If the face for your character could be picked like a photofit say 5 each of eyes, nose, mouth, chin, hair that would give us over 3,000 faces to choose from at the expense of a mere 25 small images on the client or 15,000 for just 30 images. Is this possible? if not why not?

Yes, it is possible and Asheron''s Call had a system like you speak. The problem with this, IMHO, is that _IN_GAME_ you really could not distinquish between two different faces.

Dave "Dak Lozar" Loeser

yes, it is very possible. I''ve seen it in few RPG''s though. I have seen it more in the Hoyle Card game series and Casino games.

Yeah, you''re not really zoomed in enough in most games to distinguish between small features like this. The clothing in most mmorpgs now is probably more than sufficient to give each player a unique look.

quote: Original post by Torn Space
In a 3d game, it''d be a matter of slapping on a different texture for each face.
The downside is that--in EQ for instance--you''d need to download 100+ face textures every time you zoned.

nah, you could just download the indices of the features you chose (eyes-1, nose-6, mouth-4, hair-12) and create the face textures on the client side from those indices and the "face part" images everyone already has...

--- krez (krezisback@aol.com)

course then again you could also only worry about that when you come face to face with a player

sure, and end up with blanked faced zombies for the first 3 of an encounter seconds IF you have a fast connection.

It matters on how big you make the files. With WinXP it makes it a little easier, since your OS will try (and I say try) to put stuff that is used together in close proximity on your HDD, but when you start dealing with a dozen races, 2 sexes, 6 faces each, 5 eyes for each (though you could simply use a total of maybe 15-20 eyes for all, since it''s such a small feature) and other such features, you end up dealing with 24 base models for sexes, 144 faces, maybe 48 bodies, a couple dozen eyes... then you have to deal with the issues of loading all the stuff for critters in the area you''re heading into.

Yeah, you''ll end up loading 300 textures easily, probably closer to 500 by the time all is said and done.

It starts to get yucky real quick. The best way at that point is to only load all the base information (character models and textures) when one starts the proggie, then load other textures/models as they become needed. The only problem is that you start needing upwards of 512MB of RAM just to keep the game at decent speeds and 1GB of RAM to have it run fast, since then it would only load any textures once in all likelihood.

Give us about 3 years and it will be more practical, but right now plan on working with 256MB RAM unless you don''t plan on your game coming out for another 4 years, then you could probably plan on 512MB being the standard.

Gang Wars does it to a very high extent of 9 layers with potentially 256 options each (graphics pending...) and you can tell the difference. It''s really not that hard to do. Tomstone does it with 6 layers and a couple dozen options each. It doesn''t take a lot of memory (~193KB per 256x256x24bit page 6.75MB all together for Gang Wars) and as long as you don''t allow customized options that require the textures to be downloaded, there''s no extra bandwidth.

Gang Wars is available at my web-site and Tombstone is still being developed. The sign up page is where you design your character so you can see kinda how it works.

therabbithole.redback.inficad.com/GangWars/

Ben

quote: Original post by solinear
Yeah, you''ll end up loading 300 textures easily, probably closer to 500 by the time all is said and done.

Lets do some real-world calculations for a game starting development now:
You have an isometric game, at pretty detailed resolution: textures are a cool 512*512*32 because you have to impress the "suits" and are using the alpha channel. Animations are based on model deformations, not on texture manipulation. Tiles are about 128*128. You''re running a typical resolution of 1280*1024 (based on most people having 18" TFT screens by the time your game comes out). That makes for 10*8 = 80 tiles. One character can occupy a tile, no more. That makes for 80 characters as an absolute maximum for a fully occupied screen, which is all you need to animate. At 1 Megabyte per character, that makes 80 megabytes of character memory in use. Not too bad, considering the average system has 128MB NOW, and can be assumed to have 256MB by the time your game comes out. It is also discounting the effective use of video memory (adding another 64MB of memory to the equation) and texture compression (3:1 or better by that time, most likely). With some careful tweaking, I think using around 50MB of memory and an intelligent texture swapper, you''d be able to animate most scenes very smoothly on most computers, and move around with the texture swapping taking any significant hit on the frame rate of the game.