It happens in ToB and Age of Time aswell, so it's the engine.
Yes Lucas, Floating points are generally handled by the engine...
I mean it's not a fault in the coding of the game, it's an Engine problem, that might not be fixable.
Lucas W wrote:
I mean it's not a fault in the coding of the game, it's an Engine problem, that might not be fixable.


The fix would be to locking the game world to certain boundaries, based on a binary order-of-magnitude estimate of the precision required for most models. With 32bit floating point numbers, we get 24 bits of precision. Lets call the in game units of distance "TU" (for Torque Units). This means that a model whose vertices are locked to a grid spacing of 1/32 of a TU (2^-5) will begin looking funky at more than 524288 (2^19) TU away from the origin. Note that this isn't overall distance, but distance along a given axis (and that the model will only be distorted along that axis). My guess is that most models used in game aren't positioned more precisely than 1/16 of a TU (2^-4), so you wouldn't experience round-off errors until around 1048576 (2^20), which is close to your number of a million. The HARD limit of 32bit floating point representations is at 340282346638528859811704183484516925440, so this is a boundary that you shouldn't run into.

DShiznit: In this case, it is probably a "problem" with the limitations of IEEE-754 binary32 floating point numbers, which in most cases are handled by the processor.
I say leave it alone. Most players would never discover those areas anyway, and those that do would have a nice surprise...
Doesn't happen in retail.
Exclamation
Doubt it, the problem is a floating point breakdown, so unless there's an inbuilt limit to how far you can go in any direction(which wouldn't surprise me) you can encounter the same problem in a-land Retail.
Jimmg wrote:
Doesn't happen in retail.
Exclamation

Have you tried walking several thousand cycles away from the spawn?
Confirmed, Followed how to do it in the retail setting and it does not seem to have the issue.
Can you confirm that for a .dts file (like a particularly detailed vehicle) as well as a brick? I don't know anything about .blb, but I wouldn't be surprised if Badspot used integer values for brick dimensions and saved himself him rounding errors (or if not integers, something requiring a fairly low number of bits of precision).


There is a small amount of jitteryness in player movement but it's not really noticeable unless you're actually looking for it.
I notice you're only at -100000, and the low end of the problem area is 10 times further out than that. Would you give it a try at -1048576, -2097152, -4194304, -8388608, and -16777216 with the equivalent on screen content (same tractor model, and for reference the equivalent 2x4x1 bricks) in Blockland Retail and in Freebuild and post side-by-side comparisons?
elfprince13 wrote:
I notice you're only at -100000, and the low end of the problem area is 10 times further out than that. Would you give it a try at -1048576, -2097152, -4194304, -8388608, and -16777216 with the equivalent on screen content (same tractor model, and for reference the equivalent 2x4x1 bricks) in Blockland Retail and in Freebuild and post side-by-side comparisons?
I was just about to point out the same thing about -100001. Smile I'll be interested to see what his results show.

The last one just stops rendering the ground.

It'll take awhile to load its 3.1mbs
It's rather strange that the dts works fine all the way out, but no surprises that everything gets screwed on that last one, since it should suffice to wipe any fractional component.
  
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