Polycount and material maps

[Varine]

Does anyone know the average polycount per unit? I've looked a few that were 10,000+, but I'm guessing that more accurately they're typically around 5-7500 and want someone to agree with me or give me better data so that I can set polygon limits and work on reduction when I need to.

Also, as I understand it, I can use some kind of a normal map but haven't found much information on it; I keep getting directed to people talking about whether game maps are normal. Does anyone have more information on it? Like can I write my own shaders?

 

[Dr Super Good]

You can not write your own shaders... Whoever told you that was wrong.

SC2 supports 4 texture layers. There are lighting normals (make edges smoother), emmision map (make stuff glow) and ofcourse the normal colour layer. I do not know what the fourth layer is but some units use it.

The usual polly count varies. Small units like marines have about 1-2K. Large units like battlecruisers have 5K. The thors have 10K due to all their transformations.

Frankly, if you are modeling a hero or large units, 10K is no issue. Only if you are modeling a common unit like a clone trooper for a starwars map would poly count need to be a real limiting factor.

This still is no excuse to be lazy and not optimize your models. Do not add details which are not nescescary.

 

[AionCannonzSC2]

i read a post on temliquid about poly counts being similar to War3 because normal maps let you add a lot more detail to the textures

 

[Varine]

I do game design professionally, I'm aware of what I'm doing (although I'm used to not really having to constrain the polygons much). I've just never used SCII before, and I'm kind of busy and don't want to spend much extra time doing research. And no one told me I could write my own shaders, that was mostly me hoping I could as there is something specific I want to do.

Does it use RGB normals, or a grayscale bump map?

 

[Dr Super Good]

RGB. They also support alpha channel although that may or may not do anything (as all texture layers are the same format).
They are also not compressed using JPEG lossy compression like WC3's were mostly. Instead they use a more graphic card friendly lossy compression format difined by the .dds file specifications which prety much allows them to read the file conent directly into a texture buffer. Although lossy, it is designed to give the illusion of a higher resolution textre (more sharp) by allowing as much as a 4:1 compression ratio.

 

[Varine]

Okay good. I really hate doing it in grayscale, I'm not even sure how to render it out right.

And yes good, I hated .jpeg. Is the maximum resolution 1024x1024?

 

[Dr Super Good]

I do not think there is a maximum resolution outside of stupidly large numbers.

 

[Varine]

There has to be one somewhere that the renderer will take, maybe not one you can import. I've never seen an engine without one I don't think, except apparently id Tech 5, but I'm pretty sure they just have some insanely high number for terrain and streaming. So long as it goes to 1024x1024, maybe higher for some things. If I can do the math right I might be able to go higher by making sure I know what will render, but 1024 works.

Thanks.

 

[Dr Super Good]

They also are not restricted to powers of 2. A 333*333 texture is perfectly acceptable in SC2 (well not visually as that would be rather low resolution).

 

[Varine]

mmkay. And is there a maximum file size like in Warcraft that I need to abide by?

 

[Dr Super Good]

Maps and mods are restricted to certain archive sizes for publishing.

The difference is that a map can reference any number of published mods (even from other people) which in theory mean there is no limit on content (although you may be limitied in what content you can publish).

 

[Varine]

Okay, so basically I could have a multiplayer map that would otherwise be, say, 100 megs, but I can call on a mod that contains the resources and just require the player to have that?

 

[Dr Super Good]

Yes, battlenet will automatically download the mods as they are needed.

The advantage of this is a mod can supply content for many maps (like a model pack) meaning that the content need only be downloaded once for all maps that use it.

In any case, the actual map size limit is larger than WC3 (you can read it by going to publish, it lists the exact restrictions there). With mods (even though those have a limited size) you can easilly have near infinite content by loading many mods.

 

[Varine]

Oh wow, that's awesome. So I can just put all of the graphical assets into a set of mods that can be drawn on from multiple maps, and then just have the map with the programming and placement and whatnot?

 

[Dr Super Good]

I believe so, that is what the blizzard maps did.

 

[Varine]

mmkay, I think I got enough to get me a little ways along. Thank you so much!