#127141 - keldon - Mon Apr 30, 2007 9:54 am
I think it was EIDOS or Valve who were creating a system that could automatically reduce the complexity of a 3d world based on its given hardware but don't think it was every completed. Although many (if not all) 3d modelling applications can do this, the system they were developing would do it automatically based on your graphics card and processor. This would allow you to be able to create a game with great detail that could still run on older machines, meaning that the minimum spec does not constantly grow with each new game.
Does anyone remember who it was who was researching this because I haven't seen it used yet; or is it still in development? Really curious because I remember it being in one magazine, then I never heard about it again.
#127179 - tepples - Mon Apr 30, 2007 6:35 pm
It's called "level of detail management", and it's been used on polygon based games all the way back to the Nintendo 64. A model is stored at multiple levels of detail, and one of them is chosen based on the distance from the camera. Low-spec machines would just use the low-detail models.
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#127180 - keldon - Mon Apr 30, 2007 6:53 pm
Yes, but there was one in development that took it a step further and generated models with much lower polygon counts for systems with underpowered (or no) graphics card. I think it might have actually been Core Design; I really can't remember who it was!
#127192 - Al - Mon Apr 30, 2007 8:44 pm
#127197 - keldon - Mon Apr 30, 2007 9:04 pm
Wow, could it have been that long ago? I think that might have been the one (Shiny's Messiah Engine)!!! But it appears that the technology has not been put into much use other than featuring in the Messiah Engine and being used in a demo! But it's good that they were able to do it to that level, the image shows an example.
#127295 - RegalSin - Tue May 01, 2007 1:36 pm
| keldon wrote: |
This would allow you to be able to create a game with great detail that could still run on older machines, meaning that the minimum spec does not constantly grow with each new game.
|
Can you please define old? I have seen many games that are really nice in graphics before 1996.
My fact or belief is that you can create games with great detail without such run arounds or tricks.
| Quote: |
It's called "level of detail management", and it's been used on polygon based games all the way back to the Nintendo 64. |
By that Aidyn Chronicals: The First Mage comes to mind. They tried to use high detailed features or features that would be normal in todays games but the game ended up being extremly English( crappy ).
I am guessing somebody at H2O Interactive figured they could do the same thing Imagineer did with there battle system they used in Quest but on a higher level. The game itself suffered from the effects Secret Of Evermore left afterwards.
Also the game gave you the option of High End graphics which was great but it also played slightly diffrent music which to be honest sounds worst compared to the original.
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#127304 - keldon - Tue May 01, 2007 3:08 pm
| RegalSin wrote: |
| keldon wrote: | This would allow you to be able to create a game with great detail that could still run on older machines, meaning that the minimum spec does not constantly grow with each new game.
|
Can you please define old? I have seen many games that are really nice in graphics before 1996.
My fact or belief is that you can create games with great detail without such run arounds or tricks. |
I think you might have misread what I wrote; I said "this would allow you to be able to create a game [now] with great detail that could still run on older machines!!! What happens now is that any new game cannot run on old hardware, but the research behind the Messiah Engine allowed for an automated reduction of polygons.
#127332 - RegalSin - Tue May 01, 2007 7:42 pm
| Quote: |
| What happens now is that any new game cannot run on old hardware |
So your saying I can't install one of these so called games on standard hardware?
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#127335 - keldon - Tue May 01, 2007 7:50 pm
| RegalSin wrote: |
| Quote: | | What happens now is that any new game cannot run on old hardware |
So your saying I can't install one of these so called games on standard hardware? |
Have you read the shiny article? What I am talking about are the forever rising minimum requirements of games that now cannot run without graphics accelerators at all despite the games engine being capable of doing so. Sure you can configure your game; but nothing comes close to what Shiny developed.
Are you saying that you cannot see the difference? Did you read the article? Do you know what I was talking about in the first place?
