Level Creation Using DIF

#1 It really does depend on the setup of your buildings and streets, and how many polies/brushes you have on screen. Personally for large cities i have found that using combonations of LOD, portalling and terrain occlusion work the best to produce the best result. particulary if your trying to avoid the pop effect thats caused by fog, or visual distances. But the simple answer is, i wouldnt recommend putting it all into 1 single dif. Breaking it up into sections is probably a good idea for several reasons a) easy of alteration if you need to replace a building or area. b) you can use portals and LOD to allow more detail at less of a hit when your not actually in those area. becuase remember if its not portalled or LOD and you can see it, it draws it. Hope this helps.

#2 Ahh. starting to understand. so the solution would be a combination of assembling the level in world editor and some in constructor. i was just curious about the whole map to dif exporter. Was wondering if anyone was creating complete levels in a modeling program and loading them up in torque.

i was just thinking about assembling the whole city block in constructor, from objects created by any modeling software. the world editor is not as robust to align objects and etc. my thought was to use constructor as a level editor. if any changes need to be made, then edit that map file in constructor and load the load the level again.

But i understand your logic about portals and lod. having a signal dif for a level mostly likely be intensive on the cpu. I'll try separating the objects and see the results i get.

also, i already started to notice the pop effect you refer too, depending on distance. used to make games with ogre. did it a little different with that software.

thanks! :-)

#3 Nod, my best suggestion is to split the buildings/terrain into catagories. things like the streets, would be 1 seperate model. Buildings that you go inside, should almost definitly be their own models with portals and LODs, If your using just building exteriors with teleporters/triggers to goto levels in the map, then its something that you need to take into consideration.
The careful use of textures and enviromental consideration also will make a difference. For example, if your doing a city and you have some skyscrapers that are central to your city, these should probably be portalized at the very least if you can do into them. Since you want to see them all the time, as a centerpiece. LOD is something you want to consider depending on thebuildings size/shape. Becuase if you can only see the top at a distance. By the time you walk up to it, its 100 stories tall. No one is going to see that up close, unless you have a building across the way, or some way to fly up there. So some careful texture .ie glass exterior, or marble cladding,can save you alot of brushes and details on larger buildings.

#4 The game i'm working is on more like viewtiful joe. so don't plan on going inside the buildings themselves. just sometimes as backdrops. In which cause you can sometimes fake it with texture.

From what your saying, thinking about separating things like roads into one dif. Then street objects into separate dif. Maybe connecting a few buildings together as a single dif. I guess its really a try and error with exporting and testing to get the best result.

#5 Nod, it really does depend on the visual situation. And what works for one map, might need a slightly different position and solution in another. You also have to take into consideration that some areas, might be high traffic, or be geared for a boss fight, and need a bit of extra detail or streamlined as best as possible. It truely is a fun thing to learn the ins and out of level design.

#6 In the beginning its just a headache. lol. till you figure out the methods. Currently i removed all the terrain and water from one of the sample mission file and starting off my starch. Importing in random objects to see how all this work. The level is already created in max. Now time to find the right mix/combination.

Did you make all the grey objects into one dif? Then aligned all the other objects in the world editor. Just trying to understand how you may of broken down this level for example.

#7 In this example the walls are actually 2 pieces, with the middle wall adjustable. As my city is broken up into districts. You can see in this picture that beyond the castle there is nothing there. and it is a different dif. In fact other then the walls. all99% you see here are different DIFs, i average about 65FPS inthis current setup. I am actually currently working on a update on this, adding some of our newer models (cleaning some of the texture issues and space issues. By hiding out of sight models with LOD and occlusion, you will greatly improve your fps, as well as reducing the amount of popping that a single large feature might result in.


This is example of what the above city, looks like after some tweaking to improve content.

#8 Nice. did you put LOD on the objects inside the walls? I'm assuming the wall doesn't have an LOD, since its one dif.

#9 No, we did not put LOD in most of the objects inside the walls. The large buildings with over 500 brushs , such as the castle and, the large houses, in the nobles area, and the cathedral have LOD, some have Portalling

#10 By brushes are you referring to polys?

The way we're working right now is. Making the object in max, exporting them as DTS. Then putting into Constructor and exporting as DIF. Or is there a tool for exporting as DIF of the bat?

#11 Well, we use a mix depending on the level of detail needed. For example our dragon statue is a DTS, basically the fine details. for the most part we use DIFs for our buildings. DTS buildings are only useful if they have not interior. If you intend to enter a building, i find in my experience that unless you have good LOD, a interior should be a DIF.

#12 If the building are just static, its better to go with a DTS? I thought all background object, non interactive object are suppose to be dif.

Is there a performance gain with making buildings DTS if your don't plan on entering them?

Thanks again. Learned quite about the level designing methods.

#13 Not really. If you aren't going to interact with the buildings in any way, then it shouldn't matter which way you go with it. Usually, if you're going to be doing anything inside of a building, you would need to make it a DIF because it has accurate collision rather than bounding-box collision.

#14 Ah that makes a lot of sense. Bounding Box collision would be a lot less intensive on the CPU for just a static object. Thanks.

#15 Yah thats what i meant.Most DTS you tend to have alot more collision if you have a walk in interiorl, thus takes up a small percentage more power to run a DTS (unless its just a simple box, then its probably better)vs a DIF. But it really still boils down to how you have the city scene setup, and how you have LOD and occulsion setup. Level design is definitly fun, and it takes a bit to learn the ins and out of it. I am still learning how to do alot of the tricks that some of the ol salts here have been using for some time. Just out of curiousity, can we get a look at your city, from a aerial view.

#16 BTW, Edward, I like the screens!

#17 [image] http://picasaweb.google.ca/lathieeshe/Downtrend/photo#5181785818843063666 [image]
[image] http://picasaweb.google.ca/lathieeshe/Downtrend/photo#5181785818843063682 [image]

sorry im not sure how photo link work here. Anyhow.

Are you saying DTS is more intensive on collision detection? I thought DTS was mostly bounding box collision which would be less intensive. And that DIF would have would be a lot more, since its collision is based on the mesh.

I was now planning on just exporting those buildings as DTS with just simple bounding collision. The player never enters them. They are just there.

#18 Thanks,David coming from you thats a compliment. We are working hard on Fantasci: Hidden War, to get it out of our alpha stage, and move into the beta. we hope it will be there by the end of summer. Lathieeshe, you need to have a /image inside those [] to make it work :) like this

[image] http://picasaweb.google.ca/lathieeshe/Downtrend/photo#5181785818843063682 [/image]

but it doesnt appear to want to work. Either way. It will take some time to find the proper balance between what you want, what you want to see, and what you can actually fit on the screen at any given time, collision and such all play a important role and add up in terms of resources.

#19 That's not an image file. It's a link to a Picassa album.

DTS's do use bounding box collision (unless you use the opcode resource). You can create more than one box to make the collision more accurate as well.

#20 Have a look at this max script by Ryan Mounts. This should allow you to break up your buildings into convex sections in max and export them directly to constructors native format.

www.garagegames.com/blogs/66653/14197

I haven't had much time to play with this but it seems to work very well. Although you still have to prep the geometry the same way you would need to in constructor doing it in your preferred modeler is much easier.

If you use Polysoup you will wont to make a version of, or alter TSStatic so that it uses a new flag that is registered with the shadow code allowing it to receive shadows (the TGEA 1.7 beta has code for this and I did it awhile ago in our TGE code, works well). You should also break your models up into zones to improve culling performance. If you make interiors with DTS the internal geometry should be a separate object to the exterior so that they can be assigned to different light groups to allow for internal lighting.