Nice to hear about the progress on the breton module. Sounds interesting.
A small question about the textures in the Breton pack by the way...
You say that you're adding two different materials for each weapon? Steel and bronze if I'm correct?
And are the normal maps you use for the bronze and steel versions of each sword *identical* and use the same shinyness?
If so you might be able to cut down on the number of texture files needed by sharing the normal maps between the two different base textures for steel and bronze. Bethesda has done this with a few meshes in vanilla Oblivion by naming the normal maps and textures in a certain way...
Take for example their horse textures. There are five different base textures for horses: black, chestnut, grey, paint and bay. Their base textures are named:
horse.dds
horse_black.dds
horse_grey.dds
horse_paint.dds
horse_chestnut.dds
As you can see they've added an underscore to separate the different variants from each other.
The normal map automatically associated with those textures, whenever a .NIF uses them, will be whatever is before the underscore plus "
_n.dds". This means that all of the base horse textures will all automatically share one single normal map file named
"horse_n.dds". By using this naming convention you can save on plugin size by only needing one normal map for the two base textures (bronze and steel) for every weapon instead of two normal maps and two base textures. It will also keep the VRAM useage down too, if I'm correct, since there's one less normal map to load into video RAM if both models are loaded at the same time.
Another, more relevant example...
If you use the texture names
"solingensteel.dds" and
"solingenbronze.dds" you will also need corresponding normal maps named
"solingensteel_n.dds" and
"solingenbronze_n.dds".
But let's say you have a steel sword using the base texture
"solingen_steel.dds" and a bronze sword using the base texture
"solingen_bronze.dds". The models using either of those base textures will automatically use a common normal map texture if you name it
"solingen_n.dds", eliminating the need for uniquely named (but identical) normal maps for each version.
I hope you understood my poor attempt at an explanation. And my apologies if you already know about this neat little texture trick.
I'm just mentioning it since it seems that not too many Oblivion modders are aware of it. I hardly ever see people taking advantage of this method of cutting corners and using common normal maps in their mods. Perhaps knowledge of this will spread by posting it here.
Cheers, UQF
Little touches like that is what makes the RealSwords mods fit much more seamlessly into the world than simply adding them to existing vendors.
..I have so many references that I would like to do..too much! arg!
