On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 6:18 PM, John Denker <j...@av8n.com> wrote:
>
> 3) Whether the new behavior is entirely correct is
> something we should discuss. The memory usage at
> JFK is 400 or 500 megs larger than it would be at
> a "normal" airport. I know the NYC scene is
> complex, but jeepers, 500 megs complex?
>
> As the saying goes, a picture is worth athousand
> words, but half a billion? Really? That's about
> 500 bytes for every pixel on the screen.
>
> Only 250 bytes for a normal sized screen today, but the point is well
taken. It's an interesting statistic.
I haven't looked at NYC in a while, but our urban areas tend to get
clobbered, particularly when the scenery guys strut their stuff for a new
release. Many of the specific and generic building models are layed out in a
way that's non-optimal for OSG and OpenGL, with separate objects and
textures for each wall of the building. I usually think more about the
frame-rate implications of this, but these separate objects and structures
each add a bit to the 500 megs you're seeing. Additionally, we keep way more
of these structures around than we need to. Modelers use a lot of animations
to specify properties of models that are awkward or impossible to set in
AC3D or Blender, but most of these are not animated, are one specific
animation (day / night) that could be optimized, or could actually be shared
among many models.
The ideal would be to coalesce all the buildings in a city block into one
model with one texture. We're a long way from that with our current models
and the random objects scheme. I see a combination of redoing some models
and optimization at load time as the way forward towards better performance.
Commercial sims and games preprocess all their models into an optimized form
that would be loaded directly, but there always seems to be resistance to
that idea.
Tim
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