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Gondar · **Posted:** Sun Sep 07, 2008 10:06 am

The gallery bug is exactly it.

I call them visnodes from my prior experience.. generally the idea is visible regions. The trick is to realize where vision has to be cut off, and.... cut it.

What happens is the engine (which by the way is stupid like all game engines.. it has no concept of visual lines unless it's told) renders everything that's not to the sides or behind the player. EVERYTHING. Well, normally.

It doesn't get the concept of walls and such. And moreso, there's precaching and preloading so it can seamlessly render as you run. Polycounts go sky-high.

Except for a visual cutoff. If there's a hallway that does a 90 degree turn, you can't see after the turn until you're at it, either way. So when modelling you thump down the equivelant of a transition.. where if you're before the chunk, you cut off all after. If you're after, cut off all before. And in the middle, only the hallway and not down any corners etc. Cyan used that all over.. hence when inside the gallery or museum or library etc, the outside world isn't drawn anymore. And outside you can't see in. It cuts on poly load.

To expand Ae'gura, all you need to do is figure the cutoffs. And there's lots everywhere it could have. So you put in areas in rooms, past corners and rubble and blocks. You make sure you can only take in parts of the city at once, or if you're gonna see the whole works do it with a low-poly faked model like for the hoods or K'veer. There's always room until you hit the maximum limit of the file design itself. And someone would have to fill me in on what that is, but I doubt we're close, not after Cyan likely upped it again for the big open places like say Minkata (which is a nice trick.. using sand as a fog so fade-out isn't glaringly obvious).

(Edit: I'm simplifying, but the idea holds. They're working on making graphics cards and game engines realize what's visible based on occlusion, but the catch is it generally takes as much processor as just rendering most of it anyways)

Rudolfson · **Posted:** Sun Sep 07, 2008 8:48 pm

Thank you guys, now i understand.
The terrible lag i always syffered during the first 30-60 sec after linking to ferry, is this due to rendering.

Gondar · **Posted:** Sun Sep 07, 2008 10:22 pm

Sorta. Actually, while the engine might not draw everything... it still has to know where it is and what it is.

That means it has to find out locational and costume data for every avatar in the age, visible or not. Plus all the kickables (before the cones were swiped that is). Plus a few states.

Plus the engine has to load the entire age (or at least part) into readiness. Just because it's not rendering it all doesn't mean it forgets the rest of the age exists.. that's why it pops up more or less smoothy as you run around and you never notice how it's cut by vis.

Oh, and the sounds too. Sounds have to load too.

It's a lot of hard memory load on the game as it loads the whole thing into ready memory before getting ready.. even in the offline version large ages take a while to load (as indicated by how long the bars take). Then once that's loaded it lags rendering people too.. and I think the sound stream is somehow tied into rendering cause the game has literally paused rendering to do sounds before..

But I haven't poked much in the engine, just picked a little up. However yes, rendering is a big lag, but not as much as others (hence lag grew exponentially as more people went in, even though it was the same age)

Official content by Cyan Worlds

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