Dune Wars Art Thread

keldath · Jul 10, 2009

sorry, ment the salt nif's.

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sound addon uploaded !

*****

koma13,

i thought about this,
but loosing revdcm will mean letting go on pleny of things , like dcm, that is a must have, bug screen, the font files,
the interface.

i like it to much.

take my overlord mod, there , i used revdcm, by i was always tried to use as less art as i can, no duplicated buttons, not city arts, no building art - most where monuments, mostly the unit art was the most diverted.
and it worked really well and the slowness was much much better,
the sdk part and rev dcm isnt adding that much wieght, from expericne i sya this.

most of the stuff that adds weights, is the arts. so we need to skim down parts we can.

Deliverator · Jul 10, 2009

koma13 said:
Now that I think about it could be also that RevDCM mod. A few days ago David suggested making a dw version only based on 3.19 vanilla + some selected features (jImprovement...). Maybe I will try this out to see how much impact it has on performance.

That sounds like a good idea. There are a lot of features in there that we're not using.

On the salt graphic, I don't think the iceberg nifs are responsible for slowdown since they are unchanged from vanilla, and are not very big. We can go through and review all the art for performance, it will just take a while...

keldath · Jul 10, 2009

i changed art for cottages->cities , and green house, but i forgot to ajust the sizes...

so its a bit large.

i need to rescale all improvements, some are too big.

davidlallen · Jul 10, 2009

koma13 said:
I agree. We should pay more attention to performance. Dune wars mod is already very very slow on my pc (AMD Athlon XP 2600+ ). Though I'm not sure it's resulting from artwork or the python stuff. Can't play on maps larger than small.

It would be interesting to see if this is due to graphics or python, since people often blame python. But I am not sure exactly how to separate them. If you turn off most of the python by adding a return early in DuneWars::__init__, that also disables the code which places spice, sandstorms, and sandworms. I am sure that would run fast but it does not prove much.

davidlallen · Jul 10, 2009

davidlallen said:
It would be interesting to see if this is due to graphics or python, since people often blame python. But I am not sure exactly how to separate them. If you turn off most of the python by adding a return early in DuneWars::__init__, that also disables the code which places spice, sandstorms, and sandworms. I am sure that would run fast but it does not prove much.

On the other hand, we could identify which graphics may be causing a slowdown by selectively disabling them in the python. I have given these instructions a few times. In function onEndGameTurn, comment out StormAddSubstract to remove storms, WormAdd to remove worms, and BlowAdd to remove spice. Removing BlowAdd will dramatically affect gameplay, so a before/after runtime comparison may not be quite fair.

Deliverator · Jul 10, 2009

Citysets Ideas and Reference

Since Lord Tirian expressed an interest in doing some work on the city sets I have taken some stills from Children of Dune of the city of Arrakeen. The CGIs guys have made it a mix of several different architectural styles. These shots are not a specification, just for ideas/general feel. I think we want the biggest city in the latest era to look more like this than something super-futuristic. There are a lot of citysets out there that might be ripe for adaptation.

For the earlier cities, my best idea is to imitate the carved cave dwellings they have in Cappadocia, Turkey:

If you search Google Images for Goreme you'll find lots of examples. In the Dune book sietches seem to made by a combination of natural caves and human carving so these seem like a good fit.

davidlallen · Jul 10, 2009

In the worm rider thread we took a brief detour into city sets. Koma posted a screenshot at this link.

That looks really cool, and also it looks like a real cityset. Is that an existing civ4 city set? Then let's just recycle it.

koma13 · Jul 10, 2009

It would be interesting to see if this is due to graphics or python, since people often blame python.

I think it depends on your computer. I have a halfway decent gfx card, for me the cpu is the bottleneck.

If you turn off most of the python by adding a return early in DuneWars::__init__, that also disables the code which places spice, sandstorms, and sandworms. I am sure that would run fast but it does not prove much.

And if we replace the graphics with some empty placeholders? This should ease the task for the gfx card but should not make much of a difference for cpu (well, particles maybe but we can disable them via graphic option).

