Fartiles yes, or no?

[marvin157th]

Hey guys.

You know in all my years of Falcon I still don't know the answer to this. For some reason and by habit I always checked in F4 patch to turn off Fartiles. And now I just though, what the hell do I do this for? Anyone know what the issues are with this?

Jody

[ranger822]

There are others that know more than me. I don't think fartiles is the issue it once was. As you know fartiles were made to blend the distant terrain with the close up terrain tiles . . . in the old days of 2byte terrain you were limited to 64K fartiles. With 4byte terrain the number went way up . . .

The one issue was the fartile pallette limited you . . because you had 252 colors in which to make distant tiles blench seemlessly with the higher resolution terrain tiles -- the issue there was the more varied the terrain the more colors had to be used. The problem was that if you have too many colors then the fartiles because to loose the ability to blend effectively because you need a certain number of colors in each group of tiles to have a decent transition line.

That problem is done now I think because DDS textures sidestep the issue. However, I am not sure who has done recent terrain work that can talk intelligently on the true impact of fartiles and DDS.

I hope I have at least partially answered your question.