It's all in your head, Part 8

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dudecon
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Postby dudecon » Mon Jan 28, 2008 5:51 pm

Well, I'm not a software developer either, but I had a thought, or two.
First: It seems that a lot of polys are being tied up in all the tiny buildings off in the distance. Could the LOD be scaled back even furthur in the distance, converting whole blocks of lots into a single 'building'?
For example, a block has lots filled with one or two story buildings. When the block is far away, it is rendered as a single object with a height equal to the average of the heights of the buildings. That way the skyline won't change much when you get close, but you save a lot on the haze of buildings around the periphery.

Second: Could the LOD of a building be weighted to its size, or even a random weight, as well as the distance from the camera? That way the "dividing line" is spread out, causing (perhaps) less distraction.
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Postby prophile » Mon Jan 28, 2008 7:29 pm

I hope very much that you're not rendering that in immediate mode.

EDIT: 1337st post!
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Re: It's all in your head, Part 8

Postby Montyphy » Mon Jan 28, 2008 9:27 pm

Chris wrote:The Game.
Uplink help: Check out the Guide or FAQ.
Latest Uplink patch is v1.55.
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Postby shinygerbil » Mon Jan 28, 2008 9:30 pm

prophile wrote:I hope very much that you're not rendering that in immediate mode.

EDIT: 1337st post!


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Postby NeoThermic » Mon Jan 28, 2008 9:33 pm

prophile wrote:I hope very much that you're not rendering that in immediate mode.

EDIT: 1337st post!


The second screenshot contains a faded menu on the left at the bottom. Altering it in Photoshop shows one of the menu items to say "Display List Ca{something}". So I'd wager it is being rendered as a display list.

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Postby NeoThermic » Mon Jan 28, 2008 9:56 pm

jelco the galactaboy wrote:But altering it in Photoshop makes it possible to put virtually anything in that menu, so I doubt that's real proof. :P

Jelco


Raising the brightness/contrast, you ninny! :P

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Postby shinygerbil » Mon Jan 28, 2008 11:36 pm

I could read it without opening it in Photosh--The GIMP. :D

edit: NeoThermic, I want strikethrough support!
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Postby omicron1 » Tue Jan 29, 2008 6:56 am

Procedural generation is the overlooked phenomenon of the gaming industry, to say the least. I just thought, for some reason, of a completely procedural GTA. With Darwinians instead of people - maybe 20 years after the Sepulveda incident, the DWs have managed to create a modern civilization. Calling in Air Strikes over a virtual Manhattan... hmm...


Maybe you could do procedural generation for more than the city and buildings - say, countries. Continents. Planets. Star systems. Galaxies. The universe.

Such a fun topic. And such an amazing project. Bravo - I only hope I can eventually be as good as you guys are.
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Postby Kadayi » Tue Jan 29, 2008 6:11 pm

As someone who knows a thing or two about Urban design I have to say, that that's a pretty good looking City you've got going on there. Just the right mix of Urban & Green spaces. Bravo.

Regarding the LoD I'd say you need to go down the gradient fade route that someone earlier mentioned, both in terms of detail and saturation. It's rare except after a good thunderstorm has cleared the atmosphere that you see things at distance with any degree of clarity.
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Re: It's all in your head, Part 8

Postby mmustapic » Tue Jan 29, 2008 7:00 pm

Chris wrote:I’ve started work on a basic Level Of Detail system to try to render distant buildings at lower details, but it currently suffers from the same problem all LOD systems fail to hide : your eye is constantly drawn to the dividing line between high detail and low, and you see things popping between the two, which looks naff.


You could use some kind of image blending between high-res and low-res sections to avoid obvious popping. The Jonathan Blow articles "Unified Rendering Level-of-Detail" explain the technique (although it is a per-object LOD, and you have a whole city. Maybe per-block LOD...).

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reagrds,

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Postby drakfyre » Wed Jan 30, 2008 8:51 am

omicron1 wrote:Maybe you could do procedural generation for more than the city and buildings - say, countries. Continents. Planets. Star systems. Galaxies. The universe.


http://www.spore.com/
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Postby xander » Sat Feb 02, 2008 5:28 pm

And now this blog post has been picked up by Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Yay!

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Postby film11 » Mon Feb 04, 2008 4:39 pm

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Re: It's all in your head, Part 8

Postby Superpig » Mon Feb 04, 2008 7:36 pm

You can avoid a certain amount of popping by interpolating between LOD meshes - i.e. slide vertices until they're in line with their neighbours before removing them, using a vertex shader - but for this kind of system I'd probably abandon 3D rendering of distant buildings altogether and see about using imposters instead, probably for multiple buildings at a time. Fade them in to reduce popping and 'dividing line' artifacts.

It's probably also worth looking into some occlusion culling - small, distant buildings will get hidden entirely by larger, nearer ones, no? If you group the buildings by block and then by height within the block, you can split them up into occlusion "layers" that you quickly test, tallest first, to see if there's any point rendering the buildings in that block at all. Tall skyscrapers are most likely to be seen from a distance so they all go into the top layer and are tested first, while small houses end up in the bottom layer.
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Postby Taedal » Tue Feb 05, 2008 12:27 am

Cool stick at it.

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