The harpies look more like phoenixes. Of course, those wouldn't fit with ice, being fire and all...
Yeah, with the Valkeries already being Harpy-like I figured I'd make up a new kind of Harpy, they're referred to as Harpies collectively but are actually: Gamayuns, Sirens and Alkonosts, so they're not really Harpies. MRise has it's own mythology so some things are only named from mythical creatures but are not actually those mythical creatures. Valkeries are also spelled differently which I might change...
I don't mind rebuilding GAE every time, but I can see how it can become a pain to constantly release my build of it, but then again it doesn't take long to upload a small .exe so I can count it as part of the Core Files and 'spam patch' it every major update. If anyone doesn't want to keep updating MRise.exe they can easily put glestae.exe there instead, though they'd have to make a new directory called 'share' then rename the game directory to 'glestae' and move it into share (I think that's right).
Thing is, MRise replaces the menu so will overwrite some original Glest files unless it's in a separate setup of GAE.
Anyways, a little update:
Both factions are working excellently now so I've began redoing the tilesets as they were missing objects and were using simple retextures of glest files and were pretty messy. I've finished of a new version of the Nature tileset with it's own trees, rocks, boulders (big rocks), statues, ruins (replaces impaled), plants and reeds which all look very pretty, I'll upload a screenshot once all the other tilesets have been conformed to this.
There are some problems: Firstly, there is only one kind of statue at the minute which looks like some weird obelisk, this is because i don't really have anything to make a statue of, but I will be making statues of really powerful faction units that are native to each tileset (one of the large Necribus demons for the demonic tileset or one of the Hyperion 'harpies' for the frost tileset, etc). I'll be doing this once all the factions are complete and when I begin making Glestimals for my tilesets!
Second are the trees and plants/reeds, they look excellent but too many of them causes very low fps, because of this, the amount of wood provided by trees has gone up from 300 to 750 and all my basic maps have much less trees, this is ok because dense looking forests still look dense because my new trees have quite a lot of canopy. What causes the lag I think it the alpha as the trees are very low poly but spam a lot of squares with alpha branch of leaves textures and i think have a lot of alpha textures layered over each other doesn't do the fps a favor, we're talking about ~100 trees in one view to cause this lag, 10-20 trees have a very playable fps. The plants aren't as bad as they're quite small and use less layers and lower resolution textures.
I can also say normal and specular maps are working very nicely in tilesets now even with alpha, the rocks are my favorite lol! I also love this G3DHack it makes removing team texture from trees much easier.
Note: Team Textures defined in tileset objects render as alpha in pipeline mode but flick through the team colours with bump mapping mode.
End Wall of Text! Full release should be pretty soon once I finish off the other tilesets and I clean up the factions one last time.
