Re: [Algorithms] Terrain Organization

[Jim O. <j.o...@in...>]

> As for not everyone having TnL cards, well, I thought that any game which
is
> *now* in development will probably run on fast systems. By fast I mean
either
> TnL, or on CPUs which are fast enough that regular cards don't suffer too
> much. Anyway, this is up to you, it depends on you budget and a lot of
other
> things.

If you are going to implement some form of CLOD (this is where Tom Forsyth
would promote using VIPM - which is not a bad idea at all), I think you
should couple the runtime error calculations to your fps... i.e. if your fps
drops, crank down all lod levels in the game until the fps reaches an
acceptable level. Your gime might be spitting out 100K tris per second on a
souped up PIII with GeForce2 GTS and pump through a humble 15K on a PII with
TNT PCI.

And, since you have tied your CLOD calculations to the fps you could
(theoratically) also truly design your game for the future - i.e. use models
which by todays standards contain far to many triangles, the CLOD will keep
performance acceptable on today's high end hardware and increase detail on
tomorrow's hardware. Imagine playing Half-Life again, finding that the
overall detail has increased by a factor ten.

Jim Offerman

Innovade
- designing the designer