Plan for David "FenrirWolf" Grace

A brief update on poking around large-density shape rendering in Torque

After getting some good advice, partially from GG community members, the guys at Thinktank, and GG itself, I've explored TSStatic and how it handles LOD and auto-imposter generation.

Unfortunately, last night I was busy playing around with a new toy and shooting a short amateur video. :) I'll post a link to it once I am done; It's very silly, but it's invaluable experience.

Anyway, I talked to James Urquhart and he's sent me the patch for fixing the texturing of Torque's imposters. In the screenshots he had made, it looks like the imposters are standard billboards that do not change angle as you move above the objects. But then again, I could be seeing that wrong -- I plan on patching my a copy of the HEAD tonight and seeing what comes of this. (This is a definate disadvantage to using hand-made billboards for the last detail level. They look very fake when you fly over them, and you see your trees laying sideways...)

James says Torque alters the billboard depending on viewing angle, so I am guessing it takes multiple angle snapshots. Another issue I see with billboard trees is that they aren't lit the same way as the DTS object, so you've got a noticable shift in brightness when it fades from DTS to imposter. I wonder if this could be addressed, too. More code-poking for me to do later, I suppose.

I did manage to squeeze in about an hour's worth of time to play around with the detail transitioning code. Currently, it only activates when transitioning between imposters and their DTS objects. But a very simple code modification allows it to work at any detail level. The results, I have to admit, look pretty good. Instead of the sudden "popping" we are all used to for detail changes, you see a smooth fading of the previous detail level. Geometry still disappears, but the fading makes it less visually jarring.

If you're flying over the scenery, however, the popping is still evident -- The transisitions only help if you are moving gradually, ie: walking/running on the ground. So, for flight sims or such this will be virtually useless but in my case I think it's a nice addition.

The down sides? Well, at certain times you are rendering two whole DTS objects when normally the detail code would render just one. Also, one of these objects is being entirely rendered as transparent, which means it's all alpha-blended polys. Of course, with a large number of trees I am already rendering a ton of blended polys... But it's still at least a 2x speed decrease for improved visual quality.

This definately will need a $pref entry, so a player can toggle "Smooth transitions" on and off in the game options. In my tests, a GeForce 3 and higher (exlucing the MX versions, of course) didn't break a sweat when rendering the several hundred trees of my test scene. I really need to find that FPS script someone had and re-add it back to my project so I can get actual figures.

Now, this is making me wonder how DIF detail transistions occur. That, I feel, might be a big bag o' scariness, unlike DTS objects... But I can always check it out.