#127339 - tepples - Tue May 01, 2007 7:53 pm
| RegalSin wrote: |
| Quote: | | What happens now is that any new game cannot run on old hardware |
So your saying I can't install one of these so called games on standard hardware? |
Yeah, and end up with a slideshow rather than fluid motion.
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#127342 - keldon - Tue May 01, 2007 8:08 pm
A slideshow is a good visualisation of it. Anybody remember Prince of Persia? Nice game, but you needed the top hardware of the time, yet I was able to play tomb raider without any problems on the same computer.
But I was just trying to find out what happened with the technology because I thought the face of PC gaming would change and that developers would be using that sort of technology. But it seems that only Shiny were interested in researching it.
#127347 - tepples - Tue May 01, 2007 9:25 pm
| keldon wrote: |
| But I was just trying to find out what happened with the technology because I thought the face of PC gaming would change and that developers would be using that sort of technology. But it seems that only Shiny were interested in researching it. |
That or someone uncovered a patent and decided to shelve development for 20 years.
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#127352 - Dood77 - Tue May 01, 2007 10:37 pm
| RegalSin wrote: |
| Quote: | | What happens now is that any new game cannot run on old hardware |
So your saying I can't install one of these so called games on standard hardware? |
Old != Standard
And what makes them 'so called' games?
#127355 - keldon - Tue May 01, 2007 10:44 pm
| Dood77 wrote: |
| RegalSin wrote: | | Quote: | | What happens now is that any new game cannot run on old hardware |
So your saying I can't install one of these so called games on standard hardware? |
Old != Standard
And what makes them 'so called' games? |
Precisely; there is no denying that no [typical] game made today will run on a PII without a graphics accelerator (maybe even with one). In fact I got monopoly and can't play it on my PIII laptop or my 1Ghz Athlon, which is pathetic, because it's only monopoly.
But again I'd like to reiterate that I was just curious what happened with that technology and in no way am ranting / complaining about it.
#127371 - sajiimori - Tue May 01, 2007 11:42 pm
Reality check: There is far more to a game than poly count. For instance, a typical DS game couldn't run on the GBA even if all graphics were disabled. There's not enough memory and processor time to run the game logic.
#127373 - keldon - Wed May 02, 2007 12:06 am
| sajiimori wrote: |
| Reality check: There is far more to a game than poly count. For instance, a typical DS game couldn't run on the GBA even if all graphics were disabled. There's not enough memory and processor time to run the game logic. |
Clearly that is obvious; I highly doubt that Shiny every had any intention of being able to allow a any of their 3d games designed using complex models to run on an 8086!
#127384 - tepples - Wed May 02, 2007 2:11 am
| sajiimori wrote: |
| Reality check: There is far more to a game than poly count. For instance, a typical DS game couldn't run on the GBA even if all graphics were disabled. There's not enough memory and processor time to run the game logic. |
So are Tetris DS and M&L: Partners in Time atypical?
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#127463 - sajiimori - Wed May 02, 2007 6:38 pm
The point, keldon, is that you don't gain much scalability by fiddling with poly count. That's why game developers don't generally make such ambitious claims about scalability anymore.
That's what you were wondering, right? The technology isn't being developed because it isn't worth the effort.
#127470 - keldon - Wed May 02, 2007 7:14 pm
That is a likely possibility; but maybe it is not worth it because of the effort (and cost) required to pull it off compared to the effect it may have on sales; if anything it may have little effect on sales.
But which games out there could not be scaled down graphically to be able to work on a much slower machine; I doubt Medal of Honour or Prince of Persia 3d are one of them. Black and white may!
#127471 - sajiimori - Wed May 02, 2007 7:22 pm
Speculate as you will, but the performance profiles for my games are not hinged on poly count. Not even close.
