29.10.2014

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- in 9.5, Sherman Firefly will be researchable from Sherman III and Sherman III from Grant (SS: the connection between new/old branches will be Valentine to Archer)
- it’s possible Churchill Gun Carrier will lose the 32pdr gun and will drop to tier 5
- Q: “Back in the day, it was possible to always find a strategy 1vs1″ A: “In +/-3 MM as well?”
- in 9.5, Challenger and Avenger will be mixed into one vehicle. It’s possible those vehicles will exist as separate hulls, when alternative hulls are implemented.
- FV4004 Conway has “frontal armor roughly like a Centurion”, only the FV4005 has paper armor

And now, for interesting news – Storm: “Most likely, we will reject HD resolution” (he means HD texture resolution on high-polygon models), he reasons as such:

“HD textures for one vehicle have cca 80 Mb. 400 tanks * 80 Mb = 32 Gb of textures only for tanks. 80 Mb * 30 tanks in battle = 2,4 Gb in video memory only for tanks. And then there are maps and environmental objects, so the number above can be roughly multiplied by two. Maybe in 10 years from now on, we will return to HD. When resources and internet channels are sufficient.”

This matter was already decided. Storm adds that the display of HD textures on your own tank only was the first thing they did a patch ago to reduce the stress on memory. But after calculating the total size of the game client, it was decided to remove the HD textures altogether.

- individual missions will come in 9.5, along with their respective reward tanks
- there will not be the option to test individual mission tanks before they are implemented
- no large vehicle rebalance is planned for 9.5
- New Year gift tank? “No comment :)”
- Storm on possible E-25 removal from the shop: “Wasn’t my decision. Ask those, who are spreading this piece of information :)”
- apparently, when IS-3 is transformed into HD, it will have worse lower frontal plate angle, but otherwise, the armor level will improve – in case of side armor significantly
- Storm confirms: around 150 HD models are currently in rework

152 thoughts on “29.10.2014”

        • i dont get it either… so theys stop working on HD or they dont rework the maps or what is it exactl they do now?
          (which means they dont drop maps, too?)

          • I think its about those “extreme HD” textures that you have to download separately.

        • As I understand it, HD tanks are in 2 parts. HD models and HD textures. I guess the model rework will continue with texture rework to fit but the highest level HD textures will not be created any more and not distributed for the existing tanks in future patches.

        • They are still reworking the tanks because HD TEXTURE and HD MODEL are 2 different things, im pretty sure.
          They will still increase number of polygons (at least i hope so).

          • wheels will always be hexagonal because polygons will always be triangles

            and PS: the number of polys in a model does increase the resource consumption, even if the texture applied to it stays exactly the same – fyi

            • I guess you mean polygonal instead of hexagonal.

              The trick comes with the graphical engine, that turns this polygon into a circle. A 20-side polygon can look perfectly round ingame.

            • I hate to be a pedant because it’s obvious what you mean but your pedantry demands pedantry in return.

              a hexagonal wheel has six sides.. if you increase the polygon count you could say, create an octagonal wheel. With even more polygons You could create a wheel with over 1000 sides if you wanted – it wouldn’t quite be a circle but it certainly wouldn’t be a hexagon either.

              It would however be an excellent approximation of a circle.

        • You’re forgetting that the HD stuff is divided into two parts:

          1: HD model with much higher polygon count
          2: HD textures with much higher resolution

          What WG are saying is that they will continue with the HD models but are going to scrap HD model textures.

          Personally I think they’re being a bit defeatist BUT I would personally prefer they do HD environment textures than HD model textures. HD models with SD textures will look decent but the main thing that makes WoT a bit ugly are the terrible low-detail terrain and building textures.

      • SS, you confused everyone by putting “(he means HD models)” and then went on to talk about HD textures. I’m guessing HD model rework will continue, but HD textures will not exist (separate download or not) from now on.

