Performance with High Character Count

#21 By "DTS already supports that," are you referring to the T_Skin type in DTS::Mesh? I haven't been able to find anything that precalculates the transformations. Is there an existing place to hang additional meshes per animation frame in DTS::Shape?

Not all mesh transformations would need to be cached -- just the "important" ones. Given a development cycle of 2-3 years (for a game that would need such a thing), I don't think ~12MB per character model (for the meshes) would be too unreasonable. If client memory turned out to be restrictive, there would still be the option of falling back to skinning on the fly, with LOD adjustment in high character count scenes.

Tom

#22 If you want to go into the direct vertex animation route, there are ways to make it more efficient, if you're up to writing your own system (you mentioned a 2-3 years dev cycle, that means a triple-A game).

You don't need to store a whole vertex per frame. You could store only position offsets, and maybe normal offsets, using lower precision data types and re-calculate the tangent and binormals on CPU.

#23 I'm referring to the way that we support morph animations and the like - there's a mode for DTS where you can simply specify "frames" of mesh data, all fully baked out, like you're talking about.

Oh right - the main downside to baked out mesh data is you can't do dynamic animation blending. Which is pretty important. (I think nearly all 3d games these days do it.)

#24 Thomas, the method you mention was used in Quake 2 and to a lesser extent on Quake 3. Its a bit old fashion to be truthful, but if you want lots of very similar non-complex characters with all the same animation, then youre golden (I am thinking that Call of Duty 1 did exactly this).

Also remember, you can do LOD on your bones as well as your geometry.

#25 Quite an informative thread. Thanks to everyone for their input.

Tom