#127474 - keldon - Wed May 02, 2007 7:32 pm
| sajiimori wrote: |
| Speculate as you will, but the performance profiles for my games are not hinged on poly count. Not even close. |
But is that PC or DS development? If it's DS then it wouldn't really compare in the same way as your processing power limits far more methods than a 200Mhz processor with hardware divisions.
#127477 - RegalSin - Wed May 02, 2007 9:06 pm
All games systems is built to run a certain way dividing the amount of usage for X game. I still do not get old= standard but I am sure a 1991 machine with the right upgrades could run any standard PC game of today.
On the other hand a game for the PS3 or GCN I would most likely have to upgrade to AGP at least. No cell processor or multi nonsense ether.
The so called newer games is program on purpose to run with a certain OS or even certain hardware. Feature would not matter to run newer games.
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#127479 - keldon - Wed May 02, 2007 9:19 pm
| RegalSin wrote: |
| All games systems is built to run a certain way dividing the amount of usage for X game. I still do not get old= standard but I am sure a 1991 machine with the right upgrades could run any standard PC game of today. |
If you consider motherboard + ram + processor + graphics card to be an upgrade and not a new computer. I do believe I let a lot up to imagination, such as what is old.
A PII with an ATI (Rage II) All In Wonder card is an old machine. Half life (and many games of that time) run pretty well on a Cyrix MII 333Mhz processor without a graphics accelerator, which is saying something! In fact I were able to play many games on that at good framerates including Rollcage (which is still visually stunning in my opinion) and Delta force (which still looks great)!!!
Minimum requirements have rested for a while so I can run quite a lot on my X550; but with the introduction of DX10 I predict many up and coming games 'taking the mick'. But I think that this is what Shiny were getting at.
#127509 - tepples - Thu May 03, 2007 12:57 am
| keldon wrote: |
| but with the introduction of DX10 I predict many up and coming games 'taking the mick'. |
These up and coming games taking the Mickey wouldn't happen to be those published by DIS (formerly BVG), would they?
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#127511 - sajiimori - Thu May 03, 2007 1:04 am
| Quote: |
| If it's DS then it wouldn't really compare in the same way as your processing power limits far more methods than a 200Mhz processor with hardware divisions. |
And a 200MHz processor with hardware divisions "limits far more methods" than a 2GHz processor with multiple cores.
If you think game developers have been, since 1998 (when 200MHz was fast), using the additional cycles just to push more polys, you are sorely mistaken.
#127514 - keldon - Thu May 03, 2007 1:14 am
| sajiimori wrote: |
| Quote: | | If it's DS then it wouldn't really compare in the same way as your processing power limits far more methods than a 200Mhz processor with hardware divisions. |
And a 200MHz processor with hardware divisions "limits far more methods" than a 2GHz processor with multiple cores.
If you think game developers have been, since 1998 (when 200MHz was fast), using the additional cycles just to push more polys, you are sorely mistaken. |
I would be, but that's not what I was every suggesting.
How much processing goes on in Doom and Medal of Honour that is more than Half Life and Delta Force? I do not ask that in a mischievous way, but you seem to be confident that it is not down to graphics! But like I said, Shiny seemed to think so!!!
Games can make use of the current processing power of PC's for many different things, but in how many games does this actually happen. Bearing in mind that pretty much every PC game will run fine on much slower processors, the bottleneck tends to be the graphics card anyway!
#127523 - sajiimori - Thu May 03, 2007 2:06 am
Dude, that was almost a decade ago. Shiny was wrong, the idea didn't pan out, end of story.
#127554 - HyperHacker - Thu May 03, 2007 6:26 am
It doesn't seem to me that the idea was to have modern games able to run on ancient computers. It sounded more like they wanted a system that would run on the average computer of the time, but still take advantage of all the extra processing power that newer hardware would provide. They mentioned 500,000-polygon models, when obviously the idea of a single model having that many polygons on the computers of their time is ridiculous. The idea is that 10 years later, this same game that ran on such old hardware, still manages to cripple our modern systems and looks hundreds of times better than it did before. It's never going to run on your old 8086, but it'll push the Pentium it was designed on to the max with some decent graphics, and it'll push your Athlon64 to the max with amazing graphics. (I know the CPU isn't as much a factor as the GPU, but anyway...)
