[Need Info] Frame-rate Issues (Third Person Camera)

[mattdraw]

I've just started using Sc2's World Editor with the release of the new wc3 assets. Had a couple of questions, most of which not sure if I could cover in one thread, regardless, texture filtering, limiting the distance of which Starcraft renders objects fully.

I've created this map which pretty much fried my old graphics card, which I've replaced a couple of days ago.

The camera's third person which means Starcraft is processing more objects than it needs to, such as drawing trees with the same level of detail even though they're a great distance from the camera's position.

An example of what I mean as far as how the camera looks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXCqVJuObt4
(had to lower the resolution)

The world looks great so far, but the frame-rate drops significantly if the camera is facing the rest of the map.

Any ideas how to fix this? Also, variables. Where do I create them so I can set them with triggers?

 

[Dr Super Good]

I've created this map which pretty much fried my old graphics card, which I've replaced a couple of days ago.

Card likely was prone to overheating (eg the 8800 GT). SC2 does not fry modern cards with good cooling.

The world looks great so far, but the frame-rate drops significantly if the camera is facing the rest of the map.

Any ideas how to fix this? Also, variables. Where do I create them so I can set them with triggers?

Have you tried applying Z cutoff to the camera? This should function similar to how it did in WC3 and prevent objects from being drawn when they are beyond a certain distance from the camera.

An alternative approach would be to generically send actor messages to large areas of doodads to hide/show them based on the view angle of the camera. This is more complicated than something like Z cutoff and will require you to work out when to show/hide the doodads. You can also show/hide areas of terrain which might or might not reduce overhead.

Ultimately RTS games like SC2 are not really aimed at this sort of camera angle. FP and TP games use different approaches to handling distant objects such as tessellation and LOD to reduce the complexity of far away objects while not removing them entirely.

 

[mattdraw]

It was a pretty old card gtx 570, pretty crappy. I've figured it out, the Trigger editor didn't classify it as farclip, just as "far." Is there anyway you can change the way it's laid out? It's doing this weird thing and calling the options stuff like "Comparison((RegionContainsPoint(," like it's a quick-select mode or something lol. I swear it used to look simpler.

 

[Dr Super Good]

Sounds like raw data view? You can always use custom script if you want.