To Glest Team: High Detail Models?

[daniel.santos]

What would be your opinion on higher detail models?  My thouht was that Glest could have a low & high detail models setting to allow users with higher end hardware to use higher resolution models.  I know that the biggest impact would be the size of the install, because not only would we have original models & textuers, but we would have the larger ones as well.  But then agian, the high detail models & textures could be a separate install package.

Because I don't know the process of creating, animating and "blending" 3d models very well (much less the g3d variety), I'm just sort-of presuming that the original models may already be higher resolution and are rendered down to a lower polygon count before being exported to the g3d format.

Please let me know what you think.

[hailstone]

I'm a fan of Command & Conquer: Generals and if you zoom in their models are even more basic than Glest models, so I don't think the models need to be any more detailed but a setting to reduce the quality could be good.

[wciow]

Higher detail models would not really produce any problems for Glest. The models I am currently making have an upper limit of about 1000 polygons but you could probably double that on a modern system.

The main decision is about compatibility with old hardware. Obviously the higher you push system requirements then fewer people will be able to play the game. I personally think that in order to really show off the glest engine and attract more people you have to push it's capabilities as far as you can. In theory you could make a game which scales all the way from say an old 1.0Ghz machine to a modern quad-core; however this requires lots of effort on the part of the developers. The glest community is quite small (compared to a commerical developer) and so doesn't have the manpower to create such a scalable project. Basically the only way that games can evolve is to leave some people behind (technologically). The way forward for Glest is more demanding mods which make it look awesome!

As for creating higher detail models this is not a problem and will only take a bit more time to produce. With Glest models there is no reason to create a high polygon version. Glest does not support normal mapping so it wouldn't have any benefit.

[hardyvoje]

textures are the main tool for good looking game. I don't think that someone will fell really better if you have more detailed models. Look at Quake 4 soldiers. It's FPS, but soldiers' models are with very small amount of polygons, everything is solved with bumped maps, detailed design of textures and few effects.

so, I think that poly-count on Glest models is ok.

[wciow]

I agree that textures are at least as important as the mesh in making a model look good. I'm already planning to use double the texture size of the original Glest models on mine. However as you say, FPS games (like quake) have more than just a basic texture on their models. Since Glest does not support things such as normal or specular mapping more detail must be put into the mesh to make up for this.

[Duke]

Also a cylinder with just 6 sides will never look realy round, no matter how many normal maps you aply to it. Spheres are even worse.

Normals are good for letting texture details shade accordingly, but they do practically nothing to define the actual shape of an object