It's an interesting idea. If nothing else, it lets you push your current hardware to the max at all times without fear that a more intense scene will be too difficult to render because your main character is already a zillion polygons. It can simply render half a zillion while that explosion is on the screen, with almost no noticeable loss in overall graphic quality.
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#127564 - keldon - Thu May 03, 2007 8:41 am
| sajiimori wrote: |
| Dude, that was almost a decade ago. Shiny was wrong, the idea didn't pan out, end of story. |
So you are saying that because Shiny were wrong that their idea is impossible, and not that they simply got part of it wrong! You seem to be infinitely pessimistic!
| sajimori wrote: |
| If you think game developers have been, since 1998 (when 200MHz was fast), using the additional cycles just to push more polys, you are sorely mistaken. |
You assume these were my thought; never were. Maybe you're predicting incorrect ideas that you think I'm thinking about and running off on a tangent ... that is why I always ask simple questions (which are yet to be answered)
#a: are you talking about your DS development or PC development
#b: How much processing goes on in Doom and Medal of Honour that is more than Half Life and Delta Force (stopping it from being able to run on a PII or PIII)?
#c: Games can make use of the current processing power of PC's for many different things, but in how many games does this actually happen?
#127565 - chishm - Thu May 03, 2007 8:58 am
When those engines were being worked on, graphics accelerators were no where near where they are today in terms of power (this is obvious). Since they have gotten so good at pushing polys, most games tend to scale other things, like Anti-Aliasing, or add extra technologies, such as HDR rendering. I can still play Halo on my GeForce FX 5200, but it looks much better on a more modern card.
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#127566 - keldon - Thu May 03, 2007 9:21 am
I just think Sajimori is infinitely pessimistic or just basically saying "whatever blah blah, you're just wrong <<insert random extreme>> but disregarding any topic brought up" with no relation to basic questions asked or points/topics raised!
The complexity of games has increased, but most of the jump was from 2d-3d (with occasional mechanics that are CPU hungry). The Sims for example is CPU/data hungry, although you can run it on a 333Mhz Cyrix quite fine! Prince of Persia 3d is not CPU intensive without the graphics, it is doing nothing more than Tomb Raider. And yes we don't know everything going on, but there is nothing about that game that requires it to (in case it was argued)
So here's a simple question: Prince of Persia; are you saying that its requirements are not about the graphics, and if the graphics were scaled down to those of Tomb Raider that it still would not run on the same PC's that run Tomb Raider?
#127598 - tepples - Thu May 03, 2007 2:11 pm
| keldon wrote: |
| #b: How much processing goes on in Doom and Medal of Honour that is more than Half Life and Delta Force (stopping it from being able to run on a PII or PIII)? |
Physics, for one. The animation is much more sophisticated in Quake engine games such as Half-Life than in the original Doom, and it's more sophisticated in Half-Life 2 than in the original Half-Life. For instance, bone animation has an overhead per bone even if you have models as low-poly as those of Virtua Fighter.
| Quote: |
| #c: Games can make use of the current processing power of PC's for many different things, but in how many games does this actually happen? |
Try making Animal Crossing for NES. You won't even have enough room in RAM to store the stuff on the ground.
_________________
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-- I think he moved to Tilwick.
#127618 - keldon - Thu May 03, 2007 4:31 pm
| Tepples wrote: |
| For instance, bone animation has an overhead per bone even if you have models as low-poly as those of Virtua Fighter. |
Those physics do take advantage of the increased power of PC's (which is a good answer). Also games like Halo make use of Inverse Kinematics!
| Tepples wrote: |
| Try making Animal Crossing for NES. You won't even have enough room in RAM to store the stuff on the ground. |
But again that's the extreme of super limited RAM. PC's have less RAM restrictions and even 50GB music libraries manage to run well on PC's! I don't think the concept ever concerned the extreme limitation of a 1Mhz machine with 64k of RAM (not meant to be an exact spec by any means, but you get the point)!
