So I'm going to answer some questions that came up in this thread.
Quote: "VaMpIr3
Do NPC's and weapons work in this? If not my dreams are crushed. I remember Xara Mod had a lot of cool features and stuff but weapons and stuff like that failed. "
That's the goal I have for the Mod. If I release the final version, I want everything to work just as if you are running vanilla FPSC (just with the new additions). Xara Mod basically was nothing else than a Mod taking my CorVus Mod Source Code and making some slight performance tweaks (by someone who downloaded the open-source source code--> what a sentence)^^
Quote: "xplosys
Awesome show Dark Goblin. I don't know if you've ever posted your specs but I assume from the videos that they are awesome as well and if so, how does this run on a lesser system?"
That's another aspect I want to talk about. As you all know, dynamic shadows in FPSC and especially in FPSC need a lot of power and performance. That said, it will need higher specs than normal FPSC. What I do with the mod is basically putting in a lot of quality settings and all that kind of stuff, so you can disable some features (like Ambient Occlusion etc) to get a higher framerate and even turn down the shadow quality for that. I also always try to use the latest "Advanced Lighting" version of Evolved, so you get the best performance possible. Count me on that. I want a lot of users to be able to work with the Mod. But I am no god and the cubemap command of DBP is a bit slow, so there will always be an performance impact. But with good level design you can outrun a lot of problems.
Quote: "Hamburger
Hey DG, do the dynamic shadows work with segments and entities that have an alpha channel in their textures?"
And another question that I waited for someone to ask
For dynamic entities this is easy to be done, as I haven't changed a lot of the code.
For segments and static entities this gets a bit more difficult (for me not for you ^^ ). Because the statics and segments are saved into a "universe.dbo" which I need to load manually, the whole connection to the Textures is gone. So I would need to put in a loading system like in CorVus Mod, which than could overload the memory and/or push the loading times up some more time. I will need to find a way around this and I am sure I will. But right now I don't have an idea for that. Maybe I can scan an array for the textures, don't know. But as time goes by, I will find a way for that too. I'm sure.
So if there is anything else you want to ask, just do it. I will answer your question as soon as I have the time to do so.
For the mod, the work on it is again slowed down, as I still have to do some "real life" work (... well something else than coding ^^ ). Will keep you informed of new updates (and probably with a new video again).
DG
