I was playing Motocross Madness 2 this weekend--the amount of detail in that game has always astounded me, even by today's standards. I was trying to work out how they manage to throw so many trees and scenery objects at you without hurting performance, and noticed one interesting technique, that I haven't seen before.
Correct me if this is common knowledge, but I haven't seen this discussed anywhere. I though some people might benefit from it.
They're using billboards at a distance. That distanced is set by the "graphics detail" level, and can be changed on the fly. That's normal. But what's interesting, is that they aren't hard-switching between the billboard tree and the 3D tree model, but instead, alpha blending the billboard out to nothing, gradually, as you get closer to it. It almost completely eliminates any LOD "pop", and with properly-designed scenery models (that are mostly symmetrical from all directions), works really, really darn good IMHO.
Going to give it a go in my project when I get back to it in the next few weeks (started new day job and have been moving my family, no time for 3D!)
If anyone has already played with this I'd love to hear about the implementation and results!
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D Scott Smith
Senior Software Engineer
Election Systems & Software
Day: 402-970-1114
Cel/Eve: 402-658-5674
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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