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Hey guys I've got a suggestion for SoaSE Rebellion. It always annoys me a bit when ships go to warp to another planet but the effect of the warp is at a much lower frame rate than the rest of the game. It would be nice to have the effect be at least 60 fps to match the rest game as a setting or something. Would this be possible?
Maybe if you lower the quality of your ship effects you will see an increase in FPS. That would make the jump effects less pretty to look at though...
What I mean is, I get around 60 fps but when I zoom into the jump effect, it is a noticeably lower frame rate than everything moving around it.
Its a known issue. There is a similar FPS drop (though not as severe) in Trinity during fleet phase jump startups.
Lowering the quality of ship effects has NO effect on a TGA texture. TGA textures have no Mip Mapping capability. Most of the particle effects use TGA format. Even on lowest settings a TGA texture remains the same resolution. Which is why we replaced all of the TGA textures with DDS in TSOP. This was because of DDS formats mip mapping ability, and it worked on the particles.
No worry's, You don't know unless you ask right? 
The only details that get changed when you set high, medium, low in the options are the ship, structure, and planet textures, because they use DDS format. Some of the particles use DDS as well, but very few of them, and they get changed with the settings too. However, the ones that use TGA format remain at max resolution no matter what the settings you use. I tried to talk IC into using pure DDS format just for this issue, but they insisted TGA was a better format. Which it is from a detail perspective. A TGA texture is better looking, because DDS does lose some detail with compression. However the mip mapping ability of DDS is the one pro that eliminates all of the cons IMO. I can live with a little detail loss for smoother performance. In TSOP i proved the point, because most of the particle textures were reduced in size by half, and converted to DDS, and all, but the most nit picky of players didn't notice any difference in game.
I don't think you quite understand my problem, or maybe I don't understand your answer, but when zoomed in everything else in the view (such as the ships flying around) are running at 60 fps (or at least something very smooth). Only the warp effect is at a lower frame rate. To me it seems that this texture file has a limit to it's frame rate. Maybe that would clear things up a bit.
The jump texture runs less smooth because it is quite a 'heavy' animation, compared to most other effects in the game.
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