On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 2:57 PM, BGB <[email protected]> wrote: > game art doesn't need to be particularly "awe inspiring", so much as > "basically works and is not total crap". >
It can't be awe inspiring all the time, anyway. Humans would quickly become jaded to that sort of stimulation. The quality of a game map depends on many properties other than visual appeal. A program that creates maps for a first-person shooter should probably have concepts such as defensible positions, ambush positions, snipe positions and visual occlusion, reachable areas, path-generation for AIs. One might express `constraints` such as: * a spawn zone should not be accessible from a snipe position. * a capture-the-flag map should ensure that every path from the enemy flag to the base moves past at least one good snipe position and one good ambush position. * there should be some `fairness` in quality and quantity of defensible-position resources for the different teams. * the map needs to occlude enough that we never have more than K lights/triangles/objects/etc. in view at any given instant. But, in my practical understanding, these issues are not so distinct from visual appeal. It's all subject to the same search, recognition, and refinement aspects I described initially. > the issue is mostly that my engine pulls off worse framerates on current > hardware using the stock Doom3 maps than the Doom3 engine does Doom 3 engine is hardly an obsolete technology (even used in Brink in 2011), and its developers have a lot of expertise. There are certainly metrics by which a new engine could compete for performance - eliminating load-zones, dynamic and runtime-extensible environments, moving water, etc. - but I'd be surprised if you beat the Doom 3 engines at Doom 3's own maps! Anyhow, you go into a lot of interesting specifics about your engine which seem a bit off-topic for this subject line. I might e-mail you to discuss them externally. Regards, Dave
_______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
