We need to discuss how to make the terrain code a bit more sane. The current mess is unmaintainable. I do not have a clear idea about the issue that Buginator found, so I hope that he can write a bit about those. I will focus on the conversion issue.
Currently the old (current) map format is loaded, then converted on load using conversion tables in data/base/tileset into lookups into the old terrain tile directories to find decals, and into texpage directory to find the new terrain tiles. Most of the tiles in the old terrain tile directories are now unused, but not removed, just taking up space. Some of the old terrain tiles are converted into decals, with alpha blending added to the tile, and these are chaotically interspersed with the old, unmodified and unused tile files. Nor can the old files merely be removed, since that would break the loader, and if simply renumbered, would break the conversion tables. So there is some work here. What I suggest we do is simply make a clean break. I can modify the mapconv utility I made to break up the game.map file into five, tiny grayscale png files containing terrain map (value + some constant => texture index), height map, rotation map, flip map and decal map. The utility will do the job of breaking down the current map format using conversion tables, so we can take those out of the game. Then I can run the mapconv utility on all current maps and commit those. Perhaps we can even run the utility over all maps in addons, to generate master-compatible addons. Perhaps also make a Windows app out of mapconv to help people convert. Once this is done, the current hard-coded distinction between arizona, rockies and urban will be gone, and their tiles and decals can be used interchangeably. We should also add to the list of decals the delivery points and the VTOL rearm pad. This will make them be drawn properly aligned with the terrain (and remove one more case of the awful manual vertex flattening that is preventing us from using VBOs). If you have other opinions and information about the terrain renderer, please add them in comment. - Per _______________________________________________ Warzone-dev mailing list Warzone-dev@gna.org https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/warzone-dev
