[Complete] The Ghoul's Forest 3

[Cutmanmike]

Well i'll try and build them anyway to see if that's what's preventing wadauthor opening it.

[HotWax]

I've never understood this so what ARE nodes exactly?

Nodes are what make time-travel possible.


Er. I mean 3D rendering. Yeah.

A "node" is simply part of the more critical system called the BSP tree (BSP stands for Binary Space Partition). The node builder generates a BSP tree by slicing your map into many convex portions. Then, it goes through each of these slices one at a time and checks to see what other slices are visible from any point within it. Other slices that are visible are added to that "node" of the tree.

The upshot of this is that, when (Z)Doom goes to render, it can eliminate all the sections of the map that the player can't see from their current position. If it weren't for the BSP tree, the entire map would have to be rendered every frame, which would be extremely slow, particularly on the 486 CPUs that Doom was originally designed for.

Modern 3D cards still employ a similar method of rendering, BTW, although it's typically called "culling". (The main difference is that, due to the true-3D nature of current engines, the culling is done on 3D volumes rather than 2D shapes.)

And now a fun experiment! If you have Quake 3 or Doom 3 handy, you can take a peek at what the engine is actually drawing by turning on the "tris" (short for triangles). In Quake 3, bring down the console and type "/r_showtris 1". In Doom 3, bring down the console (Ctrl-Alt-~ by default) and type "r_showtris 2". All the triangles being processed will then be drawn, including some that are actually out of the player's current view. This is a useful debugging tool, as the triangles being drawn but not seen are a waste of GPU resources.

(insert "The More You Know" motif here)

[Cutmanmike]

You learn something new every day! (evenwhen you don't really need to)

But what I WANT to learn is if wadauthor only likes maps with built nodes. If it does, it might take a big longer to do this because i'm not used to mapping in DB.

[HotWax]

I don't see a reason for WadAuthor to need built nodes. The only reason DB needs them is so it knows what to cull when it renders the 3D mode.

[Nash]

While we're on the subject of nodes and stuff; what kind of information is shown when r_drawflat is used in ZDoom?

Also, regarding ignoring nodes; you can do that, ZDoom will internally build them anyway. But one problem with not building nodes is that you will never be able to use DoomBuilder's 3-D mode because it needs the built nodes.

[Cutmanmike]

Bah! I never use 3d mode anyway. You'd know this if you ever saw the lack of detail in my maps

[Nash]

Cutty, how large do you intend to make the ghoul3 map?

Using a flat 8192 x 8192 sector filled with 350 trees, the FPS drop is drastic even on my setup (AMD 4200+, 1 GB DDR2 667, 2 x GeForce 7950 GT SLI'ed).

Each tree weighs 260 polygons. I'm not sure if reducing the polycount will be desirable. Might look ugly with too little polygons.

[Cutmanmike]

Yeah I think models are out of the question here

Ah well it's okay, I think I can manage without them.

[Nash]

Oh well.

I wonder how other game engines can render lush outdoor areas without the major FPS drop.

[Firewolf]

I wonder how other game engines can render lush outdoor areas without the major FPS drop.

Engines built from the ground up with that in mind.

The doom engine did not.

[Cutmanmike]

Ok quick question, how do you stop dos files from closing when it finishes what it's doing? I can't see the help on zdbsp.exe because it closes itself right away

Edit: Nevermind I did it, but wadauthor still dislikes it so whatever. DB it is.

[Juan "JacKThERiPPeR]

Ok quick question, how do you stop dos files from closing when it finishes what it's doing? I can't see the help on zdbsp.exe because it closes itself right away

Edit: Nevermind I did it, but wadauthor still dislikes it so whatever. DB it is.

You can make a BAT file with that and edit it and type below "pause".

[Zippy]

I wonder how other game engines can render lush outdoor areas without the major FPS drop.

Engines built from the ground up with that in mind.

The doom engine did not.

Exactly. Have an engine which does things like replace distant models with very low poly count models (or even just a sprite), since at that distance the player can't clearly make out the details anyway. That way the player still sees everything, but the engine doesn't waste time rendering fine details that the player couldn't make out anyhow.

[quote="Juan "JacKThERiPPeR"]You can make a BAT file with that and edit it and type below "pause".[/quote]Or just open a command prompt and then run it.

[Cutmanmike]

Exactly. Have an engine which does things like replace distant models with very low poly count models (or even just a sprite), since at that distance the player can't clearly make out the details anyway. That way the player still sees everything, but the engine doesn't waste time rendering fine details that the player couldn't make out anyhow.

I wonder if someone would be crazy enough to do something like that in ACS

[Nash]

I reckon it's possible but it'll only work for single player (what's far in the distant for player 1 might be right in front of player 2's nose).