NEW VIDEOS: ROACH AND SPINECRAWLER PROGRESSION
The Roach and Spine-crawler as they progressed through their individual stages of development.
ROACH MODEL PROGRESSION:
SPINE CRAWLER MODEL PROGRESSION:
Development Tidbit:
As the game is nearing its final stages, we've been looking towards maximizing the performance of the models and artwork as best we can. Our goal is to maintain the same stability as you'd experience during a normal Warcraft 3 match despite the increased number of Zergs running around. This is a tad difficult due to some built-in limitations in Warcraft 3, along with the desire to have a semblance of “modern” visuals.
To test what causes the most slow-downs and where, I recently created a series of dummy-models with a different range of polygons, vertexes, bones and animations and charted their results when I placed hundreds of them on the screen at a time. The chart and its data were pretty extensive, but I've boiled it down to the more important results below:
(The tests were performed on a “mid-range” Dell Inspiron desktop, Windows XP Professional 32bit, 2ghz, 2 gigs of ram, with a nearly three year-old GeForce 9600 GT 512mb at 1280x1024)
The biggest thing I noticed was that the keyframes hardly seemed to affect the the game's framerate, while bones and multiple texture swaps on a single unit caused the most trouble for the framerate. Unfortunately our hi-detail Zergling doesn't exactly make the cuff (it ranks 9th out of 10!), and will need to have some trimmings made. I think some bone and vertex cuts are in order. =D
That is awesome! :D