RE: [Algorithms] Terrain performance comparrisons

[Tom F. <tom...@bl...>]

That pretty much covers it. My fave is Thatcher's ChunkedLOD because
it's so hardware-friendly - pretty much every game I've worked on has
been limited by the CPU, not the GPU.

There's a sort-of stripped-down variant of it that uses precomputed
index lists to cope with the cracks, called "Simplified Terrain Using
Interlocking Tiles" by Greg Snook in Game Programming Gems 2. It's
incredibly simple, and therefore very fast indeed. There's no morphing,
but because it's so simple you can throw loads of tris through it, which
can often compensate. Almost everything is precomputed, you just pick a
VB and an IB and throw them at the card.

TomF.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: gda...@li... 
> [mailto:gda...@li...] On 
> Behalf Of Daniel Duhprey
> Sent: 24 July 2003 22:45
> To: gda...@li...
> Subject: RE: [Algorithms] Terrain performance comparrisons
> 
> 
> On Thu, 24 Jul 2003, Tom Forsyth wrote:
> 
> -->If you have any specific questions, I'm sure we'll be 
> happy to help :-)
> 
> I have some questions :)
> 
> I took it upon myself to try to analyze the modern contenders 
> for "terrain 
> engine of the year" to see if any of them performed as a 
> panacea in the realms 
> of quality and performance.  Having been frustrated by the 
> algorithm of the 
> week syndrome that seems to prevail; I figured I'd wind up 
> needing to have a 
> couple easily swappable plugins for our engine (maybe even 
> needing to switch 
> between algorithms depending on the context).
> 
> I'm really trying to come up with a general solution for a 
> general game 
> engine (even if that "general" solution is a set of swappable 
> plugins that 
> present an identical, or similar, interface.)
> 
> The questions:
> 
> what are the major contending algorithms for modern systems?
> the three I've decided to try out are ChunkedLOD, Roam 2.0 
> and Geomipmapping.
> Are there any others which have feature sets drastically 
> different from these 
> three?
> 
> If I want to maintain backwards compatibility with older 
> systems should I use 
> an older algorithm (original roam) or do the newer ones still 
> work even if you 
> can't assume there's a fast GPU?
> 
> Is it inherently impossible to boil down a set of options for 
> terrain into 
> some kind of common subset? (e.g., all can be heigtmap based, 
> all can deal 
> with texture palletes, all have a similar error metric, etc.)
> 
> Thanks in advance
> 
> -- 
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