Game Development Community

Terrain performance scalability

by Andy Schatz · in Torque 3D Professional · 06/24/2009 (1:18 pm) · 3 replies

One of the problems I'm seeing right now with my ability to make the game look good as possible on high end machines as well as low end ones is the square size of the terrain. The game runs much better when the terrain is less dense (squaresize of 8), but it really only looks good on high-end machines with a much more dense appearance (squaresize of 1). The problem is, this really isn't a scalable feature right now. Is there anything that can be done to improve terrain performance on low-end machines?

Since the ability to layer multiple terrain textures was removed, we're really forced to have a lot more density in the squaresize in order to make interesting, natural looking terrains. Unfortunately, this also means having to greatly increase the polycount of the terrain as well.
NextNext Thread
PrevPrevious Thread
More from Torque 3D Professional


Associate Tom Spilman
Sickhead Games
#1
06/24/2009 (2:02 pm)
Put things in wireframe and adjust the screenError setting in the terrain. It will use lower a lower density mesh on distant cells of the terrain. If you combine this with a 1024 heightmap you should get good results that scale well.

Torque 3D Owner Andy Schatz
#2
06/24/2009 (2:09 pm)
Ah, excellent! The comment on that property says "Not yet implemented" so I was ignoring it. WOuld make an easy fix.

THanks for your help and patience Tom! Hopefully these issues I've had aren't a hassle for you but help to make it a better engine...

Torque 3D Owner Andy Schatz
#3
06/24/2009 (3:40 pm)
Quote:Regarding the terrain density and performance, we're using a terrain size 4 and using the detail textures to give high quality details up close. The diffuse is only used in our case to supply color information to mix things up for the detail textures. If you haven't tried doing that, might be worth exploring.
The problem is that since we don't have multiple textures per square anymore the terrain textures can look very square when viewed from above (as they are in Dinosauria).