Mark's Xfighter.bb revisited

Community Forums/Showcase/Mark's Xfighter.bb revisited

SabataRH(Posted 2004) [#1]
download page

Experience marks classical xfighter.bb code example all over again! This time with plant life.
Demo attempts to show 10,000 trees smoothly controlled over a large map. Each trees position, rotation and scale are correctly stored, no more random placement.


Rob(Posted 2004) [#2]
Lovely atmosphere and visuals but slow as a dead dog on my pc. Around 5fps. I suspect it's not the polygon count on screen, but the manipulation of vertices.


mrtricks(Posted 2004) [#3]
Wow. Just checked out the BT3D demo too. You've put an amazing amount of work into that and it's really solid. Grass really slows down unfortunately, but the trees are really nice.

If I might make a couple of observations which I think could really improve it:

1. The movement of the leaf quads could be made more organic if you use sinwaves - use lookup tables instead of actual sin commands to keep it quick; also the hinge of each quad could be in different places, so in some the leaves 'swing' in others it 'sways' etc

2. One thing I've noticed in really good examples of trees in games is where the wind kind of 'rolls over' the whole playing area like a ripple - really holds the universe together

3. The fade-in from nothing to far is really nice, but the pop-in from far to mid and mid to near is a bit abrupt - would be really nice to see it fade from far to near (although I guess that might have a performance hit because for the duration of the fade you'd have two versions of the tree there?)

Anyway, just niggles - I'm really impressed on the whole.


Ross C(Posted 2004) [#4]
Nice man :) But too slow i'm afraid. I've found that terrains are quite slow though, so i never use them, so it won't be a true reflection of the systems speed :)


Perturbatio(Posted 2004) [#5]
It looks nice and runs smoothly for me.


SabataRH(Posted 2004) [#6]
Whoa you are right about the terrain speeds... Just tested it by removing the blitz terrain and adding 10,000 poly landscape model to the scene... The results are impressively faster.


mrtricks(Posted 2004) [#7]
For one thing the terrain in the xfighter demo is a big one...


Genexi2(Posted 2004) [#8]
Runs decent here on my slightly broken PC, only thing I've noticed is that all the sprites are sitting vertically....and it doesnt quite look naturally to me.....
(hard fer me to explain........also the fact the sprites are a lil' large and the fact some of them go through another sprite on the same tree isnt pretty....either way, nice work on the whole system =) )


Paul "Taiphoz"(Posted 2004) [#9]
Yeah thats cos hes making all the leaf sprites face the player. Its good cos it means he uses less sprites but bad due to the effects you have seen.. Its also what i dont like about.

I still think it might be of some use though.


Ross C(Posted 2004) [#10]
Did you update the demo Sabata? With the mesh, instead i mean?


SabataRH(Posted 2004) [#11]
Not yet, I'm revamping some of the functions and deicded to wait until I was finished updating before putting together another demo... maybe a day or two ..

I'm going to put a terrain from Geoscape3d in there, that should be nice and it's solid mesh.

Yavin, like Speedtree - people either love it or they hate it... My system follows theirs pretty close so I expect the same highs and lows as they...


Thanks for the comments.


Jim Teeuwen(Posted 2004) [#12]
unfortunatly runs at approx 0.3 frames a sec here :(


Ricky Smith(Posted 2004) [#13]
I get about 1 frame per minute...! But the standard demo works just fine - must be the combination of the trees and a Blitz terrain.


Agamer(Posted 2004) [#14]
yeh


Rob(Posted 2004) [#15]
This is because he's uploading the entire trees (single surface) mesh every frame.

Terrains also upload their mesh every frame too, so AGP 4X or low memory cards will die.


Andy(Posted 2004) [#16]
What is a 'catherdal'?

Andy