2010-09-20, 01:19 PM
About that flat grass texture. It's just a pet peeve of mine. You see it in a number of indie games, and I have a feeling it's probably the same texture more or less every time. I've never seen grass like that in a big studio game, and I reckon the reason why is the same reason it unsettles me. It looks detail rich at first, but it's just unnatural looking, and grass should be the last thing in your game drawing attention from the players eye, much less demanding it. Because frankly grass may well be the single toughest thing to render realistically, and any game that would do so will probably have to devote a good chunk of it's processing time to grass in grassy areas (and most consumers aren't thinking about how great the grass will be when they reach for their wallet)
PS: I'm not at all sure (no idea at all really) what exactly you mean by "texture overlap" (I'm going to assume lining up the seams between textures) but it reminds me of I think a real prob Som seems to have. The problem really isn't with Som. As much as the texture mapping on the tiles. The floors (just for instance) seem to be off by about one texel (pretty much just like the .mdl files) which makes them really jar when two different tiles are placed side by side with different rotations. Ie. the grain in a wood floor (for example) will be a texel off along the seam. I wish there was some slight adjustment I could make with Ex to correct for that, but I remember trying everything one day without satisfaction. I might sit down and give it some real thought again some time. Worst case scenario they need to all be adjusted by hand. And I have a feeling the textures don't necessarily wrap in all four directions, so a little "Photoshopping" might also be in order. However if you're making all your map tiles from scratch you probably don't need to worry about this for your game. And your game (Rathmor) should be interesting because it won't suffer from that failing in the presentation dept.
PS: I'm not at all sure (no idea at all really) what exactly you mean by "texture overlap" (I'm going to assume lining up the seams between textures) but it reminds me of I think a real prob Som seems to have. The problem really isn't with Som. As much as the texture mapping on the tiles. The floors (just for instance) seem to be off by about one texel (pretty much just like the .mdl files) which makes them really jar when two different tiles are placed side by side with different rotations. Ie. the grain in a wood floor (for example) will be a texel off along the seam. I wish there was some slight adjustment I could make with Ex to correct for that, but I remember trying everything one day without satisfaction. I might sit down and give it some real thought again some time. Worst case scenario they need to all be adjusted by hand. And I have a feeling the textures don't necessarily wrap in all four directions, so a little "Photoshopping" might also be in order. However if you're making all your map tiles from scratch you probably don't need to worry about this for your game. And your game (Rathmor) should be interesting because it won't suffer from that failing in the presentation dept.