Followers of shadows, the day has come!

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AnyOldName3
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Joined: 26 Nov 2015, 03:25

Re: Followers of shadows, the day has come!

Post by AnyOldName3 »

Batching just means that the vertices of several meshes get put into one new mesh, so most things work exactly as before. The problematic parts of batching are ensuring everything has the same state, which can be worked around with things like texture atlassing and finding ways to use the same lights for everything, and taking into account changes to individual things in a batch, which is trickier. If everything in the batch is effectively the same object (such as individual tufts of grass, but only grass) you can apply the same change to everything (be it a texture swap, transformation or physics simulation) and that's fine, but the problems start when different changes are needed for different parts. Fallout 4, which has pre-generated batches called precombines, has issues where disabling one of the objects in a precombine breaks it and installing a texture mod doesn't affect things within a precombine, and they have to be regenerated, which the engine can't do, only the editor. Hopefully, we'll be able to avoid these issues completely by constructing batches at runtime and when they become invalid, falling back on the original drawables while a new batch is constructed on a different thread.
CMAugust
Posts: 285
Joined: 10 Jan 2016, 00:13

Re: Followers of shadows, the day has come!

Post by CMAugust »

Right, that makes sense. I assume this is why the grass in Skyrim doesn't respond to any light besides the sun; too likely the batched grass would exceed the maximum number of lights that can affect a single object, and I guess Bethesda lacked the time to implement a proper workaround. Switching to deferred shading with Fallout 4 made this a non-issue. (but they still didn't have shadows on grass)
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Capostrophic
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Joined: 22 Feb 2016, 20:32

Re: Followers of shadows, the day has come!

Post by Capostrophic »

No. It happens because the grass doesn't have normals.
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