Random thoughts: walls and more

[Shane Christopher]

Well without the struts which it would usually be in it's just 324 polys. That's about the same as a medium detail model so it's not pushing it too much. With the struts it adds 864 which brings it to 1188. There'd rarely be a full wall with struts on screen though. Even the degraded blocks are 28, 52 and 28 polys from left to right.

I'm having a pretty hard time trying to take away the bezier curve of keyframe animations in 3DS.. I should know how. I did it for my college project

[RonHiler]

Well without the struts which it would usually be in it's just 324 polys. That's about the same as a medium detail model so it's not pushing it too much. With the struts it adds 864 which brings it to 1188. There'd rarely be a full wall with struts on screen though. Even the degraded blocks are 28, 52 and 28 polys from left to right.

Good point, the vast majority of walls seen would be in the complete state. Which gives me a thought...

Would it be possible (or practical) to have one frame (which is the complete wall default state) be a simple 12 tri block and use the texture to show detail (rather than the geometry)? If we use bump mapping we still should be able to show depth.

We'd keep the 800+ tri's for all the other frames. Just the default frame would be the small one.

Of course, that means we have two seperate textures for the one model, but eh, so what (easy for me to say, I know, I'm not the one that has to create them, hehe)

Where I'm going with this is that, if virtually all of the time, all you see are the complete walls, we could have many many walls (of 12 tris) without significant hits to the framerate (which means we can have cities), but we still get the building detail for construction/destruction, because on average there won't be that many of these around at any given time.

The problem I see is that an 800 tri wall is fine, but in a city, if we're talking about 100 walls, that's 80,000 tris *just* for the walls. With 12 tri walls we are now at 1,200 tris, much better

Ron

[Shane Christopher]

Yea that's actually a good idea and shouldn't be hard at all.

Ok.. got that done just now. Have the video ready but nowhere to upload it to atm. The site I was using has gone down. Should be back up soon.

I have this video set to 1 fps mainly so you can clearly see the transition from building to the single built frame. Right now the textures arent quite right. Different coloured bricks in different places. Since we'll be changing the texture used anyway there's no point worrying about that until we need to get it in game.

[Shane Christopher]

Ok the video is up here:
http://www.cw-meltingpoint.com/images/misc/Wall3b.avi

Like I said before it's 1fps, you can skip through the boring bits =)
Keyframe every frame for the video so you can skip through frame by frame.

I'm not sure what you meant about the wall having 14 keyframes in game. Right now there is one or other keyframe every frame so the full 75 frames (50 for build, 25 for degradation) will have to be included.

I was thinking that if a player wants to rebuild a degrading wall it should just skip from the degrading frame to the correct build frame and go from there. For example if the wall is half degraded then it will go to frame 25 (or so.. exact number will have to be figured out).

[Shane Christopher]

wow.. ok.. bad buzz. Sites coming up as being suspended.. can't be good for that game =/

[RonHiler]

Must have forgot to pay the bill

[Shane Christopher]

can you PM me the site details.. again.. again.

Formatted my harddisk and forgot to save the address.

[Shane Christopher]

Ok. Got the PM and deleted it. Cheers.

The new movie is uploaded at:

http://www.rjcyberware.com/Graphics/misc/Wall3b.avi

Tell me what ya'll think. Course it's just to show how it'd work. Textures will change. That video is using your solid wall on the built frame (50) method.

[Shane Christopher]

anybody want to give any sort of feedback? Kinda depressing that there hasnt been a reply yet.

[RonHiler]

I've been out of town or I'd have already commented No time right at the moment, but I'll give you my full analysis tomorrow, hehe.

Ron