Adaptive Degradation

[Falcrum]

What you think to implement adaptive degradation to engine ? This may increase fps on low-end computers.

"when fps < 10 change model to box/point/wireframe

For identification unit use somthing like ComNameTags where name is type of unit



Example in 3DS Max:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osbogpUIcfE

[thesleepless]

LOD models would be better

if the model format allowed multiple LOD meshes per piece it could work really nicely without much of a change.

if distance is greater than distance1 then use the 1st LOD mesh, if it's further than distance2 use 2nd LOD etc. if it doesn't have a nth LOD mesh for that piece it'll use the n-1th mesh. you could make pieces invisible at certain LODs by having an empty mesh.

furthest LOD could just be a textured box or something if you want it to be very speedy.

[Falcrum]

I agree, LOD is very useful but you need make several meshes for each unit :/

[thesleepless]

I agree, LOD is very useful but you need make several meshes for each unit :/

true, more effort for unit creators, but worth it i think... also, could probably make some kind of script to automatically generate LOD meshes for each piece?

[Falcrum]

http://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/research/vr/lodestar/ - LOD generator

[aegis]

trepan did lua lod iirc

[Argh]

LODs aren't all that useful, for big RTS games where characters already have nearly-optimal polycounts. Not drawing the object at all, more than X distance, is something that can already be done.

On the other hand, if somebody wants to do a low-POV or FPS game with this engine, they'd become essential. Nobody's working on one atm, so this subject's moot.

[zwzsg]

I thought it had been proved multiple time graphics where not the bottleneck in Spring?

[thesleepless]

I thought it had been proved multiple time graphics where not the bottleneck in Spring?

thats a very good point

[FLOZi]

http://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/research/vr/lodestar/ - LOD generator

I doubt it's effectiveness wrt reducing models which are in the 2-5k tris range to start with, which a reasonable lod0 for RTS might be.

[eyu100]

I thought it had been proved multiple time graphics where not the bottleneck in Spring?

thats a very good point

I run Spring on a P4 and with min settings, hypertheading disabled and reduced resolution I can handle a lot more units.

[Neddie]

What do you run? How many players? How many units? Are you the person lagging DSD. Probably.

[Falcrum]

LODs aren't all that useful, for big RTS games where characters already have nearly-optimal polycounts.

Homeworld 2 using LOD, and it works well. By the way Homeworld 1 Engine is Open source...

"I run Spring on a P4 and with min settings, hypertheading disabled and reduced resolution I can handle a lot more units."

I run Spring on similar computer, but why I must always run on min settings, when other RTS games run on high settings ? We can improve engine to works faster on old computers.

But what other think about Adaptive Degradation ? It's simple and will works good...

[Master-Athmos]

Well people have been asking for LOD for a long time but I guess there simply is more important stuff that has to be made first. A method like doing wireframes at a certain point isn't the way to go though for a 3D engine like Spring - that's more something for apps with REALLY high polycounts. We'd just need a real LOD system which also immediately is made with shaders & stuff in mind so you can influence not only which detail level should be shown but also which shaders should be applied to a model's material...

While lazy modeler's can use such auto-LOD tools to get the intermediate shapes those results never are really good and so you'd need handmade stuff for a nice look. Quite some work but that's how LOD works best...

[Tobi]

For units, Spring has "far textures", and the FartextureHandler (h cpp).

Basically this replaces units with a single textured quad after a certain distance. The quad is rendered on first use; a quad is rendered for a number of common orientations of the unit (I think in 90 degrees steps).

[CarRepairer]

I run spring on my via netbook with via cpu and via gpu and I can tell you that the graphics are fine but that's not what slows me down. It's when the unit count goes up, no matter what's drawing on the screen.

[Argh]

Yeah, the bottleneck is actually CPU-side most of the time, unless you're dealing with a lack of VRAM or a really huge tricount on-screen.

I've seen GPU slowdowns, but I have to set up pretty ridiculous situations, basically.

The only exceptions to this are all water-related. Spring's water1 and water 0 are ridiculously slow compared to anything else I've seen lately.

I haven't had time to ever look into why, though. My best guess is that it's because the water is having big clipping issues because it's a giant plane.

[lurker]

Fartexture

Code doesn't count unless it actually works right.

[eyu100]

What do you run? How many players? How many units? Are you the person lagging DSD. Probably.

yes =\

[Tobi]

Fartexture

Code doesn't count unless it actually works right.

What doesn't work with it?

Last time I checked it (and fixed some bugs in it), it worked fine.

(That's a while ago though so wouldn't suprise me if someone has broken it again already )