[Plib-devel] How do I?

[Brad C. <bco...@ac...>]

Hi folks,

Sorry to ask this question here but...

Is there an easy way to find out what the "texture-memory-footprint"
of my frustum is?  Meaning, how much texture am I rendering (in
memory usage) within my current field of view.  I want to calculate
what my next frame texture demands may be so that I can fiddle with
the LOD's and terrain tiles in order to keep my texture memory footprint
within the graphics hardwares available memory.

I'm leaning towards creating a class that all of my virtual objects
inherit from and having those objects throw their names on the name
stack.  Then I could render into the selection buffer and pull off which
objects where rendered and then query there LOD and texture size.
Summed up this could give me something close to what I want, but
this doesn't allow me to plan ahead, and I blow a frame or two.

Or, I guess I could add a cull and then do basically the same process as above
(without the render to the selection buffer).

It would also be nice perform a projection from screen/pixel space onto a
plane that closely approximates the terrain.  Then tiles could load a texture
which best matches the pixel/texel ratio.  I know this is much like MipMapping
but I want to avoid loading in the whole MipMap image pyramid if possible.

Any ideas or discussions on the above would be great.

I feel like I'm opening a can of worms here.

Brad Colbert
GreyStone Technology, Inc.
bco...@ac...
(858) 874-7000