will htc install new terrain

[Saxman]

Ah, cc.

[Easyscor]

You really don't need any snow on the roofs, building insulation wasn't nearly that good 60 years ago but you do need a few more generic buildings in the default and it could be a pretty sparse set.  It's the trees and clutter, particularly on a jungle tile, that eat up the resources.  With the addition of two tile sets, a small resource desert and large resource jungle, (keep snow, just retexture it) you can create almost anything by avoiding the tiles that don’t match the setup and change only the ground textures. No, you won’t have the fiery tree colors of fall but a lot could still be accomplished without requiring multiple 40 meg downloads.

As you say, green trees in snow, or desert, look terrible.

edit for sp/gram.

[Saxman]

I think what NHawk was saying is that this would be a RES file installed with the rest of AH and not part of the map itself.

[Easyscor]

I also like the idea of toggling the seasons but wouldn't that mean the basic game download would grow by 3 x 40 =120 additional megs? Ouch.

[croduh]

I made a snow map with almost every object covered in snow, trees, buildings, tiles, base tiles etc...

I don't see the problem even in that, only what Easycor pointed out, that files would be big too.

[Easyscor]

I've been thinking about it again, if the objects remained the same and only the textures were paged in and out,  the additional DL required could be reduced to 3 x ~20 = ~60 meg, still a pretty big hit on top the current 107 MB.

[NHawk]

Originally posted by Easyscor
I also like the idea of toggling the seasons but wouldn't that mean the basic game download would grow by 3 x 40 =120 additional megs? Ouch.

I don't think that would be the case. I don't know for sure, but I do believe the stdshape.res file contains all of the objects in addition to the textures.

Just give the terrain and ground object textures their own res files and leave the shapes and all other textures in stdshape.res. I might be oversimplifying things though.

Plus in theory it would be a one time download. The only time terrain textures would need to be downloaded is if there was a major change in them. Which, we don't see that often. We see object locations moved around, but rarely see the textures for those objects change.

[NHawk]

Originally posted by Easyscor
I've been thinking about it again, if the objects remained the same and only the textures were paged in and out,  the additional DL required could be reduced to 3 x ~20 = ~60 meg, still a pretty big hit on top the current 107 MB.

Remember that certain textures wouldn't change for all seasons. Fall being the obvious one since only trees and maybe a few of the terrain textures would change.

So, you'd have your standard "Summer" textures with some substituted by "Fall" textures. Same with Spring, you'd have standard "Winter" textures with some substituted by "Spring" textures.

The biggest hits would be Winter and PTO.

And actually Spring could be skipped entirely. Anywhere I've lived we go from Winter to Summer. Spring just kind of passes by without notice.

[croduh]

Problem with just re-texturing trees is this:



Re-texturing house tops, hangars, paths etc etc was no problem.


Pines and most of the shrubs don't even need anything, they are evergreen:)

[NHawk]

I've done them a long time ago.

Which tree is that? I'll see what I can do tomorrow.

[NHawk]

Ok, trees are more complicated than they use to be.

It looks like one or more of the textures is laid horizontally to give GVs some protection from sight.

I just need to figure out which part that is.