Took all day finishing up the Net-EA version of the Dark Eldar in the end, but it's done at last. I'm uploading a zip file of them all to dropbox at the moment then will email it to Zombo.

@zombo - I've PMd you a link to the Tau...

Tabletop V2 is now available from the same link as before.

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Epic: Hive Development Thread

Good to see the armies out there Post up if you spot any errors.

How slow or fast do you find the game? Mine works fine once it's in the game but takes a very long time (30-45mins or so) to start a new game on my ancient laptop these days as more armies are added in.

I've taken to making a second copy of armies.txt with all the armies in and then having the actual armies.txt only have the armies I want to use at the moment and it's much better then, only taking 5 minutes or so to load that way. This would also be a good method for those over a slow or limited connection, like Rastaman hosting the game we played via his mobile's internet.

I've noticed mine taking a little while to start a game but nothing like 45 minutes!! It did start slowing down as graphics were added so I'm guessing it must be loading them into memory.

I'm guessing some cheap RAM might help you out Glyn? Depends how old the machine is and how much it can take...

Looks great with all the armies in though - Glyn spotted a couple of minor issues with the Tau that I'll get fixed up today.

It's been slow before, but this was particularly bad. I got back from breakfast and showering and it still hadn't finished loading.

It is likely low RAM but it's too old to be worth adding new RAM. I'd like to buy a new computer when I get a chance, but need to fix up my bike and get money for flights first, so will just have to put up with it for the moment. It works fine when in the game, just takes ages to load into it.

The game loads all graphics into memory when loading the game, so as the game gets bigger it obviously gets slower.

I could look at trying to do it more dynamically, loading duiring the game when units are first used, or when armies are selected?

The other option is to reduce the memory load by reducing the size of the textures. That's the main thing that takes time to load. If you halved the resolution of each unit texture (e.g. from 256x256 to 128x128 for those that start that size) it should reduce the load time by a factor of about 4.

I'll play around today to see if I can do something about it.

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Epic: Hive Development Thread

I certainly hadn't considered that when I did the Tau - redoing all of the Jpegs at around 70% quality should also make a big difference for little difference to in game quality. Some of the larger sprites have been saved at much larger than 256x256 as well...

Sounds like a option, thanks.



I saw that 20mm is 256 pixels so I've been scaling the larger sprites in-line with that e.g. an Executioner Landing module is on a 150mm base so I've made the sprite 1920 by 1920 pixels. Did I do wrong by that? If I make the sprite smaller will the unit display smaller or does the game scale it?

The game scales the skins to the model, so if you reduce the size it'll just be lower resolution.

Realistically, nothing needs to be more than 512x512.

Sorry, that's something I should have explained better in the documentation.

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Epic: Hive Development Thread

Some if the files are weighing in at 2 or 3 meg which is kind of massive!

I've tried converting some of the tga files without alpha channel at 16 bit and that immediately cut the size to around a third on one of the 3 meg files but JPEG is really the way to go I would have thought. You should be able to get them down to 20-150k a piece. Saving them at 70 or even 60 quality would enormously reduce how much it's loading at runtime.

I'm happy to make the changes if you haven't got software to handle it Glyn? Let me know and I can get it done this evening.

making them jpg will actually slow loading times; though it saves disk space the software has to uncompress them when it loads them into memory, which takes longer.

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Epic: Hive Development Thread

Other than the loading time, any comment on the new features?

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Epic: Hive Development Thread

Ah - ok, so smaller tgas is the way forward I guess?

Yes how could I acquire this newer version?