peter_spy

The thing is, both Unity and Unreal offer both types of renderers (forward and deffered) and all types of lights now. You can use baked lightmaps and dynamic lights, both stationary and moveable, just like in idtech4. But LOD systems are still at geometry level. I get that this idea sounds great on paper. Technically, you could turn off all the shadowcasting lights and reduce your shadow tris to 0, and overall tris count by 1/4th, or 1/3rd even. But I'd hazard a guess that this is nearly impossible to do without the level looking awful. I'd be curious to see a practical example proving me wrong though.

Hmm, I wonder what would that be, since e.g. both Unreal and Unity have LOD systems, and even some pretty fancy fade in/out editing tools (see: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/class-LODGroup.html), but none of them have anything like that specifically for lights.

Hmm, I only managed to get this version to work, but it's not super useful, as it kind of extends to infinity, these should be clipped by the light radius: I think this could be done by using spot lights, not sure if that's what Duzenko meant. But that's a common gamedev trick too, using spotlights to avoid hitting too many surfaces by a shadowcasting light.

That reminds me, is there any way to get the old shadows debugger back? It was much easier to read:

In much more grim news, another depressing new low for Activision Blizzard. What a fantastic chapter in the company history. https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/activision-blizzard-sued-by-california-over-frat-boy-culture

Ambient light does that already too, as I demonstrated earlier. You have to account for the initial tris count to be at least tripled when you're placing a model in a map (ambient world + regular light, or + distance fog, so quadrupled even). If you're using lods/hide distance for models and func portals, and still can't get decent performance, you either need to up your level design game, or find better models (or both). Just hiding lights won't save you. It can be fun gameplay or aesthetic trick though, I guess it will be easier to use than scripts.

That ambient light would already act like tris multiplier. See the comparison I made in the newbie thread again. Even in complete darkness, the tris are still drawn. That's why it's better to address this at model level.

If a model is large and unoptimized, it will still be drawn, even if there's no light. So it's not that much of a performance, but aesthetics-related thing now, and that is subjective. I'd hazard a guess that changing lighting conditions like that will look more jarring than a switching between model visibility or lod stages in the same lighting.

That's why you can have a noshadows lod, and also you can hide models being hit by these lights. As Duzenko wrote, lights are expensive only when they hit something expensive. In that regard your performance won't get magically improved just because you turn off the lights.

That plus you can reduce distant shadowcasting by using as many "noshadows_lod_x 1" as you want. That should help quite substantially, since lights that cast no shadows are much cheaper in terms of performance. It's just that in this case you can achieve this by turning off shadows on the models, not in the light entity. Bear in mind that none of the optimisation tricks will help you much, if you have dozens of overlapping lights hitting tons of objects. That would be just using lights in incorrect way.

IIRC a skybox is always rendered, that would also explain the increased number of subviews and higher texture memory use.

Well, not exactly, in the second shot the number of subviews is higher, number of draws and tris is a bit lower, but the video memory is higher. That would imply that something else is being rendered too, as it uses more textures/materials. No idea why that would bring down the fps so hard. Out of curiosity, what would cause so many drawcalls and such huge triangle count in this simple looking scene? Are these pillars and grooves made with geometry?

First of all, these counts are super high for what's visible on screen: 3k draws, million tris, 156k shadow tris for simple geometry. Also, the number of views increases from 3 to 5, so it might mean you have a material with cubemap or a mirror? Just a guess.

Also, if you use shadows with stencil, these will pop in and out at fade distance; only maps with fade in and out smoothly with the model (which kinda makes sense). According to my notes, stuff like lod_x models should work correctly, but things will get wonky when it comes to skins for different lods. It seems like the model will always switch to lod_0 skin when going between hide_distance and lod fadeout range.

Sorry I didn't prepare a test map, just grabbed what I had from my stuff, as I don't want to be distracted much from the level design exercises I'm doing right now. But you can imagine this being applied to stuff like distant trees or grass, or perhaps even buildings (you could couple that with some distance fog, etc.). In general it should be pretty versatile and work with almost every object.

Not sure why it would be bad for LODing, it kinda depends on what you put in the alpha channel of the texture. It can look a bit like the reverse monster fade out in Doom3, and from a proper distance it looks good; it beats an object popping in and out of a thin air.

@kingsalIt might be Tels' work, no idea either. I did some experiments with it and I have some snippets in my notes, but I must have discarded that test map. We can use Discord and try to recreate it though.

There is alpha fade in and out, it needs alpha channel in the texture and particular material setup. I wasn't able to blend between lod stages though, only fading out from nothing to fully rendered object.

He speaks for me. Because of you, the forum view looks like this: The forums look like a news site because of you, and I don't have any way to ignore it.

I meant an Ignore function on a thread level, not just single posts. I check forums using the Activity tab, because that's the fastest way to see all the recent posts. Right now all posts are from the taliban thread which I'm really not interested in but have to navigate through, to see TDM related stuff.

An option to ignore the whole thread would be very appreciated. Just ignoring a user is not much of help when the activity stream is filled with responses from other users.

If I'm working from home, I either work in silence as well, or have something fairly generic and relaxing in the background, e.g. one of the chillhop playlists. For creative stuff I can actually focus with a podcast in the background, or I use something that matches the mood of what I'm doing, yeah

There already was a feature request to extend LOD to other entities, I believe there was more than one. So don't expect anyone rushing to fix this for you, because it's not that simple.

Bear in mind that LOD system is very old, IIRC it was designed by Tels and never improved upon much since. Ideally, every entity except worldspawn should be able to use LOD, but it's not an ideal situation. And yeah, performance is still your responsibility. Either you get to know the engine and design maps to leverage its strengths or you will see players complaining, whether you like it or not.