I agree, just put it in the game before it never gets in game. Screw tweaks, we can tweak it after it's in game.
Honestly, I'd rather give all the models a complete overhaul. Sure you can replace them one by one. But stopping half way and putting it in, just to come back to it later and having to do about 30-40% of the work again is pretty damn stupid.
I absolutely agree with you! Redskull did a fantastic job, we need new things... Let's start to find solutions, not problems!! Nobody can make PERFECT models, graphics whatever... everthing is a compromise. After all, we can improve it step by step... the mod is - like everything - a process.
Ive been busy lately, but progress on the lowpoly has begun. Once that's done I will make sure it actually works in-game before texturing it.
What's the poly count for the current high poly? I hope to god the your just doing it for the purpose of LoD, I'm sick and tired of the fucking shit argument that it'll make peoples computers run at lower frames. It's not 1999, this isn't a real issue anymore, even Xello's prehistoric 8800GTX could run empires on full. I'm cool with people with lesser computers running an ugly low poly as long as people with decent builds can have the high polies.
So what kind of polycount would be fine for an in-game tank model? The high-poly that I'm going to bake my maps from is currently around 620k without any smoothing on.
Valve Developer Community docs: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Model_Creation_Overview#Performance_and_Budgets You can probably do some extremely agressive LOD optimization to be able to give you a 15,000 - 18,000 tris budget. A LOD model for 10 meters away could already cut it down by a few thousand so the highest-quality model is only seen when up close or while driving the tank. This Facepunch thread notes there isn't a hard vertex limit, but there is a 32 material limit. I couldn't find a hard polycount limit on the .MDL format (which we use). The .DMX format has a hard limit of 400k.
BONER CONFIRMED FOR ROCK HARD Although it's funny because the industry average now is 15k to 30k for vehicles and characters. goes to show how old source is I guess.
That's nothing, I saw models for a Japanese volley ball game once, the braided hair for the character model was rocking 14k alone.
EP2 Jalopy is 16k and Source 2013 was supposed to give a big rendering boost, so it's time we use up all that extra juice
Hey guys, Sorry for the lack of updates, I've been real busy lately! I managed to put aside a few hours to start unwrapping the low poly model so it's comming along. The tank tracks will be changed a little bit aswell as the thin rails protecting the front headlights, as they are really poly-dense.