And so I created a pond in Warcraft III World Editor. Amazed that the animated water surface only takes up 22% of my CPU usage. Then I went on thinkin''... how did they make that water animated? I thought it was texture animation thingy. OK, but how to make it fast? Let''s say that''s just animatin'' the texture which gets mapped onto a couples of tiles on the map. There are two ways to go about doin'' it, I think. 1. Use a dynamic VB, update tiles'' texture coordinates every time it needs to be animated, and use only a single large bitmap for the texture. 2. Use a static VB, have multiple textures for different animation frames, and set different texture every time it needs to be animated. So, which one you think will be the best approach? Thanks in advanced. PS:Ugh, I''m quite a Blizzard fan, so I play around with their editor too. Maybe other games are doin'' better? Maybe.

It is quite pretty. My money is on them using an animated texture. A lot of the stuff they used in WarIII seems to be based on knowledge they built doing 2d games (just try using some shutter-goggles to see what I mean). Nothing wrong with that... it looks fabulous. Just don't ask me how they got the water edges looking so seamless.

There are a lot of different ways to do water and some look a lot more interesting than W3's. Not better, not worse, just more interesting.

And the performance impact for animated textures is really quite minimal. You're mostly chewing up video memory, but most of W3's textures are actually quite small so... no worry there.

Last thing to go through a tortoise's mind before it hits the ground at 40mph? "D3DXVec3Add (Tortoise.Pos, Tortoise.Delta, Tortoise.OldPos"

[edited by - soaringtortoise on May 2, 2003 5:53:13 PM]

Thanks man for the info. Hey, tell you what, I''ve come across a
program that can extract BLP files from MPQ (BLP files are
compressed JPEG format used by Blizzard for their bitmaps). I
hope this is not illegal, anyway I just used it to get some
insight, and not for any crackin'' purposes, so I guess it''s OK.

That aside, I found out how they did their water surface: they
stored one frame in each texture file, so they have about 45
textures for one type of sea surface (these sea surface
textures do not have alpha channel for blendin'', and they came
in the size of 128x128x32 format). It''s obvious that they set
different texture when the sea needs to be animated.

Whereas for the shoreline... I got this for your viewin'':



This is the only texture for shoreline animation, so for this
case, it could be that they update the texture coordinates
rather than havin'' different sets of shoreline texture. Now
this one shown above, is the alpha channel for the shoreline
blendin''.

What ya think?