The Darkengine & The Darkmod: mapping parallels

[Bikerdude]

I'm currently beta testing a map for SoulTear (screenshots are in the inspiration thread) that is so complex its pushing the perf envelope of that engine where, he is now runing into perf issues we have had to deal with for years

 

The two primary issues he has are long sight lines and too many polys in a scene, I wonder what the equivalents are in The Darkengine (TDE) would be to visportals and draw-call count?

 

And on a different note, I would love to build his map in TDM 2.03, it would royaly spank TDE on everything bar backed soft shadows etc.

[grayman]

Biker, exactly how many clones of yourself do you have? You're always very busy!!!

[Bikerdude]

Biker, exactly how many clones of yourself do you have? You're always very busy!!!

ROTFL, when I need a break from something I'm working on I like to be able to hop onto something else. Be it another TDM project, some housework or some Thief beta testing :-)

[AluminumHaste]

Yeah most people don't take breaks from work by doing more work, but bless you nonetheless.

[nbohr1more]

Draw calls affect all engines, it's a driver thing. I'm not sure NewDark has any tools to see how many draws it's using though. It's nice

that Doom 3 added that.

 

I thought Dark Engine had something like portals, maybe like Quake "hint brushes"?

 

Edit:

 

It looks like you can't manually place portals. You just use the "portalize" feature in Dromed and it does this for you automatically.

If it does a bad job or isn't as clever as Bikerdude then you're SOL...

[OrbWeaver]

Draw calls affect all engines, it's a driver thing.

 

All engines will emit draw calls certainly, but draw-call limits won't necessarily be the issue on every engine. I seem to recall from various literature on mapping with Dromed that there are problems around 1024+ polygons in the scene, which is most likely an issue with some fixed-size structure in the engine code itself rather than anything related to drivers or raw GPU commands.

 

D3 and TDM maps on the other hand can easily have polygon counts in the hundreds of thousands or even millions, where GPU bandwidth and processing power is much more likely to become an issue.

 

With regard to visportals, my understanding is the original Dark Engine uses a much simpler form of BSP tree where every "leaf" in the tree contains a single polygon or perhaps several co-planar polygons. So it's essentially as if almost every polygon in the level is a visportal that divides the space into geometry in front and geometry behind.