NodUnit
May 30 2011, 15:16
As the title says this is merely a suggestion should the BI devs read this area of the forums.
I think Arma2 missed out on many customers due to the specs required to play it, and one of the best ways to broaden the audience is to have it more open to various video cards rather than focus on the highest set, because those aren't the majority.
While lowering texture resolution can be helpful but it is not the best solution, on a regular basis normal maps take twice as much memory as a diffuse half it's size, this is the reason why many games have normal maps reduced to half the size of the diffuse, often it's the same with the specular but you are still using as much memory. Arma2's environment is diverse as are the units, the texture sizes all high and there are many of them, depending on the specs they may quickly bog you down.
But unlike grass and glare, textures wouldn't offer a major advantage by toning them down, for example in Arma1 when shaders was set to lowest the normal maps would vanish options to turn textures on and off would give a great increase in performance and allow for a wider range of customers with a wider range of computers specs.
For example by default each unit uses, a diffuse, normal, specular, ambient occlusion, reflection, sometimes alpha and macro textures, if options could be made to turn off normal, specular, ambient occlusion and reflection maps I garuntee there would be a performance increase.
Remember, the more people that can play it means more sales.
I think Arma2 missed out on many customers due to the specs required to play it, and one of the best ways to broaden the audience is to have it more open to various video cards rather than focus on the highest set, because those aren't the majority.
While lowering texture resolution can be helpful but it is not the best solution, on a regular basis normal maps take twice as much memory as a diffuse half it's size, this is the reason why many games have normal maps reduced to half the size of the diffuse, often it's the same with the specular but you are still using as much memory. Arma2's environment is diverse as are the units, the texture sizes all high and there are many of them, depending on the specs they may quickly bog you down.
But unlike grass and glare, textures wouldn't offer a major advantage by toning them down, for example in Arma1 when shaders was set to lowest the normal maps would vanish options to turn textures on and off would give a great increase in performance and allow for a wider range of customers with a wider range of computers specs.
For example by default each unit uses, a diffuse, normal, specular, ambient occlusion, reflection, sometimes alpha and macro textures, if options could be made to turn off normal, specular, ambient occlusion and reflection maps I garuntee there would be a performance increase.
Remember, the more people that can play it means more sales.