Just a heads-up, I haven't been posting to Suggestions and stuff very much lately (and generally haven't been very communicative) because I'm busy as hell. Ray and I are trying to get this whole normal-map compression thing done, and it requires re-architecting some of our art assets that are a decade old, and some other scary stuff. So, anyway, we're cranking along and getting a lot done, but I don't have time for much other than thinking about memory usage and normals and debating compression/performance tradeoffs. If we're lucky, it'll mostly be wrapped up by Fri. There might be some spillover into next week, but I'm aiming to get back to gameplay stuff by then (probably Economy, woo, heheh).

Expect a fairly big patch, and maybe another next week. Sorry, but we have to update a lot of textures for this. On the upside, it should use about half the memory for normal/specular maps, even less for illumination maps. That means lots of room for more, prettier maps. Woo.

woo!

Great :-)!

Hurray! Less memory usage = good when VO uses up about all I have leftover..

It'd be about video memory not ram i belive?

Noes! He said the E word! Run from this thread. Flee I say!

maq: technically both, since textures are always loaded into system ram first, then loaded into video ram as-needed. I don't know how much the total ram footprint will drop from this, but it's a step in the right direction, regardless.