Hey, I am in need of a solution for which I hope you can suggest an answer for. Anything you can add would be appreciated. The problem concerns the loading of models in an online environment. Not including environment models, there will be maximum of ~30 character models on the screen at any one time. This means fully animated models of some form. There are however more than 30 models available to use... but only ~30 will be displayed. I do not want to load a new model each time a new player enters the game, as this will likely cause a pause as the hard drive is accessed. There is not enough memory available in the average system to load everything at once as far as I am aware... I am in need of a solution to this problem - a method of storing or loading models in minimal time without effecting gameplay. Due to this problem, I am unable to specify the model format I will be working with, though Mdl or md3 are likely candidates. Any suggestions would be appreciated greatly, Thanks Dachande Edited by - dachande on March 28, 2002 12:47:52 PM

I will post this idea here as well dachande if you dont mind, then you can get other opinions on it. I know that when we spoke about this, you were pretty adverse to creating a new model format that will suit your needs, but MAYBE there is a way to modify a current format to support more of what you need.

Now I am not a programmer. so..

What i suggested to dachande was to have the mesh files load their textures from a central tiled image that contains all texture information. Instead of having to load a new file every time a character enters a scene that uses the same texture, it would just look up the location of that texture in a larger file and load it. this would involve only one texture file in memory instead of several. This was an idea that I also thought might apply well to animation as we could generalize most of the things that need to be loaded every single time a character enters the current screen.

>I am not text, I am not organized pixels, I am not killed by turning off your monitor, I am not isolated by turning off your computer. I just am.