        Honestly it was hard to tell the difference on my computer between high textures and the separate download version. Maybe if I had a 4K screen…

        • Yeah… Im ok with not downloading the textures. I think I read people could tell a difference but I couldn’t… At all. I thought the gun barrels looked better but that was a stretch.

          I sure hope the HD models continue because the standard detail tanks look like crap compared to the newer and converted models.

      • 32GB client size isn’t that much, the problem would be 2.4GB video memory, but if the game renders only your tank in HD, what would be the difference from having all tanks in SD? 1 tank more in HD? Less than 80MB more? The reasoning doesn’t seem entirely right…

        Assuming SD textures are 15MB, and HD are 80, if you render all tanks in SD, it’s 450 MB video memory, if you render all tanks SD except your, that is rendered HD (like it is now, right?), it’s 515 MB of video memory. Doesn’t seem like that big of a problem to me.

        • If it’s just one tank that’s being rendered in HD at any one time, then it’s not really that worth making it in the first place, since it would be cheaper and faster just to make them in enhanced SD and call it a day.

          • And what would enchanted SD mean, if not HD?

            There would be a point, it’s what they already told was the reason to have only tour tank in HD, you will likely not be near enough another tank to see the difference, but you would when looking at your tank.

            • HD textures the way WG did it is really, really going overboard. They went from having a single texture set for a tank to having over six, including one that’s four times the size of the SD one. If you want to do better than SD, without delving into madness again, there’s for example, the WT model – two sets, or three if they really still want to stick it to WT…

      • what if i have 4 way SLI packing 4 Titan Z? each one has 12GB of video ram, so i have 48GB of video ram, more then enough to run full high def textures.

        • VRAM doesnt add up when using SLI.

          So you get 6GB for each chip – doesnt matter if Titan or Titan Z or many Titans.

      • just realized there pretty much have gone back on everything they attempted to implement in 9.0 xD

  2. “- it’s possible Churchill Gun Carrier will lose the 32pdr gun and will drop to tier 5″

    If this happens, it would be nice if they replaced the 3.7″ AT with the 17 Pdr, as the gun was actually planned to be mounted on the Churchill Cun Carrier.

    • I have played over 1000 battles in Churchil GC. If they take last gun they will take away one and only good think in this TD. After 9.5 it will be big, slow, no armor, no camo and medicore gun…. Someone in WG must fall on his head…..

  3. “And now, for interesting news – Storm: “Most likely, we will reject HD resolution” (he means HD models), he reasons as such:

    “HD textures for one vehicle have cca 80 Mb. 400 tanks * 80 Mb = 32 Gb of textures only for tanks. 80 Mb * 30 tanks in battle = 2,4 Gb in video memory only for tanks. And then there are maps and environmental objects, so the number above can be roughly multiplied by two. Maybe in 10 years from now on, we will return to HD. When resources and internet channels are sufficient.”

    This matter was already decided. Storm adds that the display of HD textures on your own tank only was the first thing they did a patch ago to reduce the stress on memory. But after calculating the total size of the game client, it was decided to remove the HD textures altogether.”

    so?

    • So you will see all the new shiny HD tanks with a bit lower resolution textures, than you can see now, if you add the seperate HD texture pack.
      I don’t see a problem in this, as differences between HD and SD textures on new tanks are veeery small. It’s not a gamebraker and if that helps to save space and PC resources, then ok – do that!

      • Exactly, these super HD textures made no difference to me. What improved greatly the overall visual experience of the game to me were changes in lighting and only two things in the new HD models – round wheels and realistic track movement. Lighting and physics (as in various objects responsiveness) are, in my opinion the areas of focus for the developers to improve the visual experience. Make antennas rock, chains and cables dangle, and so on, forget about extreme resolution textures.

  4. I hope they do the same approach with the ARL V39 at some point in the future as with the Churchill Gun Carrier’s considered drop to tier 5. The two vehicles are fundamentally the same in being far too overbuffed from historical statistics, which prevents them from having any strengths except for their armament. With reduced armament they can go down a bit where other attributes can shine a bit. Maybe one day when the second French TD line appears the ARL V39 can get replaced at tier 6 and can move to become the tier 5 TD in the second line.

