Lag from high quality textures

[Thunder103093]

I've noticed on some of my tracks that they lag when i have alot of "high quality" textures. or atleast i think that is the reason as i can't think of any other reason. Is there a way to confirm this? my tracks that lag are 2015 MTWS Championship, MTWS 2018 Houston & MTWS 2019 Las Vegas, i'm remaking B-Day World Finals 1 right now using this new dirt texture i made & its a simple paint with no added stuff on the paint but its lagging when i'm driving on the track testing & i don't get it. Here is a dirt texture i made if anyone wants to look at it

[Cale]

You should be using 64x64 textures for ground wherever possible, not 256x256.

[Thunder103093]

sorry for the late reply, is that the reason? i used 256 since alot of the dirt textures i used over the years used that size, 64 was very rarely used. I'll remake them & see if that makes the difference

[Fila]

Yes that is the reason. The game engine does not work well with 256x256 files. It's a limitation of the graphics engine from that time and there is simply no way around it. The only way to fix this is by upgrading the game to use DirectX9/OpenGL (at a minimum) on it's own (not through a wrapper) but that is sadly above my limited skillset and unless someone can step in and help with that, I will not be able to achieve it any time soon.

[SparkTB11]

Seems to me the only people that can help out at this point with porting the game to DX9/OpenGL would be someone from the Sim-Monsters community, at least that’s where the former MTM2 community (or dragger community if you will) are now residing when Rigs Of Rods came to surface 10 years ago, although it’s just a question of whenever or not they’ll have the heart to come back and help out.

[Slayer]

Yes that is the reason. The game engine does not work well with 256x256 files. It's a limitation of the graphics engine from that time and there is simply no way around it. The only way to fix this is by upgrading the game to use DirectX9/OpenGL (at a minimum) on it's own (not through a wrapper) but that is sadly above my limited skillset and unless someone can step in and help with that, I will not be able to achieve it any time soon.

Sorry I'm stumped on it too

[wiesshund]

Yes that is the reason. The game engine does not work well with 256x256 files. It's a limitation of the graphics engine from that time and there is simply no way around it. The only way to fix this is by upgrading the game to use DirectX9/OpenGL (at a minimum) on it's own (not through a wrapper) but that is sadly above my limited skillset and unless someone can step in and help with that, I will not be able to achieve it any time soon.

If you were going to take on that project, you may as well just do directly to directX 11/12
1) you will avoid just running right into some API dead ends
2) It is current and active, and will be for quite some time, lot of resources to draw on.

Downside is, winXP support goes Bye Bye, which from a programming standpoint is not exactly a bad thing.

Game was written in what? DirectX 5.2?

Oh, the things you could do with it
Could really mimic the monster truck physics and better articulate the models, include more terrain physics
Could also easily multi thread the game process as well as offload the graphics calcs onto the GPU.

[Fila]

Yup, written for DirectX 5. DirectX7 apparently fixed some of the 256x256 texture lag the game has already, lol.

[Slayer]

It would be a complete engine re-write to convert to dx11. Everything would have to be started from scratch. It's not really possible.
I can't even find it, but it would be fun to change the gravity constant in the game.

[Cale]

So, hot take: the limitations of this game are what give it charm. You can do hyper-detailed stuff in Evo or Evo 2 and it will look amazing and still drive similar, if you want to go that route. But the low-res, low-poly look of MTM2 is part of why I love the game - it's a moment in time, and that's what makes it special.

To this end I spent a chunk of last week going back and making level of detail models for the HD trucks, by reducing textures to 64x64 the further trucks go out, to prevent some of the lagginess of the longer draw distances. Still have 5 or 6 trucks to do and then gotta recompile everything into a pod, which is a bit of a PITA due to the 2.1 TRKs...but, I want these things to work well. Anyhow, since the textures are straight resizes of the 256x256 ones, there's some edge mapping issues that won't be visible at a distance, but even then, there's a certain quaintness to these low-res monsters, no?

mtm2hdlowres.jpg

[Thunder103093]

I find it so funny that my problem lead to a big thread on the textures on the update pack lmao
But i just finished my update of the MTWS 2018 Houston with making the textures being 64x64 & it seemed to work. So thanks for telling me this, but i got a question. If its really the reason why some of my trucks have lag was because of them being 256x256, why are many of my older tracks that use textures that others made that WERE 256x256 not lagging? heck even my Custom Denver 2020 Track was the last one i used 256x256 & that doesn't lag, why is that?

[Fila]

It depends on the amount of 256x256. Endgine can handle up to a certain number (which I don't know what it is) and is a combination of trucks/models/road textures that triggers the lag.

[SLO_COPE]

Oh, the things you could do with it
Could really mimic the monster truck physics and better articulate the models, include more terrain physics

One of the things I've always loved about MTM 2 was the game physics. Unrealistic? Sure, but it distinguishes itself from any other racing game I've ever played, which is one of the reasons I fell in love with it in the first place. I recall years ago when people were leaving the game for "new and improved" forms of entertainment (w/respect to racing games), saying that MTM was too old to keep playing. I simply couldn't wrap my head around it. Yes, some of the other games were fun, but nothing compared to MTM 2 in my opinion, especially when you throw in track/truck add-ons.

Didn't mean to go off-topic, but it seems as though Thunder got his answer, so I figured it was safe. ;)