Hello,

can you give me more information about ABT (Adaptive Binary Tree) rendering engine? What's the differences with BSP? How can I create a level that uses ABT?

What are advantages? Does physic engine work with ABT?

THank you!

I am interest is it a patent of Conitec?

Thank you!
I will read it carefully! :-)

I cannot understand how to "compile" my level to let ABT work.
I was looking for a way to compile a level (in WED) without creating a BSP tree, but I cannot find anything. Inside WED there are a lot of options, but it seems none of them is somthing like "disable bsp".

Do you think that using ABT I can create a world where the models (building, towers, bridges, etc...) are loaded at runtime?
(I want to create a system where the final gamers can make modding of my game!)

Please help me!

Cool stuffs! But that mean when invisible objects is rendered or not? When use fog then dont render, but if only im saying youare invisible - or then is?
And what is 3d hardware!

It will not load models dynamically. It will hide or unhide models to prevent them to render at your graphics card when they are not in view. Dynamically loading of models needs multi-threading but AFAIK it is not available in Gamestudio. You can load them dynamically but it might slowdown fps seriously then.

I think I did not explain well my concept (sorry for my bad English!).
When I talk about "Dynamically loading of models", I load them only when the game starts.

Let's say I create some models (e.g.: three different airplanes, plus some buildings for the environment), then I load them when the applications start.

In this way, if 3dgs could manage well them (not only dynamic models, but even buildings, bridges, etc...) I could reach 2 targets:

1) the final gamers will be able to modify the models (e.g.: making them more beautiful, or more funny, or quite different!);
2) I could change the environment based on the time (e.g.: year 1970, year 1980, year 1990, etc....). When the time goes on, I could change the buildings to give a feedback of the time to the players!).

There are even more possibilities how to use this feature.
The problem is I don't know if (and how!) 3dgs engine works under these conditions.
My thought was that since ABT does NOT need compilation, I wanted to use it to dynamically change objects. Furthermore, are there any limitations of ABT vs BSP (shadows, collisions, physic, etc...) But I cannot find any documentation about it :-(

After reading the documentation (and many links!) I found this information (from manual):

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Build Simple Map / Build Map Entity

Compile the map without BSP / PVS data and palettes, for simple level or Map Entities, or levels that contain concave or imported elements and are not suited for a BSP tree. The map compiles faster this way, but light maps can compile slower.
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It means that in order to create a WMB file without BSP data we need to compile using this option!

Of course models are always loaded dynamically in Gamestudio, Friendly Frank was confusing this with multithreading but that is something entirely different. Normally models are only loaded when they become visible to the player, but when you set the variable "preload_mode" to 1 they are already loaded when the level is loaded.

If you dont have the Pro edition it does not matter how you compile the level, it will always be rendered with ABT. But rendering with "Simple Map" is better because then you can have arbitrary geometry, otherwise your geometry must be BSP suited (convex).