#127635 - sajiimori - Thu May 03, 2007 6:55 pm
I find it cute that you think PCs are in some other realm of existence.
I could imagine you making these same speculations circa 1995, when PC processors had about the same power as the DS. "But this theory only applies to the non-restrictive 486 DX2-66, not a paltry SNES!"
And tepples is on the right track: Node count is the real killer, not poly count.
#127641 - keldon - Thu May 03, 2007 7:05 pm
| sajiimori wrote: |
I find it cute that you think PCs are in some other realm of existence.
I could imagine you making these same speculations circa 1995, when PC processors had about the same power as the DS. "But this theory only applies to the non-restrictive 486 DX2-66, not a paltry SNES!" |
Keldon: I couldn't because it's a completely different case
possible reply: not really, it's just the same, just another type of bottlekneck
Keldon: good point; AI routines were improved and so on so we have more complicated mechanics. But one thing missed is that the processor still is not usually the bottlekneck but the graphics card (nowadays). I could probably use a processor just like the one in my laptop but it is just the graphics that stops it from running(#1)!!!
So node count does matter to the processor (I am not and never was disputing that); but there is always much room for the processor and less room for the graphics card and much strain placed on it. With Shiny's method are you saying that you could not lower the graphical strain(#2)?
I've numbered 2 points/questions!
#127642 - tepples - Thu May 03, 2007 7:11 pm
| sajiimori wrote: |
| I find it cute that you think PCs are in some other realm of existence. |
In a sense, PCs are in a realm of existence separate from game consoles and handhelds for two reasons: - PCs have a user space free of anti-homebrew measures.
- More importantly, PC backward compatibility is more thorough than that on consoles. For instance, Windows XP can run games made for Windows 3.1 and even some made for MS-DOS. Over time, a single platform encompasses a range of subplatforms with different CPU and GPU throughputs and different amounts of RAM. This makes considering scalability plausible.
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#127643 - sajiimori - Thu May 03, 2007 7:21 pm
I don't have time to post on this subject anymore, but I'll say this: Yes, it's reasonable to make a game scale down from current-generation desktops to current-generation laptops. No, that principle doesn't apply well across generations -- resource usage increases across the board in each generation.
#127645 - keldon - Thu May 03, 2007 7:32 pm
Fair enough, never disagreed with any of that(resource usage)! All I was saying is graphical strain... graphical strain, there is much unnecessary graphical strain in many games that forces graphical hardware of a certain power!!!!!
I think I made the mistake of not mentioning graphical strain (despite titling the thread AI 3d graphics quality [strain] reduction!!! ^_^
#127725 - Al - Fri May 04, 2007 9:47 am
Yeah, but the point is that graphical strain is a moving target - why bother making a part of your engine scale when there's no guarantee that's the bit that will need to scale tomorrow? Back in the Messiah days, keeping the polygon count in check was a massive win as the cost of transforming, lighting and rasterising them was huge (and the 3D cards of the day only helped out with the last stage).
Nowadays the battleground has changed beyond recognition. Reducing poly count will only help a little - the real differences between low-end and high-end PC hardware (beyond memory capacity) is in the complexity of shaders you can use. And while there perhaps scalable ways of approaching this, it's not as simple* as what Shiny was doing with tessellating the geometry.
