Hi David,
1/ yes you can make a hudge terrain
rule 1 is of course the amount of polygons the engine needs to parse
and draw per rendersession.
if the terrain holds lots of polygons, it might be handy to split the
terrain geometry to avoid long parsing.
you could then set the view.objectculling to true.
rule#2 is to make sure that the textures are close to 1/1 when display
at max size on screen.
the fog filter and maxpoly filter can indeed help a lot.
The new depthmaterial is also adding lots of goodness
2/ yes you can make a skybox, but you also can use lathe to make only
half hemisphere or cylindrical shape
3/ rule 1 and 2 are most important. try first apply them before work
out in details and add code to correct eventuals problems
but just remember that a good combo of geometry/texture often is the
best option when it comes to performance.
4/ culling does certainly help
Fabrice
On Jul 14, 2009, at 12:05 PM, David Parks wrote:
Hi, I have a few for-starters questions. They should be quickies for
folks with experience:
1) I would like to create a very large static terrain, I just want
to know what other people would use for this approach. My thoughts
are to create some kind of textured plane, and make sure to apply
something that clips the far side polygons, like a fog filter. Just
wondering if there are other techniques used here that I should
investigate? Maybe I should create a smaller terrain and extend/
adjust as the action moves into those areas?
2) Creating a sky - I saw the nice technique used in the "heavens
and earth" tutorial where they create a sphere around the game
environment. Is this the common approach? What else should I look
into if it's not.
3) Regarding performance, are there any guidelines regarding # of
polygons, # of actors, etc on scene at any given time (based on a
typical ~2ghz cpu for example)? Any documents out there that I
should be aware of that would help?
4) Is it safe to add significant amounts of off screen geometry
(assuming it's not so much as to cause memory issues), or does off-
screen geometry also have some cost in terms of CPU?
I'm just looking for some general guidance to help direct me in my
learning process.
Thanks!
David
