Color Wheel Mod

"Thzkittengoesroar;12642227" wrote:
Once you are in Live Mode the object color that has been assigned should not increase the number of polys by too much, still resulting in smooth gameplay performance.

OK... I was chuckling out loud at this point ;)

Colors have no relationship whatsoever to polys. Polys relate to object shape. Colors relate to object textures.

And, you described how a color wheel INTERFACE would work, but... TS4 has pre-stored textures for its objects. Exactly like TS2. Everybody who's done a basic TS4 recolor knows this ;) The prospects for TS4 getting a color tool are the same as the prospects for TS2 getting one. When an object is rendered, the complete texture is applied and that's it.

How exactly do you propose to modify these pre-stored texture files at runtime with the player's color choices, and then show the result to the player?

TS3 worked by having a separate compositing process, where the CaST texture was overlaid on the object's base texture, applied to every frame AS IT WAS RENDERED. That was part of the render engine, and it slowed performance because it introduced extra steps to the process of displaying a frame on the screen. The problem wasn't that MORE data was being displayed (that is why too many polys slow things down)... it was that displaying ANY data took more time.

TS4 doesn't have a mechanism like that, and it CAN'T have one without replacing the render engine... which amounts to rebuilding the game from the ground up.

Not trying to be a negative nancy here :p Just trying to inject a little reality (or something close enough to it) into the discussion.