To get any scaling on modern hardware basically means writing several versions of the same thing - for example the last PC game I worked on had to two or three different shaders for rendering water in order to cover a reasonable number of 3D card specs. Those shaders also had to have special case compatibility tweaks applied for specific cards and drivers as many have their own bugs and peculiarities. When you multiply this across all the shaders in the game, you very quickly see why developers tend to support as narrow a band of hardware as they can get away with - and why engine coders on PC games are often bitter, burnt-out people ;^)
At the end of the day though, the main problem is that scaling to this degree often just doesn't work well in practice. Messiah was dead clever, but I remember playing the demo (on a reasonably spec'd PC for the time) - I went up to a door, opened it, and watched as my poor character had all the polygon detail sucked out of him so they could be used to render the world beyond. Immensely cool tech, but the distraction it caused made the game rather laughable in my eyes.
* I say 'simple' but the tech behind the Messiah engine is still mindblowingly clever!
#127728 - keldon - Fri May 04, 2007 10:09 am
Actually that does sound pretty funny with it changing mid game! When it comes to shading you can simply turn it off (which is what anyone will do if there is an option and that is limiting their play). The tessellation will only change the model which means there is no way to do anything with shading; but shading isn't an issue if you turn it off anyway. Also the alternative to your Messiah situation is that your main character always looked that 'poor', or the enemies looked poorer. Having said that consistency is better than change in that case.
Shiny may have only thought as far as the complexity of the model; but does it only go as far as that? I think it is too easy to switch the thread into an argument between A and B; I never think like that, I think it is much more intelligent to discuss the possibility of A and the issues around it. *Shading is an issue, not a disproof.
Having said that the problem is not just scaling down the strain but in still keeping a reasonable graphical appeal. If you just remove effects then you end up with an ugly picture since the scene was designed to have lighting effects light up the room, had it been designed to not use lighting effects it would have pre-drawn the shading effect in the textures, but basically would have designed it to look good in the absence of the technology.
If you remove shading how ugly does it look? I guess fairly ugly since the models are designed to have that graphical characteristic drawn via the effect. But nonetheless would it not be great if one could create a system where the processing speed is the main issue and not the graphics card power? Even if just for an experiment, or research? That is what I am getting at.
*= I add bold so as I write much and it makes it easier to skim what I am saying; not to rant or something
#127756 - Al - Fri May 04, 2007 4:21 pm
The problem is that the overall look of a game is a holistic thing - in order to make the end result look as good as possible each element is designed to complement the others. A good example is the game I'm working on at the moment: it currently looks very bad in places because our normal mapping isn't working properly - the effect of this is amplified because our diffuse texture maps are lacking in bumpy detail because they were designed from the start to work with the normal map. You can design these kind of effects to be additive (the base texture map looks good, then each additional pass makes it look better - PC games often take this approach) but you get far better results if you make all the effects work together. We have that luxury - we're Xbox 360 exclusive so we don't need to worry about supporting different specs (and things will look awesome once those damn normal maps are fixed).
In short, making a game that looks good and runs well on both low-end and high-end hardware is a LOT of work and will almost always have a detrimental effect on how good the game looks in the usual and best cases. It's very rarely worth the bother - far better to aim somewhere inbetween, put in some adjustments to include as many systems as you can, then spend the rest of development fixing compatibility bugs with all those PC specifications included in that band ;^)
As an aside, Shiny's approach of modelling stuff very high-poly and reducing it down is alive and well in a slightly different form - many games (high-tech shooters like Doom 3 and Gears of War in particular) use an offline process to generate lower poly models with normal mapping from a ultra high-poly source mesh.
#127757 - Al - Fri May 04, 2007 4:33 pm
After typing all that I remembered this:
http://www.firingsquad.com/media/gallery_index.asp?media_id=244
It's Doom 3 running on an old Voodoo 2 card thanks to some hackery. That's what a game would look like without shaders, and it kinda proves that it's possible to make modern games run on old hardware that way. Of course playing it would be completely pointless as Doom is all about the atmosphere, but hey...
