Probably until Monday. It's just too much, too scary, too little testing for tonight. We could do it, but it'd be like 5am, and if something broke, we'd be ill-equipped to fix it. Lots of fallbacks and different hardware to keep in mind.

Overall, normal map compression stuff is working out pretty well. We just need a bit more time to be sure it's all completely solid for everyone.

The notice and caution are appreciated

No stress, Inc! Better a polished product...

Oh, by the way, I have re-subbed! And since my temporary departure, I have noticed VO is looking slicker, and better than EVAH! Kudos and drinks all around guys. Truly an epic start to a brutal under-taking.

Thanks, glad to hear it.

For a couple of weeks work, this revamp should yield some visible benefits, beyond even the detail maps we've already put in place. Since I'm making everyone re-download a ton of textures anyway, I'm taking the time to quickly spruce up as many of them as I can.

Will there be brown and glow?

..brown?

I'm mostly just trying to get more detail out of the normal maps. I made a new normal map for the EC-89, and I think it's a bit better. I'll probably do one for the Teradon as well, and maybe a whole redux of maps for the HAC, we'll see.

Others that have "decent" normal maps, I'm just doing a little sharpen/renormalize on them to add a little punch.

Like 90% of what I'm doing is performance/ram-savings stuff, though. Like converting illumination maps to 8bit by moving any RGB data into the diffuse (which I did with the Revenant) so I can drop illum-map vram usage to 1/4 (8bit instead of 32bit). Same with specular, alpha, and some crazier stuff like the "dirt maps" on the stations and so on. The illumination map changes alone should be big, especially for stuff like the HAC, which has 1024x1024 illumination maps (4MB of ram to 1MB of ram with 8bit conversion, or possibly down to 512kB if I use DXT1 compression of the map and decide it doesn't look entirely horrible). Granted, these savings are compared to current "uncompressed" texture usage, but it should be possible to run uncompressed (anywhere) on a 256MB card after I'm finished.

The normal maps are a 2-to-1 thing, which will be awesome for the capships and bone asteroids. 2MB instead of 4MB. Multiply that times the number of different maps.. for the training sector alone it could be like 10-15MB of vram savings (not sure on that, just a ballpark), and a lot less intense on the card's memory bus. But, haven't done this yet, converting object to tangent space, and retaining all the detail, is a hassle.. have to convert some really old art assets.

Plus, once I convert the old object-space "bone" roids to tangent, I can add detail maps. Woo.

Also going to try to speed up general shaders for GeForce 5xxx people, if possible, adding an FP16 2.0 path in addition to the usual FP32 one. We'll see how that goes, can't promise anything.

The way ships get colorized might also change. We're kicking around options for doing the color/alpha thing with less instructions that the current method. I won't do it if I think it looks bad, but if it's only slightly worse and considerably faster, I'll probably go for it.

We've also created a fallback that's keeping normal mapping for people on 1.1/1.4 shaders. The fixed-function (GeForce1, etc) DOT3 support will go away as soon as I convert the object-space assets to tangent. However, the 1.1/1.4 people will continue to have "pretty" maps for a little while.. however, we won't be adding any new normal maps to that pipeline (since they can't do the compressed maps, it would texture thrash them to add more), and we may eventually drop the fallbacks entirely.. if it proves to be faster overall for those cards.

I like the forum post, but please remove CTC from the game, the border wars pass my test as a replacement, work on the rewards and website page later, tyvm.

http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/21551

inc while you are doing all this is there any chance we can choose the main color for our ships aside from the accent colors? i would love to be able to make an all black valk or something

I was referring to the brownish tint that most next-gen games have. T'was a joke ;P

Peytros: no, that requires a massive reworking of art assets, as I've mentioned previously. I'm not actually creating very much, in this redux, just using assets we already have and tweaking things to look a little better. In the future, though, I may do a detail-texture hack to blend another layer on top of ships, to add more configurability, but it won't work like color selection.

Shadoen: ahh, heheh. Yeah, Fallout 3 is very brown :(. I get so sick of brown after playing that game for awhile. One would almost think the textures are palletized.

No, if we drop in some real next-gen stuff (which will be a PS4/DX10 hardware path, whenever we get to that) it'll not be.. brown. It'll be stuff like HDR, parallax mapping, spherical harmonic lighting and/or maybe deferred shading with dynamic lightsources for every single laser shot. And shadows (not very next-gen, that might be a PS2/DX9 possibility). Stuff that'll augment the existing colorful universe and content. But we really need to do some rendering arch changes before we add more advanced stuff. We'll probably need to do it soon, even after adding some of this stuff. Rendering order optimizations to help cull un-needed shaders.

But a lot of other stuff will come first, when we have time. Like making less ugly ice. <sigh>. Not to mention a lot more important gameplay stuff.

I still Hope you will consider making Monday or Tuesday the normal release day....

It'd make sense, changing things and not being around for two days in case of breakage (or worse, having to go and fix it) kinda sucks.