: If you have an older machine, you might have noticed a slight (or not so
: slight) delay in gameplay every time an new texture must be loaded.
: Typically, what you'll observe is that a door that is opening stops for a
: brief moment before opening the rest of the way. Some levels (eg. Acme
: Station) are virtually unplayable using high-res textures and OpenGL on
: older machines due to the inherent lag, which is usually sufficent for the
: Pfhor to kill the player while they wait for the textures to load and to
: regain control of the marine. Now imagine having to load a high-resolution
: animated sprite for a monster or a weapon, and to do so for all monsters
: in view. Unless you have a really high-end graphics card, you would
: quickly run out of room for all the animated sprites and would have to
: continuously reload them - it would totally wreck the game.
: With 3D models, rendering and animation is done entirely in hardware in
: OpenGL. Because the models are expressed in terms of the geometry using
: mathematical relationships, the memory requirements are actually quite
: small. Assuming the number of polys in each model is kept relatively
: small, most graphics cards will be able to handle rendering in real-time.
: In addition, modern software for 3D rendering actually makes the process
: of generating animated 3D models musch simpler than working with animated
: sprites. The develoment time for 3D models is thus much shorter than for
: high-res sprites.
: In terms of playability on older machines - I hear you! The beauty of the AO
: engine is that as long as scenario makers include the traditional format
: shapes file, you will always be able to play Marathon on older hardware,
: minus the OpenGL effects.
Oh, I see. Ok, I have a 350 Mhz, 192 Mb ram, 8 Mb rage 128, G3 iMac. M1A1 with the "smaller" hires textures looked and played great. So as long as I can have that, i'll be happy. :-)
