Distant Land: where to next?

Everything about development and the OpenMW source code.
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AnyOldName3
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Joined: 26 Nov 2015, 03:25

Re: Distant Land: where to next?

Post by AnyOldName3 »

As is mentioned on the first page of the thread, not every group of meshes can be merged into just one draw call, so a chunk can need several. If it covers a larger area, there's a bigger chance that it'll contain more meshes that can't be merged yet, for example because it contains parts of two towns which use different textures.
Chris
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Re: Distant Land: where to next?

Post by Chris »

I think that's a spambot. That's word-for-word exactly what you said back here in the middle of the first sentence.
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pvdk
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Re: Distant Land: where to next?

Post by pvdk »

I disapproved the post, should be gone now
CMAugust
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Re: Distant Land: where to next?

Post by CMAugust »

Adding this brief discussion with AnyOldName3 about the viability of LOD, since there is some talk that may be good to reference later. AnyOldName3 is in normal typeface and myself in bold, with minor editing for flow:
Spoiler: Show
Sagacity
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Joined: 05 Mar 2019, 12:58

Re: Distant Land: where to next?

Post by Sagacity »

Is it impossible to have the object paging system use differing minimum sizes for differing objects? To my knowledge, later games specifically tag trees to be treated differently, and quite a few other objects as well. Utilizing this information, you could have say a min tree paging size, and a minimum landscape paging size, etc.

Also, do cells meaningfully change in relative size between the game versions? Could it be possible that the later games are reducing load by simply have larger cells overall?

I'm really on board with avoiding baking things in as far as LODs and optimizations go. That is obviously a poor experience for everyone with largely moderate performance benefit, and that can be demonstrated with previs and precombine data in Fallout 4, which constantly breaks and is hard to properly generate for modders and users.
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psi29a
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Re: Distant Land: where to next?

Post by psi29a »

Problem is that Trees in the original game do not have any special markers indicating that it's a tree, which is why we treat everything in a generic way.

The closet thing we have at this point is OP for generic things and Groundcover for things we can instance (lots of little things littered everywhere) without collision, for example.

The plan is to further refine both systems.
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AnyOldName3
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Re: Distant Land: where to next?

Post by AnyOldName3 »

The biggest issues with size are:
  • It's not a great match for impact on the scene of this object being removed for a variety of reasons. Theoretically, there should be better metrics we can use to judge what to skip and what to keep. CMAugust got pretty good results by looking at meshes and making a judgement call, so the algorithm exists, it just hasn't been ported from the human brain to any of the platforms we support.
  • We don't know the size until we've loaded the mesh, so we have to load everything then discard it with the current approach. Ideally we'd amortise this cost by going back in time and making Bethesda add the information to the Nif header or something so it happened once in the late 90s/early 2000s and never on user's machines. We can't do that, so computing it ahead of time (or at least caching it once OpenMW's loaded the mesh once on a particular machine) is a sensible compromise.
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