Portal Mechanism For Ahra Pahts

[Ehren]

This may sound stupid... maybe I'm not understanding what you guys are talking about (I'm no age writer) but wouldn't this cause a problem standing on high ground like the castle in the center? I mean wouldn't you see there were areas of the city missing in the distance?

Although I guess that would be the only high enough ground to really see over walls.

[Grogyan]

It would require a lot of work to sort out how far one can see.

May I suggest that with VisRegions that you also do a fade at distance, thus limiting how much work you would have to do.

This would be a good addition as it would add "atmosphere" to Ahra, as its an Age in constant twilight

[Chacal]

Good job Robert, this might solve a lot of future problems.
So this would actually cut down a lot of the initial load time for Ahra Pahts?
What about performance during play (for having only one district loaded)?

[Robert The Rebuilder]

Chacal: this would reduce the load time and the memory footprint, and it would increase the frame rate (less stuff to draw).

Grogyan: It would be great to be able to do a fade between levels of detail. I think that's a built-in feature of Plasma, but I don't think we've deciphered that yet for our plugin.

Ehren: You're right - if someone is in the center, then they'll need to have a lot of the city geometry paged in. [Although we could have a heavy fog set in whenever someone goes to the hub... ]

Paradox and Aloys: I think we can avoid having barriers if we use long corridors between districts with a limited field of view. Right now, there are tunnels in between the subdistricts (the purple dots on the diagram), but there's just an open gap in the wall in between districts (the orange dots). As Aloys pointed out, there's more room around these between-district gaps, so maybe we can put in the long tunnels there? The tunnels help reduce the FOV, so our imposter images can be smaller.

Note: the catch about the paging region is that once the paging is begun, it cannot be interrupted. So, you cannot step out of the region once you've gone inside it. Even if you could, you'd have to restore the age back to what it was before you stepped in (page out the partial new district, page in the old district again), and that would still require waiting.

[Paradox]

Might I also suggest never paging anything out?

The issue doesn't seem to be that the Age runs slowly, only that the Age loads slowly initially. By paging out, you are ensuring that the districts will always need reloading.

[Nadnerb]

Which is why I suggest performing the page in far away from the actual crossover point in the wall, which already has a moderately long tunnel/gap in it. Also, if you don't page out, you don't have the "turn around and wait again" issue. IIRC, load time is the only issue we're actually trying solve at the moment.

[Aloys]

Nonononono we are totally trying to solve the actual framerate issue.
Right now on my version the Age slows down as low as 10 FPS in the worst cases and averages at around 40..
But I'm testing on a 3.2 Ghz with 1Gb of ram and an GeForce 8800GT, which is a pretty decent computer (as far as Uru's system requirements), and there are only a couple shells. I changed my graphic board in december, but just before I was using a GeForce6600 and the performance was much lower (and at that point the Age didn't even had all the content it has right now)..
So, as much as I don't like to page out district for the reasons you both mentionned, I fear this will be a necessity.
I've no idea how Plasma's occlusion engine works, or if it has any runtime optimisation of that kind, but right now when you look in any direction ALL of the age that is in the view frustrum is rendered even if you are behind a wall. Just run any custom Age with a .fni setting of "SetYON 0" to render the Age backward and you'll see the problem..
With an Age which has as many polygons and textures that is really problematic.

[Robert The Rebuilder]

Nonononono we are totally trying to solve the actual framerate issue.

Agreed - and another goal is to reduce the memory footprint.

[Nek'rahm]

Dude, that's amazing...

Absolutely BRILLIANT job figuring this out! Very easy way of shortening the size and load time of certain Ages.

This could probably be applied to Gahreesen right? With the elevators and doors? Or is that already done?

[Paradox]

Okay, one request before all of this gets too involved: Let me hack together a simple Relevance Region and see if that improves performance anywhere.

If it does, we might not need to do as much work.