scott escreveu:
>> Interesting. HL2 is "only" a computer game, and so presumably has the 
>> lowest possibly polygon counts, and yet it fills a 4GB DVD.
> 
> Textures.  My car models typically have no textures, maybe one for the 
> license plate but that's about it.  I suspect in a game there are many 
> thousands of textures.  Even back in the day of Duke Nukem 3D I remember 
> scrolling through pages and pages of texture thumbnails in the level 
> editor.

I also believe game polygonal models are stored in final format, isn't 
it?  I mean, no "mesh-smooth" subdivided surfaces on the fly, just a 
single mesh, that used to be lowpoly but in modern games is reasonably 
dense.  They seemginly play around with LOD techniques to get them 
simplified at distances, but they are stored in the most dense form.

And yes, texture maps still eat it all, I guess.

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scott wrote:
> Really, it's just clicking and dragging points until they line up with 
> the image, it's not difficult or slow and you can get something that 
> looks realistic very quickly.

http://www.hash.com/2007web/vm.htm
Check out exercise 10, which goes thru the whole exercise for an airplane.

> I used Wings for a bit but I didn't get along with it - it was awkward 
> to modify meshes and it sometimes got confused about how the mesh was 
> connected and I couldn't find a way to fix it. 

Yes, me too. :-)

>> Interesting. HL2 is "only" a computer game, and so presumably has the 
>> lowest possibly polygon counts, and yet it fills a 4GB DVD.
> 
> Textures.

And sound. And game logic. And the levels are pretty f'ing huge, when you 
think about it.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Ouch ouch ouch!"
   "What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
   "No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."

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Invisible wrote:
> - You can smooth out the lighting, but the profile of the object will 
> still have sharp edges, as will its shadow (if it has one).

Sure. But when you're talking about a polygon that's five or ten pixels on a 
side on a modern-res screen, that stuff will be much less noticable, methinks.

-
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Ouch ouch ouch!"
   "What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
   "No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."

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>>> Interesting. HL2 is "only" a computer game, and so presumably has the 
>>> lowest possibly polygon counts, and yet it fills a 4GB DVD.
>>
>> Textures.
> 
> And sound. And game logic. And the levels are pretty f'ing huge, when 
> you think about it.

Levels are "only" polygon meshes, after all. (And walls and ceilings are 
pretty big polygons.)

OTOH, not sure how much space the radiosity data takes up...

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Darren New wrote:
> Invisible wrote:
>> - You can smooth out the lighting, but the profile of the object will 
>> still have sharp edges, as will its shadow (if it has one).
> 
> Sure. But when you're talking about a polygon that's five or ten pixels 
> on a side on a modern-res screen, that stuff will be much less 
> noticable, methinks.

True, but that's a hell of a lot of polygons. :-P

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> Normal trickery is very good for creating surface roughness. The problems 
> start when people try to use it to fake large structures such as waves. 
> (Yeah, now go look obliquely across the surface. Look wavey? No, I thought 
> not.)

This is one of the best examples of parallax mapping I have seen:

http://www.elderscrolls.com/images/art/ob_pc/obliv06B.jpg

I imagine it looks even better when seen animated.

Hard to believe that the walls are just flat polygons (well until you see 
the silhouette edge on the right under the chain!).

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>> Sure. But when you're talking about a polygon that's five or ten pixels 
>> on a side on a modern-res screen, that stuff will be much less noticable, 
>> methinks.
>
> True, but that's a hell of a lot of polygons. :-P

Not really compared to what a GPU can handle.  If you assume each triangle 
takes up 50 pixels (10x10 quad split into two), and you run at 1920x1200 
res, that's only 46K triangles.  Even an ancient GPU can handle that in real 
time.

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scott wrote:
>> Normal trickery is very good for creating surface roughness. The 
>> problems start when people try to use it to fake large structures such 
>> as waves. (Yeah, now go look obliquely across the surface. Look wavey? 
>> No, I thought not.)
> 
> This is one of the best examples of parallax mapping I have seen:
> 
> http://www.elderscrolls.com/images/art/ob_pc/obliv06B.jpg
> 
> I imagine it looks even better when seen animated.
> 
> Hard to believe that the walls are just flat polygons (well until you 
> see the silhouette edge on the right under the chain!).

If you look at a "wavey" surface really obliquely, it will still not 
look right. (Unless you use parallex mapping with occlusion, and nothing 
intersects the polygon surface, and you can't see where the polygon 
meets any other flat surfaces. I'm also not sure how refraction fits 
into this picture...)

However, for "small" surface perturbations, it probably works quite well.

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Invisible wrote:
> Levels are "only" polygon meshes, after all. 

Not really. There's buttons and triggers, moving stuff, the type of polygon 
(whether you can push it, whether it moves, whether to save it in the saved 
game file, etc), the data that helps the AI navigate (dunno if HL has this, 
but Unreal does), etc etc.  Probably not a whole lot of data, but then how 
much data does one triangle take?

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Ouch ouch ouch!"
   "What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
   "No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."

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Darren New wrote:
> Invisible wrote:
>> Levels are "only" polygon meshes, after all. 
> 
> Not really. There's buttons and triggers, moving stuff, the type of 
> polygon (whether you can push it, whether it moves, whether to save it 
> in the saved game file, etc), the data that helps the AI navigate (dunno 
> if HL has this, but Unreal does), etc etc.  Probably not a whole lot of 
> data, but then how much data does one triangle take?

More importantly, it's polygon meshes with precomputed light maps. Not 
to mention some algorithm for minimising the number of "rooms" that 
actually need to be rendered for any given viewpoint.

(And yes, CSS uses navigation information for the computer-controlled 
players, as did the original HL1. I wouldn't be surprised if lots of 
source-based games do.)

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