Amazon: Total War 8.0 - Call for White Paper

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by bibi g

Falcon,

Thank you for the compliment!

Usually we prefer to get the communication through the team leader, I was acting admin only because Parthian Shot was away on field trips. I am actually very busy on my real job, so she should be the person you have contact with.

As far as LOD is concerned, this is not currently our high priority work, because we already have a set of performance standards, namely 4GB of RAM and 512MB-1GB of video RAM, so any player playing the mod on a less capable machine would naturally have to expect a performance hit. There are also other factors to consider, like changing the unit sizes and resolutions.

The only change I would make in this area would be for units with multi-layer skins, and there are only few.

---

Thanks BB, but the thing is my machine does match the set performance standard, my spec is the following:

AMD Radeon HD6850 1GB
AMD Athlon II X4 640 @3.0Ghz
4GB Ram

Although it is only considered a medium rig now, it should run RTW and any of its mods with relatively good performance even on huge battle scales.
And it does, other mods like Roma Surrectum 2 runs really well on high settings, even battles a little over 12,000 men is relatively hiccups free.
However with Amazon Total War even smaller scale 1v1 battles have heavy stutters and lags, I would not have stressed it like this if it's not a
serious issue.

LOD models are essential in smooth performance of games, that's why every total war game since Rome uses it, and nearly every mod implements it
as well. Even other games like Mount & Blade uses it because it's really a necessity to portray large scales while also have a smooth gameplay experience,
because no machine is powerful enough to render all those thousands of units at full polycount and achieve good performance at the same time. :(

By the way, for the multi-layer skins, do you mean mipmaps? Because I noticed quite a lot of textures are missing mipmaps when looking through
the unit texture folder, if it's alright I can help out and implement those mipmaps for all of the unit textures that's missing it. :)

Falcon,

Dev-Team is moving over to totalwar.org, so BB probably won't have chance reading this post.

We did have 10,000 strong battles with war machines and elephants (200 in a unit), the only problem in the test log is with large number of weapons with the BP attribute can cause lagging on high-poly multi-layer models. And that is understandable.
We are working on eliminating the multi-layered models, and that should eliminated the BP issues

In reply to your PM, I have already answered you question on the mipmap issues.

BTW, I am the one who explained to you about our missing LOD models via PM when you mentioned the 512x512 vs 256x256 textures which is not our problem at all.
The problem with your machine is more than likely something else, if there is a problem to start with in this area, as we have tested on 1GB nvidia video cards with no problem at all.
By posting this message with topics from my private discussion with you via PM, we can mislead the readers into thinking the game does not run at all on their machine even if they met the video standard we set.

Since this thread is used to launch the highly successful 8.0 release, the thread will remain here for reference purpose only, please feel free to browse and chat in the latest release thread about issues pertaining to installation, release issues, issue which you may feel it is a bug.