RTS texture sizes

TechSmith

After trying my hand at a few mods and not liking the experience much, I've come to the decision to make my own little game. my high poly skills make me go EWWWWWW, so I've decided a simple RTS game might be fun. I'm going to buy the TORQUE engine with an Indie license, and get the RTS starter kit. This should happen after ny wonderful move to the Washingtomn state area.

my nain question for the informed persons of polycount would be what are the vertice/polygon count, and texture sizes used in RTS games?

TechSmith

Unfortunately I don't know the tech specs of the game yet. I haven't purchased the engine at this time and this is an idea in its infancy. I'm thinking of being able to have up to 200 lowpolygon units onscreen at one time. There will be no pixel/vertex shaders. No bump mapping or realtime lighting.
I'm not really asking asking for concrete "DO THIS" advice. I'm just wondering if someone had some genral advice on the content creation side. I guess that after loking at some of the newer RTS games out there my definition of low polygon game art is a bit dated.

Joshua Stubbles

Games like the Warhammer RTS titles use 512x512 textures on quite a few units. The first P.O.S game I worked on was an RTS, and we used 128x128 mostly. We had a 'high' setting though, which used 256x256 maps.

You might want to consider using vertex shaders though, as you'd get much more performance. Making the CPU compute all of the vertecies of skinned objects is quite a load.

KDR_11k

200 units means nothing for your texture memory. How many DIFFERENT units are there? Make sure all the different textures plus a reasonable number of environment textures could fit into texture memory because they could all be in view during one frame. If you have only three different units you can probably use any tex size you fancy (though considering the viewpoint the player will use in most RTSes you don't need to go that high) as you don't need to load the textures once for every instance of the unit. I suppose with DXT and not THAT many different unit types you could almost go up to UT2004 specs but I don't think there's a point in that.

And how will you handle team colors?

TechSmith

AT last count there were going to be 12 different charcters clsses. So 12 distinct textures for the troops. I haven't come up with the buildings,defenses, or weapons yet so I'm not sure about those.
To tell the truth I haven't even thought about team colors yet. The opposing sides will be of different races. Monster VS human. Just think poor mans warhammer made by a noob.

Keg

also wouldn't how close the camera can get to the action play a factor in the texture size? Vassago's recommendations sound about right. about 512 if you're going warhammer style, maybe 128 if you're doing something similar to total annilhation or warcraft 3

Joshua Stubbles

Team colors are usually handled via a texture-less material, or through vertex colors of a blank material. Look at Command & Conquer: Generals to get an idea on what I mean. Their team color areas are simple colored polys, no texture at all. It's a reletively easy and cost-free way to do it.

Toomas

I would go for 256.
And i would do team colors with masks and overlay 1-pixel "textures".

TechSmith

Sorry about the slow response.I've been busy packing. 1 week until the move to Washington state Seattle area.

Anyway thanks for the advice/info. should be about 2-3 months till I get the game engine. I'll keep you guys updated when I actually get to working on it (might be pleading for help too )

John Warner

http://www.companyofheroesgame.com - that's what i'm currently workin on. on some stuff we use pretty damn large textures, but there's no usualy much wasted space. i map multiple sections onto the same UV section, just slightly differently, if i can make it look good.

it depends on what you want your game to run on.

common sense wins in this department. since your making the game yourself, if you can fit the detail on a smaller texture and make it look nice, do so. if you've got monkeys working for you, then you're gonna have to decide on stats based on what you want the game to look like.

Thegodzero

I have been making my guys using 64x textures and around 500-600 polygons. Then again i have been using normal maps.

Joshua Stubbles

Ah, what a punk, John
That game looks amazing, I'm jealous. RTS is my favortie genre.