Handle Long View Distance

[Megafyr]

I just got this idea... When you look at nowadays games the ground textures that are far away have less quality than those near. If you have a long view distance in warcraft III I'm sure the ground textures are requiring alot performance, right?

Then why don't make different level of detail in ground textures and change the pathing ingame with triggers (Shouldn't be too hard)? Those ground textures far away don't have to be detailed at all, and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference anyway because of the distance. Since you can have up to 16 tiles in one map there is enough tile space am I right? Longer view distance = FTW.

What this will require is alot more texturing work, but I'm sure you got people for doing that.

Hope this idea is useful, and works. ^^

 

[JakeCake]

If it is posible to make really low quality textures and it does not use much performance changeing the terrein in-game, this is a GREAT idea, and is 'easily' done with triggers

 

[Reaper2008]

Yeah, but it's not a big deal anyway. I mean, it's not the tiles that cause GFX lag, it's spammed effects, so (unless you have the cam 3000 units away) it's kinda pointless.

 

[AKAIMAX]

What causes lag isn't the size of what the game has to load, its how many things the game needs to load so if you have doodads spammed across the map to make large buildings, its gonna lag as hell. Effects units destructible cause lag when spammed. Thats why WOW has such a big filesize. Instead of making small models to make big ones, they made a model for almost every building to reduce lag.

 

[Craka_J]

If you're asking us to make textures and graphics overall look better and clearer even when far away from them, I'm afraid that is impossible. The WarCraft III engine simply cannot process texturing techniques like that nor does it have procedural processing either - or at least, not to my knowledge.

In order for us to get it done, not only do the artists have to work hard on making detailed and high quality textures, but we'd need programmers to pitch in a lot on the engine as well (Which is illegal since the engine is not owned by us, it's owned by Blizzard Entertainment)

 

[Megafyr]

You have misunderstood me. I'm talking about changing those far away with low quality textures, in order to get performance in high view distance. ; )

Could be done by triggers I think.

 

[Craka_J]

Nope. Don't believe it is possible with the World Editor, and if it is, it'll increase the filesize by a lot... something I'd like to avoid.

 

[Reaper2008]

Yeah, but the triggers would cause more lag then the textures.

@Craka: It is possible by picking every single tile and changing that, and..... nah.

 

[Hawkwing]

More texture work? Downsizing a texture isn't exactly work.

 

[Dr Super Good]

Downsizing textures will do shit all. Textures are insanly undemanding to render. Weather its a 32*32 or 2048*2048 they take about as long to actually display as its purly looking up 4 odd indexes in an array and peforming calcullations on them. The whole thing about textures causing lag is only true if they are used to billboard (as the scaling is unefficent in some render modes and AA modes) or when too many are used (excessive GRAM axcess slows preformance).

The whole lag is caused by the shair number of terain geomtry and model polies displayed. Remember that each standard terrain square consists of 2 3D triangles, Clifs can consist of even more. Combined with the fact that WC3's clipping is RTS and not F/TPS or RPG it will obviously lag if view distance is too far.

Reducing textures like I said will do nothing at all as WC3 uses so few of them that RAM axcess is not an issue for terrain.

To put it simply, on a 1280*1024 display like mine, it will sample atmost exactly 1310720 texture points of equal demand if rendering only geometery with no additional overlay texture effects and if display window is full screen with AA not being used. AA can increase the number of texture samples taken per pixel to the number of plains of geometry the pixel covers based on how they are positioned in the pixel.

 

[Craka_J]

True, but WarCraft III has a limited set of tilesets. We need to use all tilesets in WarCraft III (and ultimately replace them all or alter them a bit to be more accurate) for the deep variety of areas in World of Warcraft. We really need to use them all eventually and cannot waste tile slots for lower/higher quality tiles of the same tile.

 

[Eleandor]

You'll probably even have worse performance, since you must constantly check if a tile is "far away", then replace it with the corresponding low-quality tile. We don't have any control over warcraft 3's rendering system (if we would, damn I'd be able to get so much more performance for the dynamic GUI).

DSG: are you sure the textures are stored in your RAM? I thought on the gpu...

 

[Dr Super Good]

The GPU can not store anything, it is purly a processor device for geometry. The graphic RAM stores the actual textures. It is intrigrated into the graphic card so is not part of your normal RAM. On desktops however it can be part of the normal RAM and will be the normal RAM if the graphic card is full.

 

[Eleandor]

That's what I meant. But generally speaking, when people say RAM they're not talking about video RAM.

 

[illidan92]

I suppose fading distant doodads would reduce lag substantially as well as adding terrain fog.

 

[AKAIMAX]

I don't see how that will reduce lag. For all I know, it will add lag cause it runs a trigger script to fade. ANd you CAN'T fade the doodad so its impossible unless you guys aren't using doodads but destrucatlbes.

 

[Craka_J]

Fading objects would be a great addition and I'd really like to get that in there. Only problem is that I AM using doodads and I'd have to redo A LOT. Not to mention the fact that destructables are selectable (not sure if you can disable that though). Would be really annoying for players to deal with. Fading doodads wouldn't really reduce lag and maybe it would reduce the performance quality, but, it would make life a lot easier because there are a good number of areas where doodads such as buildings, trees, rocks, etc. come in the way. Hopefully the "camera doesn't collide with geometry" idea works, but it'll definitely have a bunch of flaws, especially in the alpha and beta testing phases.

 

[AKAIMAX]

Add locust to destructables? And when are you gonna add new screenshots?!? Sorry, just can't wait.

 

[Craka_J]

I'll try hard to get you something... WoW is too much fun though, so I can't promise it to be this week. But I will try.

 

[AKAIMAX]

Ok cool.