I've been having the nastiest problem of late with tilesets such as Castle Exterior, rural (a.k.a. TNO) and Chandigar's Aztec Exterior Redux. Namely, with my texture animations turned on I get low FPS in areas where there is water using these tilesets. If I don't have water in the area, or if I turn texture animations off, the FPS returns to normal. I've determined that there is something about the water textures in these tilesets that is very intensive. I've tried the latest drivers for my video card, including Omegas, but the problem just keeps coming back. I know a solution, but not how to go about doing it so I thought I'd ask about it here. Here is my solution:
The water needs to be replaced with a less intensive version. However...
I have been unsuccessful in my own attempts to do such a swap. So far, I've tried taking the water .tga from regular rural and renaming it to what Chandigar had in Aztec Exterior Redux, then replacing his with mine, but that didn't seem to do any good... so I assume there is a bit more to this kind of texture swapping than just the .tgas themselves. What is it that I need to do, other than replacing the .tga files for the water? Thanks in advance for whatever help can be offered.
I presume you've been renaming the .txi file that had the same name as the original water as well? Apart from that, I don't know what to say to you. Lord Rosenkrantz might have a few ideas...
Chandigar's tileset doesn't have a .txi file in it anywhere, so adding the one from standard rural wouldn't help. I've been using .Set File Editor BETA 0.85 from the Vault, and although it lists all the terrain features it doesn't tell me what their associated textures are. Is there any program available that would display the names of the textures associated with the water terrain in the tilesets I'm working with? That would help immensely.
I figured out what it was that I was doing wrong...
Chandigar's .txi file and water .tga were completely different files than the ones I was working with. I had them confused with something else. Plus, in order to swap the water textures, I had to replace the .tga file with the water .tga from Rural and the .txi file with the water .txi from Rural.
NOT just the .tga like I was doing initially. So... I thank you very much for letting me know about the .txi file, since otherwise I wouldn't even have known to look for it! The swap worked like a charm, too, and now I know it is a viable fix for the problem I was having with the texture animations.
Interesting, did you figure out what the problem was? Does the water look the same? I think I grabbed the water.tga and the txi from a BW tileset to begin with...
Yes, the problem was that I had the wrong .tga and didn't know about the .txi file. Once I had the correct .tga and .txi that made it all possible.
Also, yes, the water looked and behaved very differently between the fix I applied and the original. The difference in how it looked was in the rippling animation of the water itself. The fixed version, indeed, seemed to have a faster style to it's animation, while before it was slower. For some reason, the behavior was a vast improvement once the texture was swapped with the water from standard Rural. It went from an FPS of like 15 to 32 all the way up to FPS around 56 to 84 in heavily built-up areas of a 16x16 size. The lowest FPS in the fixed version, coming in at around 42 to 65 FPS.
It wasn't just your Aztec Exterior Redux set, though, but also I noticed the identical situation with Maxam's Classic Dungeon tileset and it's water. (So, I also applied my fix to that tileset as well, and it too had a large performance gain!) In my CCR&BEXv5 tileset compilation, I replaced both tilesets with the fixed versions and am using them in one of my module projects that I'm working on. Both of these tilesets are favorites of mine.
The only cases where it was not possible to apply this fix, at least for me, was with the Castle Exterior, rural (TNO) and Steamworks tilesets. With TNO it was due to the fact that A.) Every one of it's files are not named with names but rather with numbers. This made it impossible to distinguish which .tga and .txi files applied to the water and not to something else, at least without having to go through all of them individually... which would take a lot longer than I was prepared for. And B.) Perhaps the fix may not have worked 100%, due to the fact the TNO's water uses up and down animations that standard Rural's water does not. I would have had to see the results in-game to be sure, though, and due to the aforementioned numerical file system that just wasn't on the agenda for the time being.
With Steamworks, reason A.) was the same as with TNO: numerical files instead of named files. and reason B.) standard Rural's water looks nothing like steam. But, otherwise, my texture swap fix could be used for pretty much any existing tilesets that have water needing a performance gain.
Lastly, let me just say that, Chandigar, your tilesets are some of the very best I have ever seen on the Vault! Your gothic greenhouse was amazing, and the jungle terrain from your Aztec Redux set was equally inspired. And one of my favorite features (from the Aztec set), has to be the mountians that have the option of stone or snow! All in all, very quality work indeed.
chaos_theocrat wrote:Lastly, let me just say that, Chandigar, your tilesets are some of the very best I have ever seen on the Vault! Your gothic greenhouse was amazing, and the jungle terrain from your Aztec Redux set was equally inspired. And one of my favorite features (from the Aztec set), has to be the mountians that have the option of stone or snow! All in all, very quality work indeed.
I've been on a modern kick lately though... I need to pack up this office set and promised to help with a spaceship conversion but thats probably it... mainly because: Good news for me, I just got married, Bad news for my nwn hobby, I just got married
Thanks in advance for whatever help can be offered. 
