Re: speed question

[Keith W. <kw...@cs...>]

On Tue, 13 Jul 2004, Frank C wrote:

> I think I may have misunderstood your situation - if your tiles are
> using mostly different textures then yes, I see how that could help,
> but if you're only using a few textures you can set up your data to
> reuse the same textureshaders and you shouldn't have any problems.

Yeah.  Each tile represents a large chunk of ground, large enough that the
number of tile objects will be managable by the rendering engine, but
small enough that I can gain serious benefits by only activating tiles
that are relatively near the user.  It's an interesting tradeoff.

Of course, each terrain tile has a unique planar image mapped onto it,
which represents dirt, grass, water, whatnot, in a pattern that is clearly
unique to each tile...thus the basis of my original intention, which is to
use lower res textures in the distance.

Sorry, I'm not good at explaining this stuff because my knowledge of 3D
programming is adequate, but not superb.

Thanks for the help.  If I understood correctly, d18 (which I have)
doesn't do any mipmapping for me either with pixmaps or with mipmaps even
if I load a mipmap manually.  As such, I'm back to one of the questions I
asked when I started this thread:

Two approaches:

One: represent each tile as multiple trimeshes (with identical geometry)
but with different res textures.  Only submit one trimesh per tile at a
time, as matches the distance from the camera.

Two: only make one trimesh per tile, but change the texture the trimesh is
using whenever its distance crosses a threshold.

I'm not sure which method is best.  I think the second method would be
more computational because it requires reloading and copying over pixel
buffers while the first one just submits various objects that are sitting
in RAM.  Is that assessment correct?  If so, the only downside to the
first method is that is uses up RAM to store multiple trimeshes, but RAM
is fairly abundant, at least compared to VRAM.  I seriously doubt this
game could tax a modern machine's RAM.

________________________________________________________________________
Keith Wiley                                kw...@cs...
http://www.unm.edu/~keithw                 http://www.mp3.com/KeithWiley

"Yet mark his perfect self-contentment, and hence learn his lesson,
that to be self-contented is to be vile and ignorant, and that to
aspire is better than to be blindly and impotently happy."
                                           --  Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland
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