Those bomb meshes are pretty clean & nicely done. I value a good reseach and doing something properly than doing something with "frankenstyle". So Zorin is on a right track here.
I'd say that the bombs are just slightly too "fat" and feel like unfinished & un-optimized. Most don't have any LODs or shadows meshes and textures don't really need to be that big. This is a flight sim, not an ordinance sim. Is it really necessary to see all small prints on a bomb, but you cannot see equally big texts on a plane?
Pretty much all bombs could be optimized with small work to be few hundred polys lighter. I modified for test one Luftwaffe bomb and in five minutes it lost about 200 polys without changing the shape at all.
Well 200 polys for modern GPUs is nothing, but if everyone ignores the specs and go totally overkill with polycount & texture size, then we will soon have sim that doesn't run well on older PCs. This isn't overkill, but something like over 1000 polys for cannon barrel or ~200Mb textures for pit is.
Here's another quick edit of that US bomb:
378 polys, 256x256 texture (no alpha layer). Just by removing obsolete polys and mapping it so that it wastes less space so text can be bigger.
Basic shape is still same. Same number of "cylinder" segments, except in the front where they are not needed.
After all this is old game with many very low poly planes. I don't see much point of attaching something high poly to a low poly plane (1000 poly cannon barrel is good example). It's all about keeping the balance with existing stuff.
12-05-2009, 10:07 PM
Threaded Mode