Reality Factory

Does anyone know the maximum amount of polygons that can be in an RF .act file?

Or a game map?

***THIS POST'S TIP SECTION HAS BEEN EDITED! Please read the updated list.***

This is an age old question that unfortunantly has no cut and dry answer. RF polygon counts rely heavily on many other factors. Generaly, no character should be more than 1000 polygons. At max you should have 2000 polygons on screen at once from what I have seen in others projects. Now, performance can be very slow even if you follow the number rules. Fog lights, number of lights on screen, number of scripts running etc... all feed into the frame rate and limit polygon counts on screen. Here are a list of tips that I have heard work to keep a game running with a smooth frame rate.

• The lower the polygon count for actors the better. (Try for no more than 1000 polygons.)
  
  Design levels with hint brushes in mind. This will help manage a good framerate throughout the entire level.
  
  Stay away from fog lights.
  
  Use level of detail whenever possible.
  
  Do not use larger texture sizes such as 1024x1024 for anything other than terrain. BSP objects and entities textures should stay under 512x512.
  
  EDIT 9/17/06:
  Use bump mapping sparingly.
  
  Be careful of how many scripts are running at once. Most scripts are nessicary, but try to turn off scripts when possible during gameplay. (Ex: If player is x ammount of texels away or greater, do nothing. If player is under x texels away, run AI script.)

If anyone notices that my tips are off, even by the slightist truth, please correct me. I am writing from what I have read, not from experiance .

oh dont forget though the update on the engine is supposed to allow for faster use and updated engine code (words are probably way off, havent gone to sleep yet and its 6 in the morning here =( ). i heard somewhere that you should be able to do alot more now with the new engine update so i say test the waters and find out and report back what you find =D

If you mean hardware T&L, to my knowledge that hasn't been added yet.

MoG is 100% right. finally someone who gets it

I have added(edited in) two more tips to the list I made above yesterday. I am posting just to make sure they don't go overlooked.

Hardware T&L has long been a much desired addition to the feature list...maybe then we can use more detailed characters without a problem...

Once hardware TnL is implimented we will finally be able to make games that look similar to the ps2, xbox, and gamecube. Until then, we are stuck in the old pre HALO pc era. I can't wait until we can increase polygon counts .

Once hardware TnL is implimented we will finally be able to make games that look similar to the ps2, xbox, and gamecube

I don't know where you get that idea from. You will be able to have a slightly higher poly count, but games for PS2, XBox and GameCube quality games would need shaders to produce some of those effects. That is another ballgame. Until the world is batched properly and the BSP is gone, you will not be able to achieve the poly count achieved by today's games.

games would need shaders to produce some of those effects

Wxb1 said that once Hardware and TnL is implemented Shaders could very well be implemented as well,

However I dunno if wxb1 is still around he's been gone for sometime.

Shaders will definetly get things looking pretty

and the BSP is gone

why does everyone dislike BSP? it's still a good format, it's easy to produce, albeit very static, but HL2 use this format and it looks perfectly fine. i understand it may not be the most effiecient, but we have static meshes now and people have been producing some pretty nice visuals with the Static meshes for terrains and levels.

Until the world is batched properly

That's correct...

and the BSP is gone, you will not be able to achieve the poly count achieved by today's games.

...but I have to disagree here. BSP is a totally valid way to organize your scene. You have to use it correctly that's all. But this is true for each and every space partitioning method. Yes, BSP had more advantages in the past but that doesn't mean it is a bad thing all of a sudden.

...but I have to disagree here. BSP is a totally valid way to organize your scene. You have to use it correctly that's all. But this is true for each and every space partitioning method. Yes, BSP had more advantages in the past but that doesn't mean it is a bad thing all of a sudden.

BSP is a great way to organize your scene and perform collision detection, but not to render it. By nature, the BSP renders only one brush face at a time. That is not good for batching. In addition, the BSP is preventing Genesis from rendering large open areas properly.

So let me rephrase that statement:

and the BSP is not used for rendering...

If you want to achieve PS2, XBox or GameCube quality, the best option to batch your polys for rendering is an octree or an abstract binary tree OR just use the BSP for sorting and collision and render the world in large batches OR have the BSP compiler subdivide the faces into hundreds of polys instead of 2 (this is what we are doing for Jet3D).

Spyrewolf, if you use DX9, then yes...shaders are easy to implement. The only issue you would have there is how to allow the level designers to use them in the editor. We at Jet3D are using a material system to define the texture layers and shaders.

DX7 can also achieve hardware T&L but does not have shaders.

Spyrewolf, if you use DX9, then yes...shaders are easy to implement. The only issue you would have there is how to allow the level designers to use them in the editor. We at Jet3D are using a material system to define the texture layers and shaders.

.....we are using Dx9 by memory? .....not too sure on this though, im pretty sure Wxb1 ...or Quest updated us ages ago.

Yes it is direct x 9. I dug up the old Hardware TnL thread and found it.

Here is the link to the Hardware TnL thread.
The info was found on pages 3 and 4.

Anyway, now I need to correct myself from my last post. What I meant was EARLY gamecube, xbox, ps2 games polygon counts. I did not consider the advanced effects and shaders that are required for the newest games.

Now it would be possible to makes games look like this(if you are a good enough artist that is ) if hardware TnL was implimented, right?:
007: Agent Under Fire (gamecube, image from gamespot)


Halo (PC*requires Hardware TnL, image from gamespot)

DX9 is not implemented yet. They are still working on it. The current driver is DX7.

MoG, Hardware T&L is offloading the transformation of the vertices to the GPU and using the cards hardware lights (which are limited to 8 active at a time per frame). The top screen...maybe...second one would require the bsp to go away in favor of a quadtree for the terrain and a scene graph to manage the objects more efficiently. The actor code would have to be rewritten also.

Here is a good presentation that I found from NVidia that gives some good guidelines to achieving that quality of rendering.