Developer Diary #2: 05/20/2019 to 05/27/2019 news - Yuuzhan Vong at War mod for Star Wars: Empire at War: Forces of Corruption

Developer Diary #2: 05/20/2019 to 05/27/2019

The Developer Diary is a new format of newsposts for Yuuzhan Vong at War. Each week on Wednesdays you'll receive a small update on what has happened during the past week, similar to what we do on our Discord every Sunday/Monday.

The Final Breakthrough

We had a lot of new discoveries this past weekend ... Revolutionary discoveries ... things that will change modding this game forever - but, we are not going to go into that right now.
We are only going to mention that what our team created will allow all future textures to be more robust, be able to be created faster, and will use less memory on the game engine.
What does this mean? This means that we can have even better textures that we currently make that use less resources and system drain, thereby allowing the game to run smoother. This will reopen many concepts that we put on hold a year ago due to the texture memory limits of the game, because now they are not really a concern any more. We don't want to say too much, but our Hutt Fleet will be looking amazing.
But before we say too much on this subject, we wish to continue focusing on the Kor Chokk. This is the key to everything, the project that has unlocked so much new discovery and potential for future modding.

The Kor Chokk

What is so special about the Kor Chokk some might still be wondering? Well, aside from looking incredible, and having vastly improved since its first conception by EvilleJedi, Strobe almost finished replacing the "bead" (yes ... don't go there, we know) tower placeholders with more organic structures that are greatly poly reduced.

So we like it ... it looks cool ... but that is not the impressive point that we are trying to stress.

The Chokk is big, like really BIG. A Miid Ro'ik is as large as a Star Destroyer ... placed in this picture is also a CR90, and an Immobilizer Cruiser, but anyone can make a large model ... that is still not what is impressive (although it is...) ...

Size is impressive for sure, but you all remember how nice and detailed our texture was for the Immobilizer: The fine line work, the sharp crispness, the tiny texture details that were not blurry or pixelated? Here is a reminder:

Well, for the Kor Chokk ... when you the player are zoomed in, looking at the detail of our textures (when you play our mod, please select the units, and press the C-key spend the time to pause the game and look at our textures. We don't want to hide our work, we spend an incredible amount of time making these things look good ... or don't, not judging), well when you are looking at the detail of ship textures the Kor Chokk despite being so large and in the background...

... the Kor Chokk will have a texture resolution of equal quality of these "small" ships ... and this is accomplished with Ambient Occlusion. But that still isn't what is impressive. What will be impressive is that our new methods ... they will allow super high definition resolution, soft shadow ambient occlusion, and ... and ... AND ...

... AND will use less textures than other ships have used in the past. Or in short:
Less textures, less used memory, lower chance to crash due to random out-of-memory errors.

Yet again, "that's all folks!"
The Shapers - Team Yuuzhan Vong at War