posted 12-01- 07:36 PM               

1. Does it matter if all of the terrain "tile" models have the same name?

2. As I mentioned I solved one load time problem by having the names all of the same, but there is another point, which is just before the "Aircraft" tick comes up on the loading GUI, where the load time also appears to increase exponentially with terrain size/number of models. It there something I can improve in the SM file that will help this? If this can be solved then even bigger terrains will be possible.

3. Bigger terrains seem to cause a large hit on FPS, even though I've got the clip distance quite close. As an example, at 50 tile x 50 tiles I get 50fps sitting near the ground in slew mode with 3 109's flying around, but with 100 tiles x 100 tiles I get 15FPS, and with 200x200 (after the long wait for it to load!) it falls to 2-4FPS. I was sort of expecting the loaded size not to matter, as the visible part is the same for each terrain. The only thing that sprung to mind was memory usage, but i didn't notice any disk cache swaps. Is there anything I can optimise in the SM file to help this? It appears to be number of models related rather than number of polygons.

Thanks,

posted 12-02- 03:48 AM               

One thing you have to keep in mind is that I only have a low spec machine. Most of the games I play with a decent number of aircraft only get to 12-15 FPS tops any way.

posted 12-02- 07:28 AM               

1) No, as long as they aren't referred to by name in any other object property list. I say that mostly for future reference as I'm not aware of any user-mods that care what the terrain is named and we certainly don't have anything that cares.

2) There's nothing you can do at the moment other than make the terrain smaller I have some designs on paper that will both speed up terrain loading and allow OP to handle much larger terrain but that code won't go in until after our current product ships.

3) That's a biggie. I'm sure we've never tested the engine with 10K models.

posted 12-02- 09:14 AM               

How detailed is the larger terrain? Is it flat undetailed land?

------------------
Kopper

Fortunae Nihil
(Nothing to Chance)
OPPs Making SDOE a Dangerous place.
One plane at a time.

posted 12-02- 07:48 PM               

At the moment it is height mapped based on the DEM at 1KM intervals, with 3kkm^2 per "Tile" , but with the same texture at the moment. It doesn't look too bad, and you can see some elevation (depending on which part of the DEM it is).

I haven't created the Vertex normals properly yet, so lighting isn't going to show up on the terrain, which reminds me of another question for MH is he's still listning, if I get the normals right, and set the texture flags etc correctly will the terrain be lit and smooth shaded?

I believe that the detail is more of a time thing i.e. creating detail on 10,000-40,000 tiles could take a little while. I would invisage that it would start off 1km sq tiles based on the DEM elevation and bits could be added like the dover cliffs, a few sub-1km width hills etc. If someone could get there hands on dem data( or equivilent ) for parts of england and western europe at a higher resolution this could be done automatically.

From what I've seen ( and I could be wrong of course) model numbers are the main problem with large terrains rather than polygon count, since the view distance takes care of this. This is until a memory limit is reached of course.

posted 12-02- 07:49 PM               

Thanks for the reply. It sounds like there may be room for improvement so I'll continue on assuming it may get sorted in the future sometime.

Kopper,

At the moment it is height mapped based on the DEM at 1KM intervals, with 3kkm^2 per "Tile" , but with the same texture at the moment. It doesn't look too bad, and you can see some elevation (depending on which part of the DEM it is).

I haven't created the Vertex normals properly yet, so lighting isn't going to show up on the terrain, which reminds me of another question for MH is he's still listning, if I get the normals right, and set the texture flags etc correctly will the terrain be lit and smooth shaded?

I believe that the detail is more of a time thing i.e. creating detail on 10,000-40,000 tiles could take a little while. I would invisage that it would start off 1km sq tiles based on the DEM elevation and bits could be added like the dover cliffs, a few sub-1km width hills etc. If someone could get there hands on dem data( or equivilent ) for parts of england and western europe at a higher resolution this could be done automatically.

From what I've seen ( and I could be wrong of course) model numbers are the main problem with large terrains rather than polygon count, since the view distance takes care of this. This is until a memory limit is reached of course.