loading very large maps

juliusctw · Post by **juliusctw** » Wed Aug 30, 2006 2:56 am

Hello

I am really confused about the terrain issue, i see all these games where the map is huge and I see irrlicht terrain tutorial. Just that small piece of terrain takes up a lot of processing power,

i just don't see how I can have a large outdoor world using irrlicht , can somebody please explain the technique to generate large worlds in the game .

RhavoX · Post by **RhavoX** » Wed Aug 30, 2006 8:36 am

http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/ ... hp?t=15207
Here are some answers, but not for everything you want to know

I didn't notice that terrain tut takes a lot of power... I have like 200 fps on dx9

Spintz · Post by **Spintz** » Wed Aug 30, 2006 10:25 am

It doesn't take up a lot of processing power, well, it kinda does in that there are no vertex buffers, so every frame, it has to send the vertex and index data to the video card. With IrrSpintz, I can >1200FPS on a 257x257 terrain.

Spintz · Post by **Spintz** » Wed Aug 30, 2006 10:31 am

Also, other things need to be fixed, like when using OpenGL and the engine converts color data every frame to OpenGL order. Point is, there are other things slowing down the terrain, that aren't necessarily the terrains problem.

juliusctw · Post by **juliusctw** » Wed Aug 30, 2006 8:54 pm

RhavoX wrote:http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/ ... hp?t=15207
Here are some answers, but not for everything you want to know
I didn't notice that terrain tut takes a lot of power... I have like 200 fps on dx9

Hello , So what I got out of that conversation is that I have 3 choices

1 . dynamically load and unload the map as the player walk around. I think each time i load, this would cause the game to halt for a split second

2. load all maps at once and dynamically setVisible, which would use more ram but much faster,
I did a little research and i found 2 ways for this:
a. 9 block grid , basically you just keep loading the 9 grid around
the player
b. Kalman Filter , guess where the player will be and display
those grid ahead of time.

which management scheme did you use Spintz????

3. IrrSpintz have a manager which i could read the source code and manipulate,

Am i getting the point? ???

@spintz,
yeah, what you said was what meant, so in IrrSpintz you solved those inefficiencies???? i guess there's still a lot of improvement required in irrlicht. i hope hybrid will consider making those changes in the next version.

hybrid · Post by **hybrid** » Wed Aug 30, 2006 9:01 pm

I'm not the only one working on Irrlicht

Spintz · Post by **Spintz** » Wed Aug 30, 2006 10:52 pm

< cracks whip >

vitek · Post by **vitek** » Wed Aug 30, 2006 11:02 pm

I'm not the only one working on Irrlicht

Really? According to the SVN commit list it sure looks like it.

hybrid · Post by **hybrid** » Wed Aug 30, 2006 11:10 pm

But most code I've checked in was not implemented by me, just adapted or simply patched onto Irrlicht. I'm usually catching things from the forums and rearrange a little bit, except for the very simple or obvious things maybe. So publish code and Irrlicht will grow (but you two already know

)

juliusctw · Post by **juliusctw** » Thu Aug 31, 2006 12:09 am

i was whipped

RhavoX · Post by **RhavoX** » Thu Aug 31, 2006 8:22 am

Spintz wrote:It doesn't take up a lot of processing power, well, it kinda does in that there are no vertex buffers, so every frame, it has to send the vertex and index data to the video card. With IrrSpintz, I can >1200FPS on a 257x257 terrain.

OMG I would like to see Irrlicht patched with this

Xaron · Post by **Xaron** » Thu Aug 31, 2006 9:24 am

RhavoX wrote:OMG I would like to see Irrlicht patched with this

I agree! What about vertex buffers for terrain rendering? *looksathybrid*

I would like to see 32 bit indices as default in irrlicht, too. Come on, almost every graphics card can handle this.

@Spintz: What about IrrSpintz 1.1?

Regards - Xaron

hybrid · Post by **hybrid** » Thu Aug 31, 2006 9:29 am

Spintz is working on an update for the terrain node to handle larger maps. I don't wnat to change to 32bits without having the IIndexBuffer interface, and that one needs some cleaning before I can integrate it. I had planned 32bit support for Irrlicht 1.2, but bug fixing is also quite time consuming. If someone has a patch for terrains to enable VBOs there we could also use that as a temporary hack.

Xaron · Post by **Xaron** » Thu Aug 31, 2006 9:31 am

Thanks so much hybrid!

Looking forward to Irrlicht 1.2.

BTW: Would it be possible for you to integrate the method addTerrainSceneNodeRAW, too? It's nice to have the ability to use 16 bit raw heightmaps.

Regards - Xaron

hybrid · Post by **hybrid** » Thu Aug 31, 2006 9:38 am

I don't like the interface of it, yet. Having several new methods for this loader in ISceneNode is messing up the interfaces. If someone comes up with a better idea (maybe an optional IAttributes for all loaders) I will integrate it.

Irrlicht Engine

loading very large maps

loading very large maps

i was wipped