Posted: Wed May 23, 2007 10:03 pm Post subject:
TSO decision making time
after having gone through various solutions for voxels, i've got several possible ways to do it, some are high-end real-time voxel rendering, others are far simpler, but do not allow for the same visual goodness.
The OpenGL option by far, is the most visually appealing, and would allow for a lot of extra functionality, think specularity maps, 24 bit colors, 24 bit normals, and emissiveness, however, you'll need a video card of about 2 years old or younger to run it at good FPS rates
the software rendering engine, allows for most of opengl's functionality, and fr good frame rates on poorer systems, the problem with this solution, is the fact the CPU has to carry it all, so these will not be fully real-time, and only be updated when the unit moves, the light color/brightness changes, or you just got it on-screen, this method, in my opinion, is the golden road in between, it however requires more RAM than the opengl method
and finally, like in RA2 and tiberian sun, rendering voxels into sprites during loading, this method has close to no CPU usage in real-time, and costs the most RAM, seeing as 32 orientations * 16 pitch directions * animation frames need to be saved into sprite form, which, as you can guess, is quite a bit.
another method to handle the pre-render method, is by simply re-rendering the part if pitch changes
and no, i cannot allow both software rendering and opengl rendering as options, pre-rendered and opengl, or prerendered and pseudo is possible though
_________________ Micro TS
Portable, no campaign, movies or music, just the engine and needed resources for skirmish and lan. Last edited by Judeau on Wed May 23, 2007 10:53 pm; edited 2 times in total QUICK_EDIT
Joined: 26 Nov 2002 Location: Algae Colony On Mars
Posted: Wed May 23, 2007 10:30 pm Post subject:
Just for reference to people voting, I get a decent FPS rate with an oldish 9700 Mobility, it'll be crap on integrated cards and stuff 4 or more years old but it should be fine for most people. _________________
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Also Known As: banshee_revora (Steam) Joined: 15 Aug 2002 Location: Brazil
Posted: Thu May 24, 2007 4:54 am Post subject:
Honestly, my vote goes for OpenGL. It's easier and it makes a better usage of your video card potential and provides a better image quality. The other two options are recommended if you wanna make a game for mobiles. Considering that this engine will still take some time to be finished, mobiles will be much better and probably support OpenGL better, even if it is OpenGL ES... QUICK_EDIT
Definitely OpenGL.
When this is finished, almost everyone will have good enough 3D card.
Altough I'd also like an SW renderer as an option.
But if you make it expandable and OS, someone might write additional SW renderer if you don't want to write both (of course I don't mean myself:P). _________________ Time will tell...
Sooner or later...
Time will tell... QUICK_EDIT
OpenGL, Judeau. It's working quite well here, on mah weaker graphics card. It'll work perfect for those on the beast cards, and it should be good for those on anything weaker than mine. _________________ QUICK_EDIT
here, a performance test
extract to a directory, run, keep on for 10 seconds or longer, and then post the contents of log.txt here
if your average frames / second rating exceeds 40, your computer is most probably going to be able to handle real-time voxel rendering in opengl
All the tests on my comp .
The performance test uses same method as test.rar, right? The spotlight one looks nice but is rather slow, altough that might be becouse of the voxels' size.
Anyway, considering you're gonna also have tons of other objects and terrain to render, not to mention the game logic, I think you still need to speed it up. Maybe TS/RA2 style prerendering would be faster in the end,
it didn't waste my old 192 MB of RAM, and today people have much more of it, considering you have 60 OGL Mammoths on some 60 FPS on my Radeon X1600+Athlon 3200, while you could have similar speeds in TS on 1 GHZ or something like that.
i'm hoping to reveal a good terrain engine during june _________________ Micro TS
Portable, no campaign, movies or music, just the engine and needed resources for skirmish and lan. QUICK_EDIT
Joined: 01 Mar 2007 Location: Dead and back Commander...Dead and back
Posted: Tue Aug 07, 2007 8:50 pm Post subject:
why bother with voxels at all? someone should just make a program that turns voxels into 3d renders, we can already turn renders into voxels, why not voxels to renders?
or better yet we use alternating non isometric sprites! lol j/k
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I'm pretty sure i can handle it, but am i reading the right thing?
why bother with voxels at all? someone should just make a program that turns voxels into 3d renders, we can already turn renders into voxels, why not voxels to renders?
or better yet we use alternating non isometric sprites! lol j/k
PLEASE, look at the date of the post before you. _________________ Micro TS
Portable, no campaign, movies or music, just the engine and needed resources for skirmish and lan. QUICK_EDIT
Turning models into voxels, you lose all the information except, to some extent, the normals.
The only way to convert a voxel into a model, then, is to extrapolate the data from the shape of the voxel. In the simplest form, a voxel to model converter would simply make each voxel a vertex and attach adjacent vertices. The problem with this is that it would not look very good, and it would probably have problems that would need fixing in a model editor.
The ideal solution would analyze the voxel for curves and flat surfaces, and then use the analysis to recreate it in 3D. The problem with this is that it would be a lot of work, and may still need fixing.
There is no real reason for there not to be a voxel to 3D converter, its just that its more work than its worth. _________________ QUICK_EDIT
okay i feel stupid now, for some reason i thought that post was recent
no problem, have a look around _________________ Micro TS
Portable, no campaign, movies or music, just the engine and needed resources for skirmish and lan. QUICK_EDIT
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TSO decision making time