Lord Tirian · Jul 10, 2009

davidlallen said:
It would be interesting to see if this is due to graphics or python, since people often blame python. But I am not sure exactly how to separate them. If you turn off most of the python by adding a return early in DuneWars::__init__, that also disables the code which places spice, sandstorms, and sandworms. I am sure that would run fast but it does not prove much.

The empty graphics things is a possibility (just a nif with nothing in it to display).

Additionally, a rough guide to the cause is often the type of slowness: Long turn times usually indicate that a lot of computing is going on, lags during scrolling over the map or on looking at certain regions (like with a lot of units/effects etc.) tend to indicate graphics. That's of course not a hard guide, just a pointer.

Cheers, LT.

davidlallen · Jul 10, 2009

I can try some experiments tonight but I don't know how to make an empty nif. Is there one around?

Deliverator · Jul 10, 2009

Here's a NIF which everything deleted from it - pretty much empty.

I think removing the constant particle effects from the worm and the spice - which I'll upload tomorrow is going to make a significant difference to performance. But I'm sure there are other things...

Lord Tirian · Jul 10, 2009

Hey, just dropping by to show how the early city set looks so far. Bear in mind that this is still a work in progress, things that will be done on it:

-> better texture that doesn't look like old bacon
-> shadows will be added
-> some extra variety
-> need to tweak the LSystem-file a bit more to reduce repetitions

Any impressions so far? Things I should totally change? Or happy with the direction? Give me feedback, guys, that's my first cityset I'm doing, after all!

Cheers, LT.

davidlallen · Jul 10, 2009

Looks good so far. This is just the basic cityset, right? So a separate project will be required to make the "ethnic" versions of all the tech tree buildings like granary, etc?

There is a request to greatly reduce the number of buildings. I think we have thinned out the early buildings enough, but the midgame and lategame buildings haven't been studied yet. So if you do start on the tech tree buildings, let's sync up and make sure the less important buildings go last.

Deliverator · Jul 11, 2009

Good stuff LT. Looking good for your first cityset. :goodjob:

I get what you mean about the bacon! :lol:

1) Can you change the underlying paved tiling? It feels a bit advanced for cave houses. Something a bit rockier would be cool.
2) I think it makes sense to work on the city sets for the different eras right now. We don't yet know whether buildings will be culled, or changed to fit Water for Food like Food Warehouse -> Reservoir. Koma is reviewing early units, but there don't seem to be any explicit plans to review buildings. It is sensible to avoid things that may be subject to change right now.

Lord Tirian · Jul 11, 2009

davidlallen said:
Looks good so far. This is just the basic cityset, right? So a separate project will be required to make the "ethnic" versions of all the tech tree buildings like granary, etc?

Yep. Also, right now the city set is universal to all civs. Down the line, it might be possible to make city sets that differ between some civs - but that's a looot of work.

Deliverator said:
1) Can you change the underlying paved tiling? It feels a bit advanced for cave houses. Something a bit rockier would be cool.

Okay, will try to do that once I get the texture on the caves right - then the ground could sort of blend in with the caves, making the caves more like something that's connected to the ground than buildings on top of it.

Cheers, LT.

koma13 · Jul 11, 2009

Okay, will try to do that once I get the texture on the caves right - then the ground could sort of blend in with the caves, making the caves more like something that's connected to the ground than buildings on top of it.

Can't you just remove the ground texture so we see the normal terrain graphics as ground?

That looks really cool, and also it looks like a real cityset. Is that an existing civ4 city set? Then let's just recycle it.

I got it from Mare Nostrum mod but originally it's from geomodder's ethnic artstyle.

Lord Tirian · Jul 11, 2009

koma13 said:
Can't you just remove the ground texture so we see the normal terrain graphics as ground?

Easy enough - and seems to work out pretty well with my updated texture, see the screenshot (also, feedback, please - shadows will be done last, because that's the drudge-work).

Cheers, LT.

Deliverator · Jul 11, 2009

Cool. Could you put a few smaller rocks and boulders around the bases of them to mask the join with the ground?

Lord Tirian · Jul 11, 2009

Deliverator said:
Cool. Could you put a few smaller rocks and boulders around the bases of them to mask the join with the ground?

Could... but then you'd see the join of the rocks and boulders with the ground, no?

Cheers, LT.

Deliverator · Jul 11, 2009

I mean a few very small ones around the base of each house.

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