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Yes, the Yellow Tang is in the tank. Now the Wimplefish, Achilles Tang, and Powder Blue Tang are, too. But last night I noticed a small problem. The image quality of the fish just didn't look quite as good as they did in the old program, so I did a couple of screen-captures and compared the two. It turns out that the fish are about 10% smaller in the new version. This is because the camera is slightly farther away. I use 128-pixel-wide textures for most of the fish because that's about how big they end up on the screen, but the Yellow Tang is only about 100 pixels wide now. Without going into the details of MIPmapping, let's just say that some of the detail in the texture never makes it onto the screen, resulting in a slightly ragged image.
So, I have to make a decision from among these possibilites:
1. Use the current system, and just live with the lower image quality for now. All the fish models will be replaced soon with a whole new system, but I promised Encore I'd get a Beta out soon, and coming up with a whole new fish-object system was not on the schedule yet.
2. Enlarge the mesh for each fish as it's loaded. I could write a routine to scale the vertices without adding too much to the loading times, but behavior and collision avoidance might be adversely affected.
3. Go back to Lightwave and recreate each fish, but larger. Very time consuming, and I no longer have some of the programs I used to convert the files from Lightwave to Direct-X while retaining the individual parts of the mesh.
4. Change the camera position so that the fish appear to be the same size that they used to be. The current position is the result of many days of trial-and-error to get the optimum image quality of the background objects without any "behind the scenes" elements showing as the camera pans back and forth.
I'll do some quick experiments regarding #4, but if those fail, I'm leaning toward #1.
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