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Topic Starter	Topic: other engines (vis question)
bork[e] The Borked One Joined: 23 Mar 2004 Posts: 4708	Posted: 04-30-2005 10:09 PM                  How can games like FarCry and Grand Theft Auto pull off showing so much detail in such a big area? With Quake (the only game I even come close to understanding)...well, I don't have to explain how quake works, you all taught me how it did. The reason I ask is I was just standing on the top of a mountain in FarCry looking back to the area where I started...some ~8miles away. Surrounded by trees, water, boats etc... Not the screen I'm talking about, but gives a good example of what I'm asking. [lvlshot]http://www.members.cox.net/borke/FarCry0003.jpg[/lvlshot]
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urgrund777 Commander Joined: 07 Mar 2005 Posts: 122	Posted: 05-01-2005 05:07 AM                  there's a brutal LOD system in place with FarCry - probably a bit too much for my liking (as in the first dropdown can be seen too readily). Other techniques for such open spaces is shader degradation. Why resolve normalmap and specular contributions on pixels that are far away? Texture mipmapping... this also helps with pixel shaders that require per-texel lookups. Less work to do on shaders that are further away. For the outdoor areas, it is not necessary to have a BSP (though I don't know what farcry does). Objects themselves could be used in occlusion queries for more granular occlusion of smaller objects in such large scenes (can't see the house? then the 20 child objects inside the house don't need to be queried for visibility). The terrain itself could be LOD'd based on quad/oct-tree approach... but yeh, thats just a few approaches of the virtually unlimited ways a dev team may decide to implement occlusion and scene managment. I've never looked into FarCry, so I don't know what (of many) technique/s they're using
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reyalp Gibblet Joined: 30 Apr 2005 Posts: 11	Posted: 05-01-2005 01:53 PM                  Also, remember that quake3 was designed around hardware that only did texture mapping in hardware (with 2 texture units, if you were lucky). Taking advantage of modern video card features requires engines to be written differently, and opens up a whole lot of options. A q3 engine map showing 30k triangles/frame will often bring a modern high end sytem to it knees, yet current video cards can easily render far more than that.
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urgrund777 Commander Joined: 07 Mar 2005 Posts: 122	Posted: 05-01-2005 05:29 PM                  was going to mention batch sorting as well... which helps when you've got many object instances... but here's a good read about it anyway http://download.nvidia.com/developer/presentations/2005/GDC/Direct3D_Day/D3DTutorial08_FarCryAndDX9.pdf
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