Material Slots Suck

[Mad_Maxine]

you rember way back, before the super patch and everything? We used to see this alot.


But im getting quite an odd thing happen at the moment, I wonderd if anybody could shine some light on this so I can actully play a cool modded carmageddon, for me, and freinds.

I started a total overhaul of the game, Riped out all the old maps, cars, peds, and started one by one.. Well im still on the first, I currently have a hires version of beaver city, and econobricks eagle 5 inplace.
Ok cool works fine, Ill start the peds for this map then opponents.



Yep thats right, I add the new peds in and I get this error.. Odd super patch IS installed. so I start looking into my peds, See im not good at peds, I use cared, so they have multiple textures, Im sure you know this, each of my ped containes 11 - 18 textures,

Ive been playing with settings, and doing some maths so heres some numbers for you.

I can have 8 diffrent types of peds, but when I add the 9th, it causes the material slots error.

So lets look at numbers.

Number of textures on Map: 209
Number of textures on car: 66
Number textures on 8 peds:
Ped 1: 14
Ped 2: 15
Ped 3: 14
Ped 4: 14
Ped 5: 11
Ped 6: 16
Ped 7: 16
Ped 8: 18

Total number of textures ingame at that moment: 393

Ok so you may think im just overloading the game, right? Adding the last game would push the total textures up to. 411, so this means the limit of total textures is something betwene 393 - 411?

But wait. I tried the race with an opponent.

Opponent car textures: 41

Total textures ingame: 434

So 411 textures is too many, but 434 is ok?

Can someone kindly explain to me, what the fuck is going on? before I brake something.

[QTZ]

Oh I see, you like backgrounds ;) Never mind...

I guess you are talking about C2. I haven't seen this error...

But for errors tracing I'm using ProcessMonitor (or older FileMon). It show process activity. So we can see on which file game crash or at least which files are loaded / accessed so far.

[coffeycup]

Well, I'm not 100% sure but I think nine peds is too many. I get that error when I try to add too many different types of peds or ped groups.

400+ textures is ok. D_B and I had four hundred and something textures in the Maxed Out map.

[Deep_Blue]

Nah..... 386 in Maxed Out!

(I just checked.)

[Toshiba-3]

Maximum amount of textures we've been able to load in C2 was around 900-960 I think (with the GTA2 cities). There were no peds and only a few opponents. What I find a bit odd is that a part of the materials just didn't load (the ones in excess) and rendered white, thus no error message. Even though there were as many materials as there were textures.

What I think is that the game as differently sized material pools in memory for each kind of ingame elements. Maxine's mod here tries load ped models with a total amount of materials higher than 100-120. I guess the game never expected this many materials as it's used to have 1 or maybe 2 materials per ped in the original game.

I'm not sure there's a hard limit for materials when it comes to actual track mesh and car models. There sure is a limit texture-wise though and it might not actually be the number of textures but the total weight of it all. (900+ textures I explained were all 64² bitmaps)
We should run tests etc. but is it still really worth it?

[coffeycup]

Yeah, I think the error message is actually telling the truth. Too many ped materials.

But I get this error even with the 1 texture peds if I mix too many ped groups.

[Mad_Maxine]

Ive had a lot of peds in one group before.

Meh whatever, ill jsut have to limit the use, Its eaitehr limit the peds of texture in plaything.... wich is harder than getting banned from carmageddon.com

Ahh, I wish I dident make everything in cared.. but I do :P