    • This is another case of weird tier level.

      The ARL V39 was roughly designed and prototyped around the same time as the Somua Sau40. I’m pretty sure the later was even considered superior, yet in game, the Sau40 is tier 4 (with nerfed stats) and the ARL tier 6 (with guns it was never supposed to have, to make it “competitive”).

      But overall, the in game design of those tanks is flawed. They don’t get the armor they were supposed to get (after all, the Sau40 was based on the Somua, an extremely well armored tank), and even if they did, the giant tumors make sure they would suck anyway.

      I don’t get why some high tier tanks’ tumors are hardly penetrable (Americans, I’m looking at you), yet all french low tiers have giant ass tumors that make them freekills as soon as they’re spotted.

      • WG got the Somua’s armor wrong, they put it at 36/35 instead of 47/35. Which translates over to the Somua SAu 40 too. Having 47mm of frontal armor wouldn’t make it into some armored beast, but it might protect against tier 3s to a greater extent.

        The ARL V39 is the worst though, it got such incredible upgrades that could never have happened. DCA 45 guns that were only mounted on post war vehicles? Entirely unhistorical. Reducing it in tier helps deal with that and make it a better machine.

      • ARL with le baguette 105 mm was a quite decent TD for its tier, back when paper TDs were of any use, before the bushless corridory clusterfuck.
        SAu 40 is abysmal though.

  5. “- individual missions will come in 9.5, along with their respective reward tanks”

    Looks like we’re having a busy Christmas this year :D

          • Most people, including you, have no idea what they’re talking about. If some truly might not have a an extremely fast download speed through the torrent system (by that I mean up to 30 mb/s download and I’m talking actual speed) what you’re talking about is exactly the reason why they’re having that problem, because not enough people with decent internet around them have torrents on.

            You should probably refrain from advertising stupidity Homer, at least a little bit.

          • I cant agree – I use it and to my great surprise, last patch it was able to use all the bandwidth of my 40Mbit connection (resulting in 4.9 MB/s download speed). Patch download was the question of minutes, actually applying changes to client took far more time.

  7. HD textures for one vehicle have cca 80 Mb. 400 tanks * 80 Mb = 32 Gb of textures only for tanks. 80 Mb * 30 tanks in battle = 2,4 Gb in video memory only for tanks. And then there are maps and environmental objects, so the number above can be roughly multiplied by two. Maybe in 10 years from now on, we will return to HD. When resources and internet channels are sufficient.”

    So they completely dont know to optimize the game and resources

    - it was decided to remove the HD textures altogether.

    so back to square wheels and crappy tanks

    • Notice the ‘textures’ part in ‘no more HD textures’. Pushing model verts is cheap compared to storing a shitload of high-res textures for every single tank, so that aspect of the models still can be improved. Maybe with two-times the old texture resolution, not quintuple.

    • Square wheels are a matter of low poly 3d model. That’s nothing to do with HD textures.

      • i dont understand the dif between and hd tank and an hd texture.

        wouldnt an hd tank be made with an hd texture?

        how can a tank be hd but not the texture?

        why not just put hd textures on non hd tanks? wouldnt that be quicker.

        BTW: i dont see a huge dif between nonhd tanks and hd tanks with or without hd textures.

        • it is kind of funny the amt of hours WG put into HD whatevers and the new sounds and then not use either.

          also, all the hours screwing up maps like severgorsk, murovanka and el halluf when i feel the prior maps were better and had more character and putting lipstick on that pig prok by creating fiery salient not to mention the disasterous historical battles. i also consider soccer and rally both a bad use of hours.

          it does seem like WG wastes a lot of development time that could be better spent.

        • HD models are the “shapes” of the tanks. The barrel, the wheels, the hull etc. Textures is the image that is then put on this model like a well… skin. So they will make an HD model without an HD texture, so that it takes less space. Get it now?

