Irrlicht for RPG (Gothic 2)?

[Nadro]

Irrlicht will be fast for RPG (big world, npcs, misc, etc)? (size map GOTHIC2)

[benny53]

chances are,if an rpg has a huge map,it has some management system for it. Like take for example TES3: Morrowind,that splits up the map into cells,which I'm assuming they will then load the corresponding meshes and place items for it. Thats also why it loads so much...(I'm just assuming...)

Irrlicht is fast,its the fastest thing I've used so far. Of course,I probably shouldn't compare it to darkbasic pro,seeing as irrlicht blows that away:)

[JP]

Benny's basically saying yes you can do it in Irrlicht, but you'll have to work on it along the way, as you would have to do with any other engine you used. There have been quite a few other projects doing this kind of thing so you should be able to find some useful threads if you have a look around.

I think the Virtual City (somewhere in project announcements) probably does something similar to this, and there's an RPG project i remember (can't remember the name though) which was working along these lines.

[RhavoX]

As it was previously stated the best way to make a huge map is to split it in to cells in irrlicht there is a terrain map limit 256x256 if I remeber right so there's no other choice. I don't think that a "celled" map would load much, I guess that loading whole map into memory takes much longer. Anyways Irrlicht is pretty good for an rpg but you will have to write the whole system yourself it's only graphics engine

[Nadro]

So. If I build small maps and split ito big map and added (if player is < than 200 meters near the smallmap1, now smallmap1->setvisible(true); if player is > than 200 meters near the smallmap1, now smallmap1->setvisible(false) my game will by fast??

[Xaron]

in irrlicht there is a terrain map limit 256x256 if I remeber right so there's no other choice.

That's not completely true. This is why the Irrlicht engine uses 16 bit indices. If you change it to 32 bit, this limitation will be gone.

Regards - Xaron

[Nadro]

Niko says that irrlicht has no problems with working over big worlds

[Spintz]

IrrSpintz has a mod, CTiledTerrainSceneNodeManager class which can easily be converted to Irrlicht. It has a few kinks to be worked out, like lining up seams for different LODs between tile edge patches, which I'm about to work out. I guess what would be nice, would be to have a manager that uses brute force terrain( draws every vertex/index without LOD ) and one like Warchief did for RTS Style ( it's kinda in IrrSpintz, but needs some work, not the current way Warchief is doing it I believe ).

Point is, it's definitely possible, just will take a little work to get it customized and working to fit your exact needs.

[needforhint]

I don't believe that Gothic 2 ground mesh was splited into cells. The world ground mesh was loaded once all, and only objects like buildings and characters were being loaded according to a radius around player. Also the visibility was solved by a cube frustrum so part of the world ground mesh was not visible so it was not being rendered, thus still it was alive in memory. Actualy, a virtual memory, even weak old ones, are quite big. You just have to save CPU power, even if it means eating more virtual memory.

[Nadro]

I know that gothic world is in one file, but split small maps for one big is nice suggestion.

[RhavoX]

in irrlicht there is a terrain map limit 256x256 if I remeber right so there's no other choice.

That's not completely true. This is why the Irrlicht engine uses 16 bit indices. If you change it to 32 bit, this limitation will be gone.

Regards - Xaron

Thx ^^ another good thing to remeber