Ahra Pahts Shell 410

[Chacal]

Add 600 faces and animations for each squirrel.

[Aloys]

Haha. 600 face for something so small I would refuse the shell.

3300 face may sound high for a tree, but currently that fits decently with the number of polygons for the rest of the Age. (plus it's a nice looking tree. )

It's difficult to properly estimated a ressource (polygon/textures) budget for a shell, essentially because right now all of the Age is being rendered at the same time. We have no rendering optimisation of any kind: no occlusion, no level of detail, no dynamic loading of pages etc.. So right now there's roughly 50000 polygons being renderedd at any time just for the city structure, if you add the Hub, the Nexus (yes it is calculated too ), the shells etc, the polycount goes throught the roof very quickly.. (and that's not even counting the textures).
But that might change in the future as PyPRP progress (at least I hope. ). At which point, ressources allocation will be calculated differently. So how many polygons and textures should go in a shell? It's not possible to give a precise number, the lesser the better of course, but that doesn't really help us either.
This not much of a problem for now, but as more shells will start to come in this will become one.

[Chacal]

Has anyone found out how vis regions work for uru?

[Aloys]

I remember someone saying long ago that they would be quite easy to implement (or was that for relevance regions?), but because I'd probably be the only one to actually use them I didn't try to push that up on the development priority list..

[mar]

What are vis regions

[Chacal]

It's a device for getting a better performance at rendering time.

Let's say you are in a cave, obviously you shouldn't be able to see what's outside the cave, so it makes no sense for the game engine to render the outside. By using vis regions, it is possible for the builder to tell the game engine: "if the player is here, render only this".

I used to build levels for the Quake engine, and the building tool automatically calculated vis (visible) information at export time (along with baking the lights, etc). I have no idea how this would work for the Plasma engine.

[Trylon]

I looked into it a bit, and it should be easily possible. If the soft volumes are implemented correctly that is....

[mar]

Thanks for the explanation

[Tsar Hoikas]

I remember someone saying long ago that they would be quite easy to implement (or was that for relevance regions?), but because I'd probably be the only one to actually use them I didn't try to push that up on the development priority list..

I was talking about Relevance Regions

[Aloys]

Well, honnestly given the ever-decreasing performance and ever increasing load times in Ahra Pahts, I'll take anything at this point: relevance regions,vis regions, anything..