Best way to Portalize "Open/Destroyed" Buildings?

#1 In this instance, portalization is not likely to help with your performance, as the inside of all the portalized zones will likely be visible through the windows and missing walls you describe almos all the time. It also seems likely that you do want the sunlight to shine into these areas, if they are open to the sky, so even if they were portalized, you'd want to have the portal set to let the scene lighting in.

#2 You're right Alex. I just finished a 3 hour long testing on this. I tried every possible combination of portals, collision brushes, null textures, you name it. Portalization is not an option here.

About the sunlight, there will be none. It's a night level but still, it's not like I'd have lights inside those buildings so I would need the ambient light anyway.

At least I learned a lot from this exercise.

This leaves me to do extra LOD-ing, use of null textures and detail brushes to make up for the loss in performance right? I was more concerned on the load times though. Takes way too much light the scene.

Thanks for your help.

Nick

#3 Well, keep in mind that you should only need to light the scene once per client run. lighting information is cached and used every time thereafter (as long as nothing is changed in the scene that requires re-lighting).

#4 Yeah that's true Stephen. But even with cashed info, it still takes some time although don't have any final data yet.

What also concerns me is the amount of memory used when I load the mission. Any guidelines on how to keep it low? Does texture size have anything to do with it? Amount of polygons?

Nick

Edit: What's strange is that if I load a blank mission and use nothing but one .dif file many times, memory goes up. Isn't Torque supposed to load one instance only of each file?

#5 I am not TGE owner and all of my TGE experience comes from the book 3D Game Programming all in one. If I am on your place I would create ruined bulidings as statics

#6 Romano, you mean as 3D models (.dts)? Yeah that's one possibility. The truth is, I don't need precise collision as the player will not "enter" in most of them. Don't have any experience on DTS yet so I wonder what difference in performance and memory usage that might have.

Nick

#7 Well, hmm, if mt memory serves me.. I've read somewhere that making very large (sizewise) .dts shapes tend to affect performance even more..

#8 @Jorgen
Maybe I am wrong, but ruined building with only few walls left can be easily done with 1k to 2k polygons (maybe even with less, it depends how ruined it is or how high detailed you want it). 1k is mininum for decent looking character (my opinion!), so it shouldn't be such a nigthmare for your machine.

My experience on fps and polycount per screen is from modding with TES Construction set (shiped with Morrowind).

#9 Ok I found a solution for the large amount of system memory used when adding many complex buildings. Use TSE! It does a much better job in memory management it seems.

I'm moving over now!

*Hopes that right before clicking on "Checkout Module", Milestone 2 will be checked in!*

Nick