        • HD model means more polygons:
          Circle apears to be a bit more round. Lets look at some gun barrel from the front – its not a circle, its a hexagon. In HD model, there is much more polygons, so it is hexapentawhatevergon (:D) it still isnt circle, but its much closer to it.

          HD texture – is how crisp and detailed the texture is. Its the resolution f that texture.
          Set the texture quality to LOW and see some part of the tank. Now set it to MAX quality. – see the difference ?

          this way you can have crispy HD texture on a hexagonal low polygon gun barrel. You can also have a lowres blurry texture on high polygon gun barrel.
          The best looking combo is high polygon model and crispy texture = HD model + HD texture

  8. Having tanks that use 5 sheets of 2048×2048 textures is a bad idea? Who would have thought… Now, if the pissing contest with WT is over, can we get a decent environment renderer instead? And maybe some better assets there?

      • No, only buff.
        Magical Stalinium space side armor for every tank!
        Because a thin vertical piece of metal over 120mm, somewhat sloped side armor can stop ANYTHING.

        IS3 can into tonk.

          • Funny how guns with 250mm pen can cut through the 113′s armor that’s 120mm at 68 degrees, but those same guns can’t go through 30mm + 60mm at 68 degrees. (knowing that the 30mm plate helps with normalization).

            • Well if you think about it then when yo shoot at 113 ufp you shoot from up down = less angle, but in case of IS3 it is the opposite (try to visualize).

              • Should that (small) angular difference really make that much of an impact, considering the massive amount of armor difference.

                Again, similar angle, one (should) have over 250mm effective armor, the other should barely reach 30mm + 140mm effective armor.
                And yet, the former is penetrated with ease, the latter impenetrable, even to tierX TD guns.
                So tell me how that 3cm thick piece of spaced armor make what it equivalent to the T-54 LT’s frontal armor, impenetrable.

    • Spec, Gloss(or Roughness for PBR) Diffuse, Normal….Spec and gloss can be used in one texture sheet with an alpha channel. That’s 3/4..So what is the 5th one? WoT tanks don’t have reflections or any tessellation …Decals/Damage?
      Have you seen what textures they use?

      • I’m counting diffuse/alpha plus spec/gloss plus normal, plus quarter size camo mask, four texture sheets, as one set actually. Plus a quarter size diffuse/spec/normal for the destroyed model. I’m looking at the HD sherman, and basically, you have 1kx1k sets for suspension, stock turret, elite turret, guns, 4×4 set for hull, 512×512 for tracks, plus assorted bits and ends. 48 dds files just for a single model.

        • WOW, that’s a lot of textures ….Not really sure how they justify that or at least not how i would go about it…
          At any rate, the whole up-res of the models and textures was so that they could look pretty alongside WT anyway. And it didn’t work , except lowering fps all around. Higher poly geometry sounds nice , if they don’t quit on that.

  9. So… They will not be HD tanks, but cca 150 tanks is currently reworking into HD?
    Did I undestand it correctly?

        • The HD MODELS are still going to be made, but the TEXTURES on them will not be HD.

        • Low def textures – blurry flat surfaces with less fine detail. Low def models – round parts looking angular.

        • The difference is, that WarGaming are morons and fell into their own advertisement trap. HD tanks have nothing to do with HD resolutions, textures or whatever HD thingamabob comes to your mind. What WG calls HD tanks are actually High Polgon Count Tanks, which simply means, the tank models are more detailed and complex. It has nothing to do with the texture tapestry in and of itself.

  10. I’m confused. They decided not to implement HD tanks but they are still working on making HD tanks?

    I’m not a programmer but is it that big of a challenge to implement HD tanks? I mean,WT tanks look very good,way better than WoT anyway,all new games look flawless,you can’t even tell if it’s a movie or a game and we still have wheels and barrels with edges?

        • you will have HD models… nice models with many polygons.
          And a fucking lowres texture stretched over it. You know, so you can make use of your shiny 6GB VRAM on your GTX880…

          But little Timmy will be able to play on his 27 years old PC he traded for a dead kittens paw with his blind schoolmate.

