Ok i'm officially testing the new shade-c (sent yesterday by havoc to all betatesters) on Wasteland. Needs a lot of twicking before i can show new screenshots, hang in there.
But the quality has improved a lot already compared to the last shade-c version. Now we have LPP SSAO and antialiasing included all in within shade-c

Can you maybe try to work on some gameplay instead of tweaking graphics every day?

i second and third that...

That depends on Damocles, he's the programmer. I'm the 3D artist hehe

so when will you have some of the updated shade c screens?

Even as a programmer I can tell you it is better to make the graphics more pretty. If I recode some functions and make them 5 times faster, no one will ever know. If an artist draws a picture 5 times better than before, people sing of it.

I'm redoing the canyon level 4 times bigger then the previous one, with better optimized lods, fine tuning character animations, and the new shade-c features.
At the moment I've finished remodeling the new level in 3dsmax, I need some time to re-export all the cliffs (better looking rocks now), terrain chunks, etc etc. Keep in mind that I have commercial so I have to do Lods manually and export them one by one (that takes a lot of time).

I'm constantly in contact with Havoc asking for support on how to use the new features smartly preventing framerate dropdowns (the quality compared to the previous shade-c pack is now unbelievable thanks to its new features LPP SSAO MLAA etc etc).

I've also allowed HeelX to use my post-nuclear and medieval (older project) assets to improve his SSAO Shader environments, and I'm probably going to integrate his tools later in the game.

I'm also still leveling 4 characters in World of Warcraft 6 lvl85, 1 lvl81 and 3 lvl80.. these folks deserve to be leveled up during relaxing time hahaha

I also have exams in 2 weeks, I need to study.

Hang in there, I'm not willing to abandon the project but I'm mostly on my own at the moment (which depresses me a little), I haven't heard from damocles in a long time. I assume he's very busy with his primary commitments and I have no other support. It would have been great to have a committed programmer but since nobody is making a living out of this at its current state I can't pretend from anybody.

Managing LOD yourself, gives you more work, but lot better control on wich vertex to weld/supress !

I relax in other ways than WOW , but if it relax you is what really matters
Take a break is really important !

Did you tried to use the built-in LOD manager of Gamestudio?

Yes indeed !
I used 3 LOD of a model, and LOD works fine !
It was a cartoon house well detailled, and i welded vertex
for the other stages in order to decrease polycount.

I'm suprised, A8 people don't using it so much, caus it's lot
of frame rate gain ! Any AAA engine use it a lot, sometimes
they don't hesitate to use 5 LOD, where it's hard to notice the
transition

But i made my own in Script for some sort of LOD in Oblivion style :
Detail objects only appear when camera comes near ; and they appear with a progressive alpha fading. So the object don't have a LOD in fact, but that technique allow to save lot of
GPU power !
Each polygon or pixel you don't draw is lot of power saved !