Compiler should optimize high tris situations

(The Wanderer) #1

In this game (ET) when you have a scene with about 30K triangles from world geometry, and triangles from a few players doing their things, performance can drop incredibly. Even call of duty which was build on this same engine and had better lightning and shadow options could push way more triangles and still keep a good performance. But not just call of duty, almost all recent shooters I’ve played (the most recent that delightful Painkiller) can push huge numbers of triangles, with excellent lighting effects, high res textures and still keep very good frame rates.

maybe I’m an idiot and I don’t know anything about how things work, but am I wrong to ask why can’t q3map2 do this. Sure the engine it is build on is old and useless, and doesn’t take advantage of most of the new hardware capabilities, but still. I think ydnar could do something with that compiler to optimize performance somehow so that it can better handle high triangle counts. Though I’m sure that would be a lot of work.

(chavo_one) #2

The engine that you stated as “old and useless” is the bottleneck. q3map2 doesn’t render anything. It has nothing to do with ET’s poor performance compared to other recent games.

(The Wanderer) #3

yeah I know…it was just a moment of frustration. :twak:

(ydnar) #4

Q3Map2 does the best it can given the limitations of the Quake 3 engine.

The rest is up to the renderer.

Call of Duty’s renderer is almost completely rewritten, which is how it can push those numbers.

y

(G0-Gerbil) #5

How about someone does a mod that just updates the rendering engine?
Although, if I recall correctly, the public domain source doesn’t contain that part of the source right?

(SCDS_reyalP) #6

Correct. (with the minor nit that even the source available is not public domain). But if you are writing a whole new renderer why start with the q3 engine anyway ? You could start with quake,for example

If your scene has 30k polys in it, there is only one thing to blame… the mapper. :moo:

(mslaf) #7

There’s about 50k polys in JKA and there’s no way the mapper could improve it: open space map, few NPCs, few models, steams, effects etc. I think it’s because it’s the Raven’s engine that seems to have serious efficiency problems with rendering more than 15k polys even in MP!

(G0-Gerbil) #8

I think SCDS_reyalP’s point was that given an engine’s inherent limitation, if those limitations are gone over it’s the mapper’s fault for not bearing them in mind when creating the map.
Now personally I’m gutted that other engines similar to ET / RTCW are much more efficient, but we have what we have and must simply try to make the best of it that we can. There’s always a little bit of flexibility since the mapper can ‘choose’ what type of machines to support - the more modern, the more polys. The flip side is doing so rules out much of the playing public, but it’s still their call (even if most mappers simply tend to map for their own spec, and also forget about the extra polys when playing on a full server).

(TwentySeven) #9

You’d be quite surprised how far you can stretch a poly budget if you really have to.