Dimensions

[RobF]

Trying to get my head around a suitable scale to utilise with this game engine when designing a level. I came across this document http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Dimensions and was wondering if we had something similar?

If not, does this document have any glaring anomalies that would make it unworkable with Reality Factory?

[Jay]

With RF, it does not matter how big your units are. All that is important is the relation between the sizes of different objects. For example, lets say you build your levels with a dimension of 100 texels=1m in mind. Then, when the level is finished, you scale the actors to have the appropriate size needed (for example the player actor can be 180texels high for 1,8m)

One thing to remember is, that the editor does not like big sizes of levels 4096x4096x4096 is generally the maximum. So it can make sense to sacrifice detail by making 10 texels = 1m, but then the level can be 10times as 'big'. In this case the player actor would then be 18 texels high for 1,8m)

[Veleran]

There is a trick can do,specially if you use meshes.Use the standard scale.
Divide the 16k x16k units to 8 smaller ones and use change level when you approach the boundaries.
The terrain pieces that are far will be no collision,lower res,and with lowres texures.
This way the gameplay stops only for loading between the sections.

If you dont want the loading screen,then place all in the same level and rely on the LOD to keep the framerate high.
As long as you keep the Farclip plane to max 4000 ,you wont have problems.Over the 4000 the rendering may crash.

[RobF]

Tks Jay,

appreciate the answer. Working in metric makes sense, is there an entry that can be added to the rfedit ini file to change the grid size to metric or does the engine cope better with binary?

[zany_001]

Units in 3D space aren't a specific amount, by which I mean, a texel(the 3D unit) can be as big or as small as you want. For example, you decide the main character will be 2 meters tall. So you put his model in RF, and scale it to, say, 20 texels high. Then, each texel would be 10cm. But if you scaled him to 200 texels, then each texel would be ONE centimeter.

tl;dr because of scaling, texels can be any measurement you want.

[darksmaster923]

Editor tends to suck with large levels mind you. So don't make em too big or anything