Graphics standards

[Jeremy Buloch]

If your GPU is outdated

CPU *

Its allright Ras. I dont mind if my 233mhz cant take it at least my 400mhz and 1.0ghz can.

-J.B.-

[Rasbelin]

I meant GPU, not CPU.

[targon]

Originally posted by Vultur
Put one common color to each unit (like transparency color of sprites), than it's possible to implement in the game a function that change that color into the player's one.
Player logo... sound interesting. I think it's possible to paste a texture with a logo on a specified part of the unit.

I still can't grok that did you mean, Vultur. There are several possible solutions:
1) Colorkey texture. Really bad; we need either have a copy of all textures for each player (at least 2 for any battle) with changed colors or tweak colors each frame.
2) Two textures. Normal texture + color/logo texture. Use separate primitive sets and separate UV maps (the later element may use really simple map, just rectangle (0,0)-(1,1)).
3) Multitexturing. Good, but it may require either additional texturing units or excessive passes for legacy 3D cards.
4) Pixel shaders. Even better, but still not standard and needs fallback solution.

[targon]

Oops, I forgot about index mode and color lookup tables, but they impair perfomance a lot, are poorly supported by ordinary "game" cards and, in general, silly.

[targon]

Another possibility is to draw some parts of model without any texturing at all. It's a safe bet, in fact. glDisable(GL_TEXTURE2D) and go-go-go.

[Vultur]

Originally posted by targon
I still can't grok that did you mean, Vultur. There are several possible solutions:
1) Colorkey texture. Really bad; we need either have a copy of all textures for each player (at least 2 for any battle) with changed colors or tweak colors each frame.
2) Two textures. Normal texture + color/logo texture. Use separate primitive sets and separate UV maps (the later element may use really simple map, just rectangle (0,0)-(1,1)).
3) Multitexturing. Good, but it may require either additional texturing units or excessive passes for legacy 3D cards.
4) Pixel shaders. Even better, but still not standard and needs fallback solution.

My idea was solution #1 - like: use 2D flags like Civ2, CtP2 and SMAC.
Also solution #2 can be implemented, sound resonable and practical. We'll see... for now we need few simple things, there is all the time to complicate them