Scott Richmond

Aye its a decent solution IMO. But just in regards to the cutting up of models - LW can do dynamic model splicing anywho, as already demoed.

Calm down buddy. Rick was simply elaborating on his point, which we were disputing. Don't take it personally when he has a valid point you can't rebuke.

Ah good point, that's a much more elegant solution.

Shamus has posted a short video on some landmass generation concepts in relation to Fuel. Its worth the listen:

Aye. That would be simpler at the disadvantage of not being able to modify your models' polys (Say, for example, putting big chunky armor on your character). These solutions are the ones you want to be looking into Rick.

I don't know how most MMOs do it, but I would not have entire character models just with different texture sets. I would cut the models up into body parts (arms, legs, torso, head, etc) and then put the model together with LUA scripting at runtime. That way you can have all the combinations you want and are interchangable at will.

Thanks Josh. Lovin all these tuts your doing.

Yeah thats fair enough. Though I do think you can use relative paths to avoid the whole issue. But meh, whatever works best.

Well your entirely right Marley. It is simple to change the project paths. So it is no biggie. *shrugs*

Sorry, so you're actually assuming everyone here is running LW in the default directory? You should be able to set the projects up using relative directories.

Originally I was tending to agree to Tyler on this, but I'll freely admit that I don't fully understand how the shader solution works. So I'll have to assume Josh in correct in saying it is more efficient and faster. Could someone, anyone, maybe write up a bit of a tutorial on how this is supposed to work? I'm sure many people here would benefit from it.

Sounds good. Though most of us probably have our own locations for programming stuff (I do). So just make sure you don't assume LW is in that default directory in your tutorials.

I think we're over reacting a little bit here with the framewE/Ork change. LW is going to go through a lot of API change in the near future what with this merge and the integration of LUA and all that, so we might just have to prepare to spend some time performing code change in our project timelines. Personally, I'm fine with that - Its more work but I signed up for clean code and consistency when I bought LW. So change is expected, and I knew that from the start.

Hrm, are you able to point to an example of that function in use Josh?

That's even better news! After all this crazy new stuff in 2.3 I think we need some decent doco.

Fantastic work Josh. Nothing better than consolidating codebases to make things more efficient and simpler.

Lumooja is correct. You need to to throw out this whole notion of regions or cells or whatever you want to call them. It just doesn't work out the way you want, and you can go see Oblivion for another live example. Everything needs to be streamed. Josh you might want to look into how RAGE is doing its texture streaming as a point of inspiration (See: Oct-trees).

Okay. You guys might want to post full config details - resolution, SSAO/HDR/etc.

This is just a complete hunch, but if you're using KeyHit() / KeyDown maybe the keyboard isn't being polled quick enough. What I mean to say is, KeyHit() captures the key that was hit and then resets afterward. So at a speed of 100FPS, you might be finding that some frames turn up an empty KeyHit() because it hasn't polled the keyboard yet.

Ah but they do. Clearly the game must have some key places and areas in the game. So they tell the procedural engine to put this and that in specific places each time and then let it work out the bits in between on the fly.

Yeah I tend to agree with Niosop. PhysX is an Nvidia exclusive feature and now that quite a damn few games use it, I do make the concious decision to buy Nvidia over AMD. And as for CUDA, thats a whole new concept Nvidia are hoping will really kick off in datacentres in the future. I think Josh could be right in that thats what Nvidia aim for at the start, but both PhysX and CUDA will, in the future, make them money, all things going to plan.

Ah you are correct Michael. A typo on my part. Still, you appeared to be talking about the MegaTexture implementation in idTech4 (Doom 3, Quake Wars), while idTech 5 (RAGE) takes it to a whole new level. I may not be getting what you mean by 'balance' but I disagree with you, for the most part - We have terrain generation working perfectly now. You'd be crazy to try to hand paint your own terrain (heightmap) when completely realistic ones can be gen'd at the click of ones fingers. Of course, I agree that one will need to come in a touch up and personalise the terrain afterwards. But I think thats where games will continue to head in the future. More and more will be generated on the fly, which allows us developers to concentrate on more important assets or parts of the world we're building.

haha. Gee you've really jumped on it eh. To be honest I don't think an FPS would have worked out at all. You'll see this the more you play - By the games design you are flying through the world at high speeds. So environment quality isn't a big issue. Thats not to say Fuel isn't beautiful, because it is. But when you're on foot in an FPS, its an entirely different matter. The world has to be much much more detailed. I think it could very well be done, but it'd take a hugely detailed procedural system to build up an interesting world to an FPS player level. It would require so many layers and passes. I'm fairly certain the code is out there in pieces - Trees, grass, terrain, roads, caves, etc. It just all needs to be put together. I'd really love to see an open source project do sometihng like that. I wonder if there is already a project out there?

Wow that app is very impressive! I think procedural environments will become a bigger and bigger part of the gaming industry. We just can't keep on going the way we are - Takes too long to make decent large worlds at the moment. We need better tools.

Aye. There is a lot to be said about procedural graphics. Fuel is a perfect example of how procedural graphics can really make your game unique. There is simply no way anyone could justify building such a huge world by hand, and the fact is, a game like Fual just would not exist without the huge procedural engine they have under it. Josh, you should really check out some of Shamus's other articles on Fuel. I know you yourself have done quite a bit on roads, so I know you'll be interested in em: 1. Fuel: Roads - http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=5237 2. Fuel: Terrian - http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=5267