So can anyone tell me whats the difference between BSP and the upcoming ABT? Just for curiosity

anyone?

well biggest things I can think of off top of my head will be more complex geometrey handling, better collision and should be faster realtime rendering ( less combile/build times too) because visiblity, lighting etc are then more dynamic/realtime and less compile time calculations

I don't think lighting will be faster. the ABT is a culling method but the amount of surfaces to be lit is still the same as with BSP. But realtime lighting (and shaders in general) is indeed faster on models than on level geometry.

I believe it means CONCAVE SURFACES! And lightmaps! Doooweeeeeeeeeeeeeee
and i think has the same advantages as Octrees

sory for the delay, i just wanted to say "thanks"

but what it really does, noone seems to be able to explain properly.

an abt is similar to an octree.

what it does:

it recursively splits the geometry along an axis aligned splitting plane. this plane doesn't simply get placed at the center of the bounding box of each node but its placement somehow gets adapted/optimized (so that both sides have the same amount of polygons or so that empty space gets handled efficiently but only jcl knows the exact criteria of his implementation ).

this tree of geometry nodes then can be used for fast frustum culling and such things. it works with any polygon geometry and is much better for modern gpus since it is much coarser than old quake-style bsp.

<edit> here i found a much more detailed explanation: http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=123169. this thread is from 2002. read what he says about quake-style bsp! </edit>



with quake-style bsp the geometry gets split recursively too but with non-axis aligned splitting planes. the algorithm is much more complicated and i don't know the details but we all know the disadvantages. convex blocks, long compile time, bad for the gpu since it is way too fine grained (1 polygon leaf nodes),...

thanks