          I’m tellin’ ya WG! Scre the graphics, make it text-based so I can play it on Amazon kindle!

            • My point is, those textures were optional…
              why do they care about my VRAM usage ? If I dont have enough memory i just wont use them.

              WOT looks bad enough when maxed out… dont understand why people who paid money for new rig has to suffer the terrible graphics if they do have enough power to run it…

              • By the way VRAM usage shouldn’t be a problem, if you just render 1 tank (yours) in HD, it’s 30 SD tanks vs 29 SD and 1 HD.

                Maybe those problems with the HD modellers are the real problem they don’t want to talk about…

            • He is right you know, who can’t download some extra gigs? do they play in the woods with an adsl?

          • Don’t give them ideas Bugii…..

            I can see it now. WoT on Kindle.

            Your Sherman crests the ridge, before you in the distance is a Hummel, a T29, and a Tiger.

            Which one do you shoot at?

            A shot takes your track, do you repair or return fire?

  11. jesus christ…
    size of client matters ? fucking kidding me ? How about using fucking compression ?
    1TB harddrive is almost cheaper than pack of cigarettes.

    Yes, 6GB of video memory on GPU and I’ll be looking at lowres textures because some idiots playing on tamagotchi are getting 12fps… fuck they dont even need to install these textures…

    You know what WG! I have an idea! Lets decrease the number of polygons of every vehicle to 6. And put black screen overlay over the screen, so we can all get 9000fps and see shit. I’ve treid to run WoT on my CASIO watches and only got 7fps… fuck you WG, make all the tanks rectangles in greyscale.

    Or make the game a text-based adventure…
    “You hit the tank for 10 damage.
    He missed.
    You got shot by arty, you are now in garage.”
    This way, peole can play it on amazon kindle!

    • Yes, WG should concentrate on making HD textures, and not a slew of other things that could benefit the millions of players, just to aesthetically please a few thousand players like you with 6GB GPUs.

      Hear that everyone?
      Sherman Firefly cancelled.
      Having 5 layers of rust texture on an invisible part of the tank is more important to Mr Bugii.
      Nothing to see here, move along.

      • its compeltely different department working on these things.
        Plus, they are not “developing” HD textures!
        It’s how the texture is made in the first place.. then they shrink it to lower resolution to save space. So why cant they just give the first , bigger version ?

        • It’s not completely different funding, though ;)

          Do tell us how textures made in 2010 were made at the same standards as new ones made for the newer HD model tanks though, that’s a great story.

    • As much as I love a good rant, I just don’t think this game is for you.

      You see… those people playing on tamagochis spend thousands of dollars to keep the game running.

      A little bitch like you who sits on top of the line computer (I bet it is still worse than mine) that plays the game for free and whines about it, is basically a non-issue. Nobody will miss if you stop playing. Not WG, not community.

      We appreciate your speedy uninstall.

      • what makes you think I dont spend money on the game ?

        If I can afford high end PC, i can afford to support devs every now and then…

        Yes it might be worse than yours.. Im not saying is the best, im saying I can run the game even if one HD texture took 700MB .. not 80

        Plus, those people can still play it, hell there is even the “old renderer” that makes the game look retro like from 1995 …

        • You’ve got a 21GB GPU? what a waste of money
          If you don’t like the game, stop playing it. we won’t miss you, bye.

          Also, comments are to discuss, what’s your point anyway? If WG doesn’t want to make HD textures, what’s the problem? you don’t like how the game looks, go play some other game like battlefield

          • Like I was the only one here who is complaining :D

            My point is, they already got those textures. so why cant we download them ? Why is Storm deciding if my PC can take it…
            Client size ? please… takes me 20-25minutes to download whole client.
            I know some people have worse connection… that’s why were those textures optional…

            It’s not like its extra work to make HD textures… They already got them, resizing and making SD textures. To get the SD texture, first you need to have the HD one… so why cannot we download those ?

