Progress Update: Now fortnightly!

G'day all, 

Don't feel like the old format was working for me, so I'm shaking things up and trying something different- doing these in shorter form, faster. 

So, here's what's been going on in the last fortnight or so- 

I got to a point where I was comfortable pausing the texture work to improve the technical side of the mod, bring that forward a few pegs. To that end, A lot of the first week was going through, duping and hooking classes/strings so the different texture variants (Black/Tan/Camo) are all working in game. 

The next big task on the technical side is the visual geometry LODs- Most engine do this automatically, but Arma is one of those special cases where you do it manually. Rather than just letting vertex crunch and jumble happen automatically, I am full into a process of doing hand-crafted culling the idea being to cut out as much extra polys as possible why roughly retaining as much of the silhouette as possible- this way it doesn't feel like it's actually degrading visually. My goal is generally to get to around half the primary LOD's triangle and vertex count and with the SCARs specifically, overall that ended up actually cutting more like 2/3. 

As you can see from the quick images here, this is generally what the process looks like. Keep in mind that these LODs might be as much as 10% of the size of the screen max in game. 

If you've been following my twitter, and were wondering what was up with that SCAR-L -this is what was up with that. 

Anyway, all the Meshes are done now and as of Wednesday they're going into the P3D files and getting any extra implementation work done to them (make sure the correct selections for camo and such are all set up).Sticking the LODs in will keep me going for a couple more days, then its back to polish off all the remaining textures.

So, that basically where I'm at. I'll keep you all in the loop, and if I keep to the cycle here, I'll be back with more to report in another fortnight .

Have a good one.