Does Torque3D support instancing ?

#1

Quote:
06/08/2009 (11:01 am) Tom Spilman

Torque doesn't do any mesh instancing. Its something i'd like to fix before Torque 3D ships, but the solutions for DX9 are not ideal or trivial to implement.

Still the same I think.

#2 There is not an instancing solution, but you can still have a good lot of guys walking around. The mesh skinning solution in Torque3D is much, much better than the one in TGEA. Have good LODs, and smart bones/weights, and it should be no sweat.

#3 stupid question but with various things mentioned as "troublesome" and "not optimal" in relation to DX9: why don't we see a DX10 renderer by now, as it is obviously what any of the devs related to the "trouble makers" would have prefered and AL requires DX10 class hardware anyway to run realistically in scenes like the warrior camp and alike.

#4 GG has already stated that they wont be supporting the updated DX 11

#5 The way I heard it from Brett, I believe, was that they had no plans *at this time* to support DX11. But earlier on these forums I am sure I saw someone mention, although not as an official announcement, that instead of moving to support DX10, at some point, they would rather leap-frog directly to DX11. That's what I seem to remember anyway.

#6 I would imagine more time would be spent on moving over to DX11 compared to DX10 now as both Vista/Win7 will support DX11. That being said, it is bleeding edge and most likely would be far down the list of things to do (not to mention I would imagine that would not be a free upgrade).

#7 @Marc - You don't see a DX10 renderer because DX10 was Vista only and Vista never took off.

Look at the current Valve hardware survey and you'll see less than 30% of their customers have Vista and a DX10 card... less than 35% even have Vista installed.

In fact there are more DX10 capable cards on WinXP machines than on Vista machines. So its not that DX10 hardware wasn't bought... its just that no one bought Vista.

So my hope is that Windows 7 takes off and everyone installs it. Heck Valve's hardware survey shows 8% have Windows 7 installed and it hasn't even shipped yet. I hope this means good things.

#8 Depending on the Windows 7 adoption rate writing a DX11-based GFXDevice, but using the DX10 feature profile might be a good thing. Those constant buffers and state blocks will finally be justified ;)

Rendering all PSSM splits/dual paraboloid sides/cubemap faces in a single pass would be nice too.

#9 Thanks for your answers Chaps! Very interesting stuff...

@Pat, will do! It's on my list of things to add to the ships, so I'll let you know how I get on.

Yes, I'm reading more and more that really aggressive Loddign is the way to go. I've just built an almost exact replica of Lord Nelsons 'HMS Victory' which has turned out to be about 8000 poly's. I may have cut this down but it'll only ever be seen really pretty close to the camera, it'll very quickly be half that, and most likely 300-400ish for the lowest LOD if Buccaneer is anything to go by...the animated guys if we can do them will only be on the highest couple of LODs too....

We've got to get them on there, I want them Ragdolling off the decks while sinking with PhysX 8)

#10 I've read a lot of publications on this theme (some of them in gamedev forums).
It is impossible to create 100% an efective mesh instancing on a render state system.
That's why this one moved the idea of the geometry shader.

#11 I potentially should have written DX10+ :)

#12 Anyway, you can implement a level of instancing if you create a custom object class for impostors: animate and render the model once into a texture, then draw billboards using that texture where the "instances" should go. If you rotate the model based on the camera angle properly it will look even better.