Matrix Games Forums

ORIGINAL: HanBarca

Sorry to bash you guys, but calvinus (the programming team leader) said on the AGEOD forum:
"the map tile for Eastern Mediterranean Sea is 1981 x 2849 pixels"
You can easily check this by looking in in the Data\Graph\Map\Regions directory.

Now, the map is made by areas, and to draw each single area the game must load in memory a bitmap that is up to 16Mb in size. Why in the hell you should need a 1981x2849, 16mb bitmap to display a completely blue area of the map is beyond my capabilities.

That's where memory goes: blue pixels. Come on.

It's a bitmap, that's all. You could paint anything you wish into it, the game engine doesn't have specific cases for painting an area without bitmap.
Maybe they could have put a blue background and no bmp for seas, but then the map edges will be blue also ...

War in the pacific handles the whole pacific map by using 40 bitmaps for a total of 206Mb; World War One uses 6006 bitmaps for a total of 1,07Gb.

That would be ok and nobody would have noticed it if the game had no memory and speed issues, but at its current status I think that's a problem.

As far as I know, the standard methods to handle a large map are:
- loading big rectangular chunks in memory to compose the current view used by the player.
- Highlighted regions are created by binary XOR bitmap masks
- Bitmap size should be compatible with any standard graphic card.

Judging by the graphics used by the game, none of the above has been implemented; Whatever method was used, it obviously creates a problematic memory / CPU load.

Anyway, if you think there's no problem with the graphics, I'll pass your opinion to my CPU [:o]