Hi together!
I wanted to ask a question that was recently scaring me all the time: What about the memory consumption when using multitexturing shaders? I'm using the ps 1.3 shader by ventilator (found in the wiki) which blends two textures smoothly. I haven't got any problems so far, but as the world our team is creating will tend out to be really huge, I'm scared the VRAM or RAM could run full! How about it? Does the shader use a feature similar to A6's "d3d_texshare" or, if not, how to do it?
Because if things keep like they are at the moment which means every mdl (I'm using the shader on mdls for more flexibility namely concave forms) loads the texture into the VRAM for its own, I will run out of memory in a very, very short time (note: target sys specs are 512 MB RAM / 64MB VRAM)...
Does anyone know about it?

40 views and no one did know anything?
O_O!

Sorry, didn't mean to me impolite or impatient. I was just wondering why so many people are viewing this and no one is answering... maybe the (for me quite slow although DSL) forum speed is guilty?

Shaders definitely use additional memory. With clever scripting, you can avoid a lot of the frame rate loss and memory consumption. A couple points come to mind:

1) If you have multiple terrains, make sure they are sewn together. A crack in your terrains can cause framerate loss, as anything under the terrain (skybox or other) will have to be rendered as well.

2) Load only those terrains that are visible, using ent_create and ent_remove. You do not want to have 16 terrains placed in WED if the player can only see 4 of them at once.

If you plan to stitch your terrains, but dont know how - theres a feature article on it in March edition of 3PM.

3PM March

Thanks for your replies both of you!
I actually planned to do some clever scripting such as ent_remove and ent_create, the point for me now is:
Is there any way to tell the shader itself that it should share the textures used with other objects that have assigned the same shader and are using the same texture/s?
Btw I'm completely idiot to shaders so you would propably have to explain a bit more precise if you do
Thanks in advance!

texture memory usage has nothing to do with shaders.

it depends on wether you use the same textures for all terrains (mtlskin) or separate textures for each terrain (entskin).

of course the first solution will consume much less texture memory because the textures will be shared.

Ahaa thanks thats what I was after!
Ok then I'll give it a try; not sure though which line to change but I'll find out
Thankies ^^

Ok I got it working, thx everybody

New idea! What if you could write a simple code using the ffp to make every model share its skin with any other models that have the same skin? What I mean is, would it be possible to achieve the d3d_textshare effect also with models and terrain without loosing any skinning information on MDLs?
Or is that feature already on the forecast and I didn't notice... just wondering because everybody, including me, is complaining about models each using their own textures instead of sharing them!
Any ideas?