Quote:
Yeah, every engine I've worked with even Epic's Unreal 3 engine suffer from a lag to users when too many static objects have their new locations updated to all connected users. This is the problem with vehicles as each part of the vehicle is treated as a single static object whose position needs to be updated even when mounted.

I've observed whay Tt Games did to address this issue in a single player game with Lego Star Wars, and it's pretty much the method I would have taken and is similar to the one I suggested in another post for allowing editing of structures in BS' retail without crashing the engine.

Instead of mounting the bricks to a moving vehicle, just have the player mark a set of bricks that are mounted to a defined vehicle base as "completed." Then have the engine dynamically define a static object whose shape and color matches that of the vehicle created and replace all of the bricks with this single vehicle object thus using this new dynamically created static object as its skin. This way you are updating the position of one object. Granted there will be a momentary lag when the object is defined and updated to everyone in the begining, but it shouldn't be that noticable.

For extra credit, you can store all the brick definitions used to create the vehicle in structure that is attached to the object, so the player can place the object back into edit mode where the static object is removed and replaced with the bricks used to define it. Even better would be to make it so when the vehicle is destroyed debris objects are setup from the brick definitions attached to that vehicle.

This is how game design works. You just have to fake it well enough that the players think it is all legit. Suspension of belief. A good game designer is really like a magician that way.


What do you think Elf?
my concern with that is that the number of poly's in a detailed model would be too high, but I've considered it, and some implementation of buildable vehicles will be part of TBG
elfprince13 wrote:
my concern with that is that the number of poly's in a detailed model would be too high, but I've considered it, and some implementation of buildable vehicles will be part of TBG


How many polys are you thinking there will be? Its been a long time since I've played TBG, but I suspect that it still looks like crap with nothing but low poly models with bad textures (compared to commercial games, I mean). Modern systems (even crappy video cards from 3 years ago) can easily push tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of polygons a frame, no problem (assuming the engine can handle it, that is). Look at PGR 3 for the 360 (X1900/7900 level video card). There are ~96,000 polygons PER CAR in that game. You can easily end up with over 500,000 polys on screen at a time (and that is with high res textures, shaders, etc...). I seriously doubt you need to worry about a poly count.

Since these cars are going to be made out of blocks, however, you are only talking like 2-8 polys a block on average, and that is with only basic "is this side visible" optimizations....

Unless I have completely missed something here?
iirc the Torque engine kinda ignores / doesn't implement the "only this side is visible" optimization.
KermMartian wrote:
iirc the Torque engine kinda ignores / doesn't implement the "only this side is visible" optimization.


But if a static vehicle is being built from a grouping a blocks, then it doesn't matter if the Torque engine does it or not - the builder of the static vehicle can do it when the vehicle is being built. Then the check for whether a side will be visible (at all) only happens once Smile
  
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