Ok, so an odd thing happened to me last night. After posting that i couldn't use OZ on either my 32 bit XP or my new 64 bit XP system, and it was no longer working on my older desktop, i decided to give it one more try on the old machine via remote desktop rather then move the tower over and reset all the cables. After about 30 seconds on the other machine i remembered that I had always had issues with OZ 8.5 or newer... and that I used to use 8.3 for stuff and it worked flawlessly. Remembering this, I opened OZ 8.3 and found that via Remote Desktop the terrain would not show up on screen however it was in fact present and there. I decided to tell it to compile which went without a hitch. 10 seconds later I was in game running around my new test terrain.
Very excited about this as i finally remember that the issue for me was happening with any version of OZ after 8.3. Just happy I kept the old one.
My happiness was short lived however due to the fact that the texture that I had created for the terrain, tho working, was very badly smeared and misformed almost as tho when the compiler ran, it changed the texture from a 2048x2048 to something closer to 512x512 or smaller. It appears as tho it sorta broke my huge texture into smaller tiles and then tried to blend the edges... quite poorly. Think of having a picture printed on paper sprinkled with a fine mist of water... very odd looking and the blended edges for water, rock, grass, and even the finer details within the rock are gone. Also, the shadows that I baked onto the texture to boost realism are almost grey rather then a dark black and look like eraser smears... which puzzles me.
Another note is that while 3dsmax 2010 is supported and does work for exporting, and OZ does work with these files... If i try to import my "moderately good" looking trees, OZ crashes upon compile. The trunks import fine, but the leaves/branches imported through a seperate file do not work.
I at first thought perhaps it was the total number of polys or verticies, but seeing as Max limits exports to 64k of either polys or verts, and my terrain is at 63,348, and works correcty, I am begining to wonder what the issue is.
My first thought is that there are too many high res textures being used... my branches use a 2048x2048 texture to help balance for lack of poly count... so this will be my first place to check.
As far as tutorials go... I am still working on the sound issue, and after changing drivers a few times with no luck, i may just have to create a virtual sound driver to shunt the audio input... or perhaps record audio on another machine and overlay it as I go.
Wind, if u are reading this, and know why perhaps that OZ 8.3 would work, but any newer version doesnt, please let me know. I also now realise why we were having memory issues with our old zone imports seeing as the number of high res textures was beyond insane. To give u an idea, We were using between 15 and 30 exported meshes stacked ontop of one another each with roughly the max number of polys/verts... and each with at least 15 high res textures. We were getting asked for roughly 1 terabite of memory to continue the operation... perhaps Our new work machine cluster will have better luck.
EternalBlack
Member of OrisonIndustries
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