Game Development Community

WaterBlock Usage

by Kip Carr · in Torque Game Engine Advanced · 06/23/2005 (7:42 am) · 3 replies

Ok well i finally got my 32km x 32km terrain up and running by using 4 16k x 16km blocks (due to other issues at the moment).

Now my questions come to the waterblock. When i run my terrain with no water i get 100+fps no problem. But the size of my waterblock isnt really what is doing it. it seems to be the full reflect property. I can have a 16k square water block without the full reflect and get very little frame drop but the second i add full reflection i drop to about 8fps.

Is there a way to keep full reflections but get this so that i can still achieve good performance. I dont know if maybe breaking up the water block into smaller ones would help. I know i get about 50 fps if i put in a 1k block with full reflection. That halfs my frame rate!!!

Any help on the general good practices for water blocks would be great!

#1
06/23/2005 (10:54 am)
What graphics card are you using?
#2
06/24/2005 (5:54 am)
Geforce 5950 Ultra 256 mb ram
CPU is a 2.6 Ghz P4 with 1 GB Ram

Sorry i ment to put that into the post but i had to head to a meeting. I figured this card would of be sufficent to handle this. I know that water block is very big so i needed to know if i should use smaller ones or what i should do.
#3
06/28/2005 (12:08 pm)
Lots of smaller blocks would probably be slower because each one does its own reflection, so you are multiplying the number of times it has to draw the terrain.

That water block is so big though that you may be vertex limited. Try increasing the "gridsize" parameter. At its default, it renders a vert every 100 meters. So for 32x32km grid, thats 320x320 verts = 102400. Yikes. Try setting it to 500.