Torque Engine able to make city maps instead?

#1 With some carefull planning and a heavy use of portals and LOD's, the answer is yes.

But it will take a lot of work and a lot of planning.
And by the time you re finished with your fist city everyone is running a 2.6 ghtz computers and can run it smoothly.

But the answer is yes.

// Clocks out.

#2 biggest problem of massive cityscape is the fillrate hit generated by stack of buildings. thus, CPU power wont help much.

#3 Its quite possible to do, but I dont think its best suited to doing it. In order to do cityscapes well, you need lots of instancing and some very good quality HSR algorithms designed for the purpose (things like large occluders etc).

There really currently isnt a single engine available to the public that would do this right afaik.

Phil.

#4 how doubt destructable building ... is that possible. . .after so many hit the building crumbles?

#5 I had a thought on this topic. It is very relevant to the game we are making.

Does this sound reasonable:

1. Build terrain mountains with 90 degree slopes.

2. Place decals on the "side" that are textures of buildings. e.g. 2d drawings that look like windows, etc...

Alternatively, you could load and place the decal after the terrain is built through script. Because the engine only keeps one copy of the resource, you should be able to load 10-12 different buildings with little overhead.

For more detail, you could always attach objects on the sides of the buildings, like archs, steps, and other models at or near ground level.

Not all buildings would have interiors, of course.

Does this sound like a workable idea?

#6 Hmm. I haven't tried to see how steep I can get Torque to look yet, but heightmap-based landscape engines aren't capable of perfect 90 degrees in general. Since Torque is a heightmap based engine, you'll have at least some slight slope to your buildings with that method.

#7 To do this ideally, you want a thing called "instancing", this is where a single object can be referenced many times but with a difference in position. The idea is that you send the geometry of the building to the 3D card once, and then tell it to draw the building as many times as its needed in your city.

The texture on a raised heightmap *might* work, but right now the terrain editor isnt working for actually setting materials, and I doubt its got enough control to be able to set your material with correct UV's to make this work.

So what are you left with for cities? portals. Lots of em. Effectively, think of your whole city as one huge great box with portals everywhere. Really, learning the use of portals is really the only chance you have of getting the framerate you need.

I just dont think this is the best engine for cityscapes, although you can do quite a lot with portals to mitigate that.

Phil.

#8 k then could some explain portals and brushes while your at it, for me?

#9 Check out Crimeforce. We have a city enviroment. FPS is decent on my Geforce 2. Check it out at Crimeforce.com and dl the deathmatch demo.

#10 If your only looking for mod work on the engine then wait for Medal of Honor to come out. Not too sure if they are releasing the source but they have some really nice cityscape stuff in it.

Alc

#11 phil, or someone who knows their stuff, could you please tell me more about this portal thing? do portals simply mean that you can occlude better? would they allow me to make a large, well populated medieval city, as long as it stayed relatively cramped with lots of twists and turns and few open areas?

#12 Jeff, in your Torque dir there should be a folder called docs, in that is a folder called Tools and there's a html doc called Worldcraft.

Near the bottom is a part called
"A Simple Hall - Portal brushes and zones"
which explains how the portals works.

Hope this will help you out a bit.

// Clocks out

www.flashthunder.com

#13 Trevor-the Crimeforce demo didn't work for me...is it just me, or is everyone having a problem?

-Evan

#14 err, not a proud owner of torque, as im not a progger...

#15 Jeez, I have to download a whole bunch of stuff in order to install the torque engine :( jeezes, i'll wait till next year.

Well how the way it sounds, it's possible to make atleast a small city.

#16 I can expand on some of this for you guys, maybe it will help.

In short, the portals allow you to manually set up visible zones within an "interior" structure in torque. With each structure you have at least "zone 0" which is normally the exterior of the structure. With at least one enclosed area separated from the outside by a portal brush you'll get "zone 1." Now, the engine will only draw the faces in zone 1 if the zone itself is visible to the player. It's actually a little more complex, as far as how the engine handles zones and their benefits, but that's the basics.

The other engine feature that is a huge help is the LOD support. Your 2000 face building can be easily reduced to less than a hundred when the player is not next to it. A well laid out city could easily take advantage of this by arranging the buildings so that the really close buildings, at a high LOD, hide the players view of the fairly close buildings so they can be dropped to low poly LODs quickly without the players seeing the change.

And, in laying out my city map, I found that it works very well if you avoid the urge to make your terrain perfectly flat. Using a few hills and ridges can work wonders on your framrates... maybe we should all try to make San Fransisco? :)

If you're wondering just how much you can cram in the engine, I've run a test set of 5 detailed buildings, ranging from 1 to 4 floors tall with full (portalized) interiors and 3 LOD models each. By placing 10 of each building (50 total) I can essentially create something that looks like a suburban city and runs quite well on my old GeForce 2 (32MB). I'll credit some of that to the fact that with only 5 different buildings I'm reusing a lot of textures and not choking my vid card. And, if you're wondering, 50 buildings looks like a LOT of buildings in the game. The biggest problem I have, well, I'm dreading the time when I have to go place all the dts models in place for each stinking window.

I'm in the process of creating a stress test for the torque engine, I'm making a very high poly 20-story building to see how well it works, if at all. Two methods, 1 is a single .dif object for the building, the second is for each separate floor as a separate .dif object (occluded floors will then be totally ignored). Not sure how well the second method will work, but hey... it's worth a shot.

Pardon my Typos, I should already be in bed.

Keith

#17 Hey Keith, any word on how well your stress test worked?

Vic-D

#18 I'd kind of like to what know Trevor has done for his town. The town in Crime Force is a very good size, more than enough for a death match or team based game (you city guys might be doing an MMORPG or something on a larger scale), and Crime Force runs very very well.

#19 ummmm if the lod doesnt work real well we will have to look else were for Genome conflict cause we are gonna have fully intergrated towns and high detail bases and under ground citys

#20 Hehe, so what engine would you be using in place of Torque?

Large cities and underground villages and lush forests... not gonna work in any engine unless you do major work on it.