vis control in et:qw

(MuffinMan) #1

can somebody explain to me how vis control is going to work in qw. as far as I understand it you have one big boxmap, the megatexture is out of the calculation anyway but the rest is visible

is there some advanced lod-calculation or do you somehow block view and spread portals everywhere?
from the quakecon videos it looked like everything was equally visible, even some buildings were quite open to the outside terrain. I would assume these used portals in all windows and so on? did they hide the inside of the buildings at all or is it just that qw sets the performance prerequisites that high so that you just have to be able to calculate everything at every moment?

btw: is the megatexture terrain structural?

(Wils) #2

We use distance culling on external geometry (vegetation, road infrastructure, crates, barrels, fencing etc). If something becomes too small to see over distance, it gets turned off. This is set up by the level designer in radiant using some new grouping tools we’ve added. There’s more to it than that (especially with vegetation) but it’s not worth going over here.

For interiors we use Doom 3 style portals, extended a little to provide control over ambient light. We treat buildings with limited interiors and lots of holes (ie windows/doors/giant shell holes, etc) the same as any external geometry, and don’t portal them.

The terrain is compiled in with the rest of the world geometry (the Doom 3 engine doesn’t have ‘structure’ vs ‘detail’ geometry).

(MuffinMan) #3

thanks wils! that clears things up a lot. I missed this point in the mod- faq video - somehow everybody only asks about the megatexture (which looked pretty impressive)

I’m already gathering map ideas but I see there will be a lot new stuff to learn!

off topic: with the stamp tool ingame, is there some option to turn on stamping for the usual player - like the spray tagging in counter strike? would be nice to have, if not I might think about some mini mod :slight_smile:

nice sig btw ;o)

(Lanz) #4

The decal tool, if I understand the procedure correctly is part of the level editor and used before the megatexture is compressed with the “makemega” tool and not part of the game engine. That said, stamping a decal on a surface with the game engine is not really a big deal but a different thing.

I might be completely wrong though. :slight_smile:

(MuffinMan) #5

I thought they said you’re running around ingame and stamping wherever you like… would look nice to have a really big stamp and the apropriate animation for it! :wink:

(kamikazee) #6

Do tell us when you can spray a :nag: on someone’s forehead!

(MuffinMan) #7

sounds good, keep that in mind!

(TseTse) #8

For terrains, how does this work in practice with fog and vis distance?

Put another way, many engines compromise terrain rendering quite a bit. They dont auto-occlude and they render in “chunks.” The tinier the chunks, the more realistic it is (i.e. literally in theory every triangle could be checked). However, that eats up framerates pretty substantially.

How will QW work along these lines and does distance fog come into play?

(Wils) #9

Terrain gets frustum culled. We don’t have distance fog in the usual sense (i.e. with a farplane beyond which geometry is culled).

(TseTse) #10

so…

I just read this to make sure i understood what you meant. And i have follow-up questions :slight_smile:

Will terrain auto-occlude? If i put something behind a mountain, will it render without further optimization planes/entities (im new to the engine)?

In being frustrum culled, does it determine rendering based on ‘chucks’ or on a poly-by-poly basis? This isnt so much of an issue if there’s no distance fog system (i.e. unreal engine 2 often rendered terrain in “chunks” which could look very messy and unnatural with distance fog).

Can the terrain be connected to visibility groups or the equivalent? In other words, can you chop up the terrain into visibility groups?

Can there be multiple terrain entiries?

Yea, im a n00b… but i live for outdoors level design so… im just trying to get my head around this.