I've tried this out verbatim, however I wasn't really noticing a difference. One odd thing, though, was when adding the second skin and applying the 512x512 texture, it reverted the first skin to 512x512 as well(Or that's what the bottom bar of the MED skin editor window said("512x512x24"...)); So it's like the first's texture size didn't matter. But, then again, the texture's resolution didn't seem to change so perhaps it didn't actually change.
Anyhow, I created a very visible 512x512 WILDLY colored map(Think many different buckets of brightly colored Circus-like paint being dumped on a canvas.) for testing and applied that as the detail-map; I then tweaked the detail_size in the "main" feature(I'm using the template 5 script) between 1 and 512 at 1, 5, 10, 100, 256, 512, to see if there was any noticeable difference and I noticed not; However, I did notice that in the blackened parts of the first texture, it seemed as if the second texture was attempting to peak through(The blackened spots were outlined with red, blue, green: Bright colors)... So I'm guessing the black parts are interpreted as transparencies and some parts of the second, underlying, skin were showing through. Is this what mipmapping is about? I'm getting the feeling not, but I've never noticed "mipmapping" or "detail-mapping" in games. I've just noticed that in vast desert terrains in the game "Delta Force: Land Warrior"(a 2000 game), they seem to "tile" their extremely large terrains with a desert texture(I doubt they created one 20000x20000 desert picture, though they may've used some inhouse on-the-fly terrain texturer that automatically tiled it; Though, if they did, why doesn't 3dgs offer that functionality?) and thought that's what mipmapping might've been about. How is that possible with 3dgs's suite? Is there a way to tile a texture on a heightmap / terrain without having to lug around the full-honking 100MB terrain texture? I'm searching google now since this would seem to be a pretty widespread game-development problem/stepping-stone.
I think one solution may be just finding a MED-compatible image format that automatically detects tiled-patterns and compresses them accordingingly(.Tif, .Bmp, .Tga, .Pcx, etc.) to a manageable size and using the 20000x20000 picture resolution, but then a problem: Wouldn't the game-engine simply decompress that 100MB to the RAM or Video-Ram? That would seem to be kind of hoggish... >.>
Last edited by swbluto; 11/20/06 22:07.