#127788 - HyperHacker - Sat May 05, 2007 12:40 am
| Al wrote: |
| Messiah was dead clever, but I remember playing the demo (on a reasonably spec'd PC for the time) - I went up to a door, opened it, and watched as my poor character had all the polygon detail sucked out of him so they could be used to render the world beyond. Immensely cool tech, but the distraction it caused made the game rather laughable in my eyes. |
Sounds like a glitch. It either shouldn't be putting that much detail into the far-off scenery at the cost of the close-up character's detail, or shouldn't be rendering the character with that much detail to begin with if it has to make such a drastic change once a larger area is loaded.
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#127800 - keldon - Sat May 05, 2007 2:22 am
| Al wrote: |
After typing all that I remembered this:
http://www.firingsquad.com/media/gallery_index.asp?media_id=244
It's Doom 3 running on an old Voodoo 2 card thanks to some hackery. That's what a game would look like without shaders, and it kinda proves that it's possible to make modern games run on old hardware that way. Of course playing it would be completely pointless as Doom is all about the atmosphere, but hey... |
yes, that is what I was saying; it would look ugly.
| Al wrote: |
| You can design these kind of effects to be additive(the base texture map looks good, then each additional pass makes it look better - PC games often take this approach) |
Yes, well they do all have many graphics options.
| Al wrote: |
| As an aside, Shiny's approach of modelling stuff very high-poly and reducing it down is alive and well in a slightly different form - many games (high-tech shooters like Doom 3 and Gears of War in particular) use an offline process to generate lower poly models with normal mapping from a ultra high-poly source mesh. |
Hmmmm, so it seems their ideas have been carried on in some way.
#127814 - HyperHacker - Sat May 05, 2007 8:47 am
But do they do that on the fly or at compile time?
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#127817 - keldon - Sat May 05, 2007 9:26 am
| HyperHacker wrote: |
| But do they do that on the fly or at compile time? |
Couldn't be compile time (unless you mean the Voodoo Doom 3), otherwise it would be fixed to every game.
#127840 - tepples - Sat May 05, 2007 3:04 pm
| keldon wrote: |
| HyperHacker wrote: | | But do they do that on the fly or at compile time? |
Couldn't be compile time (unless you mean the Voodoo Doom 3), otherwise it would be fixed to every game. |
Unless the game is shipped as source code. In the case of the engine and assets being proprietary software, the "source code" would be the hinted high-poly model, and the models would be "compiled" to a low-poly representation upon install.
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-- I think he moved to Tilwick.
#127843 - Al - Sat May 05, 2007 3:32 pm
| HyperHacker wrote: |
| But do they do that on the fly or at compile time? |
At build time - the game ships with the lower-poly, normal mapped versions of the meshes.
I guess you could ship the high-poly source meshes and do it at install, but that adds to install time (it's an intensive process - I seem to remember the tool that builds these meshes for Unreal Engine 3 even supports distributed processing over a network!) as well as giving you a test and support nightmare (it's bad enough having to test and support the graphics options games already have - but this could give you a setup unique to each PC!).
I wasn't saying that this technique was used for scalability - it's actually more to help artists generate assets that can make use of normal mapping. Normal maps are hard to do well by hand so techniques like this or tools like Zbrush are popular. This method could be used to automate generation of multiple level-of-detail versions of the same mesh though.
#127844 - Al - Sat May 05, 2007 3:43 pm
| HyperHacker wrote: |
| Sounds like a glitch. It either shouldn't be putting that much detail into the far-off scenery at the cost of the close-up character's detail, or shouldn't be rendering the character with that much detail to begin with if it has to make such a drastic change once a larger area is loaded. |
I was exaggerating a bit, but it was definitely noticable and distracting (it was particularly noticable on the characters' heels for some reason). This is where you have to be careful with dynamic level-of-detail systems - unstable graphics like this tend to undermine the solidity of the game and destroy the players' suspension of disbelief. Often you're better off just creating a solid, lower detail world than relying too heavily on tricks like this.