Why do we have to use ST_GENERIC,ST_EXTERIOR_CLOSE etc ?
If I have a scene which have both indoor and out outdoor, how to deal with it ? So I think if the engine have realtime visibility determination, so we can remove BSP, scene manager type away, and don't care about transiting from outdoor to indoor and vice-versa anyway
Because there are a lot of ways to do visibility determination (generally called "culling") and they each have their benefits and drawbacks.
For instance, would you want to use the same method of culling for a 3D space game with huge draw distances and moving sectors AND culling for a small 3D static terrain AND sprite-based 2D side-scrollers, etc.?
I know I'd probably explode in frustration and want to build something specialized to suit my needs, hence the flexibility. Also, since it's about 10-20 characters of text to switch between the various systems, I think the extra flexibility and scalability are both well worth that.
As for indoor/outdoor, take a look at the up-coming Shoggoth release for the "PCZSceneManager", which does just that specifically.
OK, so this scene manager is based on portals, right ? And I think it suits best for indoor, not a large scene. What about Antiportal? The Unreal engine and (maybe) CryEngine uses it too.
What about Antiportal? The Unreal engine and (maybe) CryEngine uses it too.
I've honestly never heard of antiportals. How does that work?
Even I'm not very sure, but they're quite the opposite of portals. Portals tell you what the player can see, and if you don't see them, you don't see the 'zone' they allow you to see, but antiportals, you can't see through them, and thus don't render what's behind them.
What about Antiportal? The Unreal engine and (maybe) CryEngine uses it too.
I've honestly never heard of antiportals. How does that work?
Even I'm not very sure, but they're quite the opposite of portals. Portals tell you what the player can see, and if you don't see them, you don't see the 'zone' they allow you to see, but antiportals, you can't see through them, and thus don't render what's behind them.
I think anti portals are similar to occluder geom/planes. So you can stick a big plane or box in a large structure or terrain feature and anything it blocks is no longer drawn.
We used something like this on a commercial game a few years ago and it worked really well. we just had planes most occluded, but you also had negative occluders that punched a frustrum shape through the occluder you would place in doors etc that enabled you to see through the occluder.
I'm a 3D artist not a programmer so I don't know the technical stuff. It was very easy to use though, you just created a plane and places it in your scene, and being a PS2 game with limited CPU only the nearest 4/5 occluders were used at any time. The planes had simple postfix tags in their names so you could use any 3D app you wanted, in our case 3dsmax.
nullsquared wrote:
I've honestly never heard of antiportals. How does that work?
Even I'm not very sure, but they're quite the opposite of portals. Portals tell you what the player can see, and if you don't see them, you don't see the 'zone' they allow you to see, but antiportals, you can't see through them, and thus don't render what's behind them.