          • Maybe he meant with the game rendering only your tank in HD. If that would be the base, I don’t see that much of a difference from 30 SD textured tanks from 29 SD and 1 HD.

        • You do know that there is a sizeable bunch of people playing stuff on their laptops. And let me tell you that even in a above average laptop configuration this game is quite intensive on the mobile (watered down, undervolted, underclocked) components. And don’t get me started about the cooling inside a laptop case.
          Anyway, HD textures are not necessary to enjoy a game like WOT, the gameplay is important, not the bling.
          PS: on my laptop (on the high side of the price tag, with i7 , lots of ram, medium line nvidia gpu and 17″ display) the standard renderer looks quite modern and even somewhat pleasing to the eye, and more importantly the framerate is muuuch more stable than on the new renderer. It does run hot, but that is to be expected.
          PS2: not everyone uses their PC (desktop, laptop, etc) exclusively for games, and even more important, you might find out that people choose their stuff based on various criteria: space, portability, convenience etc.
          In my case, it was a matter of convenience – portability is quite important since i use it for work (and personal stuff like games) and so i had to make some ammends regarding performance on the gaming side.

          • I’m also playing on laptop. with i7 and GTX 880M … well everything runs hot under heavy load., Im getting 65-70 °C
            Thats pretty standard.

            Point is, this rig can run WOT maxed out with all those textures and still get over 70fps.
            So why are they not letting us ?

            I do understand some people have older PC, but these are not forced to download these textures… In fact…they shouldnt even be using them and probably are not using them.

            This decision (removing HD textures) wont affect them at all since they are not using them anyway. See ?
            It will only affect those who can use them and already have powerful enough rig to use them.

        • There’s something called “spaced armour”. This causes the magic troll bouncers at the side armour of tanks like IS-3 and IS-7.

          But still: WG makes the best Tier 8 tank only stronger with the HD remake. But I didn’t expect anything else by a company which bootlicks the jingoistic Russian playerbase.

          • That spaced armour is 30 mm at 30° from vertical, covering the 90 mm at 45° from vertical hull armour. That’s approximately 150 mm effective.
            Of course, most of the side armour is just vertical 90 mm.

            Also: you just called IS-3 “the best tier 8 tank”. Think about that for a second.

            • What’s there to think about? What tank has been used more than any other tank in the tier 8 pro league seasons? Hint, it’s a Russian tier 8 heavy.

              • On the few rare occasions when I watched streams from tournaments, the battles were full of AMX 13 90 and AMX 50 100. Sometimes there was T32. Neither of these is Russian.

  14. Pingback: Wargaming zrušil HD modely

  15. Wow, those lazy WG developers have obviously never heard of texture block compression (specifically BC6 and BC7), Storm’s analogy is flawed because the devs are literally exporting and saving tank textures in raw legacy (and deprecated) D3D9 dds files rather than compressing them into single compacted files like most other games do. Do they even have a clue ffs?

    Compression, if done correctly would save them gigabytes of space if correctly implemented in a D3D11 renderer which BigWorld ironically doesn’t even have. Their engine is archaic and pathetic, that’s what IS holding back everything in this game. Bringing back the old engine to modern standards would require a massive overhaul of the engine itself (such as removing all fixed function pipeline usage in favour of programmable shaders) and that’s what they’re too incompetent to do.

    I’ll leave that here for those interested:
    http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh308955(v=vs.85).aspx

    • BC6 and 7 only work on dx11 (or OpenGL) and the quality difference is probably not that big, compared to bc2/3 (dxt3/5).

      And they currently use DXT1-5(BC1/2/3) for their textures.

  16. 80 Mb * 30 tanks in battle = 2,4 Gb in video memory only for tanks

    Yes I believe that cocksuckers really allocate memory several times for exactly same texture (tank).

    • Really, this cheap shot? I know worst-case scenario doesn’t have to be exactly common, but not being prepared for it is the shortest way to end in tears.

