| Subject: Replacement of 3D Client Terrain |
Author:
Darkstone News
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Date Posted: Sat, Feb 08 2003, 01:19pm
In reply to:
Darkstone News
's message, "New weapons for AoS *pics*" on Thu, Feb 06 2003, 01:30pm
Vex (Designer - Ultima Online) has posted a thread on the UO.com forums about the recent replacement of the 3D client terrain. You can find the thread here!
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Howdy, y'all. I just wanted to take a moment and explain why we decided to replace the 3D client's terrain artwork with the same artwork used in the 2D client.
Mainly, we did it for world building reasons. Simply, due to the differences in artwork between the two clients, some things that looked great in one client didn't look so hot in the other. The tones of grass and dirt tiles were quite different between the two clients, and other tile sets had more subtle differences. When it came right down to it, we wanted the world to look the same no matter which client you use.
Creating a third totally new terrain tile set wasn't a viable option for lots of reasons. In the end, we went with the 2D client terrain textures because all of the original game terrain and dungeons, and the Lost Lands maps as well, were designed around those tiles. The map looks best when viewed using those tiles.
For those who do prefer the 3D terrain textures, all I can do as apologize. The UO design team stand by our decision to make this change. I can't recommend copying the texture map files from older 3D installs into your client directory, because that could cause patching problems as well as missing images.
I've also read some comments regarding client performance either improving or worsening due to this change. In truth, a texture change like we've done here isn't going to greatly impact performance one way or another. The textures are in most cases the same size as before, and they are all the same color depth. The actual number of textures used hasn't changed significantly, and in our testing process we paid careful attention to video texture memory usage, comparing the 2D and 3D artwork.
If you've seen performance improvements in 3D due to this patch, it's more likely due to the continued efforts of our client programmers, Alai and Greyburn, to optimize the 3D client's performance. In the unlikely event that you've seen performance degradation as of this patch, please visit the Connectivity and Tech forum, where there are always threads to be found discussing 3D client, video card, and driver issues. You're very likely to find help there.
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