CF Update - lunaran.com

# Lunaran.com Matthew Breit Level Designer | Texture Artist

## CF Update

#### Mon, Jul 16th, 2001 | 10:34pm

I've got the Coriolis Force .plan update PHP and MySQL code all assembled and stitched together. Almost all of it was taken from other PHP I had written before for both news updating here and for the new website intended to support a new generation of my old Star Wars sim, the Liberator, except the RPG sort of petered out before I could finish and I've had no reason to pursue it (althoug any SW fans out there who'd be interested in an IRC sim can e-mail me. :D

Anyway ... I'm not sure if I'm going to go to the trouble of actually testing/implementing the code yet as I'm not sure how much use it would get from anyone other than me, although I also can't imagine myself typically updating the news here for anything other than map releases. :P The system would work as a sort of combination .plan/news page, where every now and then if one of us has some major bit of information relating to their progress on the mod and work they're doing, they could add their own little news update to the page, sort of as a legacy of why I still designate each of these news posts as having been written by Lunaran (see subject line).

The dropship I built for Coriolis Force last year was ugly, but the interior I built was still pretty cool looking, so I redesigned and rebuilt a new dropship exterior around it. It's quite a bit bigger and more dropship looking (the old one was based rather heavily on the Viper from Quake2, right down to the shark mouth on the bottom of the nosecone), with more detail. I also decided to texture the whole thing in 1:2 scale textures (like all of Q3) rather than 1:1 scale as I had done to the old one for reasons I couldn't quite remember.

But, I noticed that as I ran around it in Q3 if I stood and faced the right angle my framerate would suddenly drop by 90%. Suddenly, I remembered the problem, having encountered it once before with my contract work.

Q3 was using too much texture memory to render that particular angle, so hard drive swapping was bringing the game to its knees. I realized then why I had thought it a good idea to use 1:1 scale textures on the old dropship, although I should have done it the other way around as the old ship had half the surface area to cover.

I tried scaling the textures I had done down to 1:1 res and reapplying them, but it just looked so ugly compared to before I just had to try and find some alternative. I should just buckle down and accept that nobody else has seen the 1:2 version so the 1:1 version won't look that bad to them, but I'm a perfectionist.
And no you can't see a screenshot of it. :D