  17. HD models = yes we will still get them all…
    HD texture (the surface of the HD models) = apparantly not…

  18. Wow genius WG developers/producers can’t think of such issues in advance. Amazing! “Maybe in 10 years from now on, we will return to HD.” Maybe WOT will not exist as a profitable entity 10 years from now on.

  19. - apparently, when IS-3 is transformed into HD, it will have worse lower frontal plate angle, but otherwise, the armor level will improve – in case of side armor significantly
    _________________
    Yes!!! More magic shell eating bullshit on sides of stronk rashan tenks.

    • After rework IS-3 drivers will park their tanks sideways for better protection because pike nose (specially shaped and angled for maximum protection) will be autopen while sides will be autobounce. Duh.

  20. Basically they could have condensed this info into:
    “We haven’t moved to a 64 bit game engine so we have a very hard limit on memory addressing that limits what we can accept for model and texture size.”

    A majority of their market probably still run Windows XP so business wise there’s not a lot of incentive to make a 64 bit client if you go simply by a profit viewpoint. Plus I’m sure they’d find a way to choke on some issues trying to rely on python so much while having both 32 bit and 64 bit clients.

    Then as mentioned before by others, the current engine and game builds don’t even leverage everything that’s currently available to get more out of their 32 bit environment. There’s a lot of meat left on the bone so to speak.

  23. “HD textures for one vehicle have cca 80 Mb. 400 tanks * 80 Mb = 32 Gb of textures only for tanks. 80 Mb * 30 tanks in battle = 2,4 Gb in video memory only for tanks. And then there are maps and environmental objects, so the number above can be roughly multiplied by two. Maybe in 10 years from now on, we will return to HD. When resources and internet channels are sufficient.”

    My question then is this: How the fuck do other games do it!!!!!

    Seriously they need to learn to code properly.

    • even if they wasted memory like this… there are “mid-end” GPUs that can run this and still have 5,6GB memory free.

      Anyway, I just dont get how come it could have 80MB per model… are the textures in raw bitmap or what ? Because it certainly wasn’t some outstanding resolution.. you could still see some blurry textures on the tanks when zoomed in battle (closer than it lets you in garage).

      • Two turrets, hull, suspension, gun and tracks, all separate with three sheets of 2048×2048 textures (the hull has 4096×4096 instead), plus a bunch of smaller textures for tracks and whatnot, all in dds compression. Most of that really useless, and way over what’s currently considered ‘next gen’.

  24. my question to WG is why 400 tanks need to be HD? do we really want to see t1s,t2s,t3s in HD? noooooooooo well not me

  26. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_David

    WW2 ERA 910 mm mortar that actually got made into a mobile system. You could balance it by having to wait for the TWO tractors that pulled it to dig it in for firing. Or maybe a T95 with a dozer blade could be used.

    It seems as plausible to me as the giganto mortar they want to give the Japanese line.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Cannon
    We could get that as well. It’s from the 1500s but so is BigWorld apparently

  27. “But after calculating the total size of the game client, it was decided to remove the HD textures altogether.”

    Well good job calculating the size of HD battles around A FUCKING YEAR after starting to work on them. LOL. I guessed it would be the FIRST thing you ever do if you want to introduce HD stuff, but no – FagGaming has a better (RUSSIAN STRONK!) policy…

  28. - apparently, when IS-3 is transformed into HD, it will have worse lower frontal plate angle

    finally, this historical incorrectness looks odd to me

  29. 32GB client size isn’t that much, the problem would be 2.4GB video memory, but if the game renders only your tank in HD, what would be the difference from having all tanks in SD? 1 tank more in HD? Less than 80MB more? The reasoning doesn’t seem entirely right…

    Assuming SD textures are 15MB, and HD are 80, if you render all tanks in SD, it’s 450 MB video memory, if you render all tanks SD except your, that is rendered HD (like it is now, right?), it’s 515 MB of video memory. Doesn’t seem like that big of a problem to me.

  30. I think the best way to solve this is

    Rework all Tanks to “HD”
    as in model all tanks to High Poly or at least 3x higher poly count then the current one
    Not all tanks needs 3x more ,cause there are tanks in this game that even 50% more Poly will be sufficient
    Give the players the chance to choose what Texture they want to download.
    options like
    ALL HD textures..
    All Tanks I [you have" in your garage
    or None at all.

    still the way they do textures for the new "HD" models of tanks , i have never seen it that way or maybe i don't remember .I mean i don't get these AM ,ANM ,GNM ?
    still 1024x1024 is not really HD [Chassis] but it still looks nice.
    still I am talking about the default ,no HD pack from WG or anything.
    Since my GPU will not be able to handle the game .
    anyway i think making the game client a full control of this stuff would be nice and then the game simply just downloads the textures of which option you choose

    • “Not all tanks needs 3x more ,cause there are tanks in this game that even 50% more Poly will be sufficient”

      reminds me of maus :D

      apart from gun barrel, I had a hard time spotting the difference.

      • The thing is
        Players should not have 2x texture for the same Vehicle…
        The Textures you choose should REPLACE the Texture in the PACKAGE…. not being put inside res_mods….

  32. 80 MB are correct even with compression, if they use 5 4k by 4k textures per tank, and if i remember correctly from my analysis back in july, the use 3 – 6 per tank.

    One for diffuse colors (the color that is visible at each pixel of the model), one for the normals (defines which direction is top relative to the surface), one masking for various stuff (camo masking, specular/metal/reflection masking) and one optional for the camo pattern (which is very small 256 or so), some tanks have two of each but with a lesser resolution.
    Most other studios only use the full resolution for the diffuse texture, and half or quarter for normal and masking, specular, and other surface properties, so if they would really try, the could bring this down to 30-60 MB per tank.

      • They never try, the prime example for that are the test servers, they remove stuff from patches, because ‘they don’t work right now’ (audio causes perf problems, is hilarious)

    • WoT texture resolution is significantly higher than Warthunder, even without the HD textures.

      The HD textures were absolutely ridiculously massive anyways. The people who’d actually benefit from them likely number in the hundreds, at most.

      • It seems that the lighting calculation of WT is way more advanced than in WoT, and thats the real reason why WT looks way better.

    • Do you even play WT? that thing has shit textures even on the highest settings, whatever you’re playing it’s not developed by Gaijin.

      They might be giving it a little more work on the tank textures, but the plane textures, game which it currently is, a plane arcade game, are way worse than even WG’s side project has, WoWp.

  36. - there will not be the option to test individual mission tanks before they are implemented
    ——————————
    Well that’s ultra stupid :(
    Want to get a new shiny rare tank? Then make a month long mission. Ooh, you don’t like the tank you got? Sorry, but you cannot get another one in time..
    It would be so hard to add them for 9.5 Common test, right?

  37. “HD textures for one vehicle have cca 80 Mb. 400 tanks * 80 Mb = 32 Gb of textures only for tanks. 80 Mb * 30 tanks in battle = 2,4 Gb in video memory only for tanks. And then there are maps and environmental objects, so the number above can be roughly multiplied by two. Maybe in 10 years from now on, we will return to HD. When resources and internet channels are sufficient.”

    I have a high end gaming rig that will fulfill all of these things today.

    Since high end machines can do this today – I’m leaning towards this will be one or two years from now, rather than ten years.

  38. They should use shaders for different materials, and use Physical Based Rendering. That way most of the “textures” could be re-used for most of the tanks.

  39. I’m a bit worried about the IS-3 side armor increase – hope they wont make it impossible for T71/M41 WBD to reliably pen IS-3 side armor :-)

    • A T7LT penning the side of a mighty Russian heavy a tier higher? What blasphemy is this you speak off! (Frankly I won’t be happy if that’s the case because my T71 loves eating up IS-3′s from the side.

  40. Sorry, but that HD texture memory consumption calculation is math at its worst…..cause not every tank has absolutely unique textures. At least it won’t have if the developers have ANY know how regarding their job. On the other hand….it is WG we are talking about ^^