This may seem like a dumb question for someone who has been around gstudio as long as me, but I have never had any edition higher than GStudio standard.

My question is:(1)
What benefit does geometric LOD give? Just a better/more smooth clip of far away objects? Because quite frankly I havent been too excited about my edition's ability to clip out geometry in a smooth, believable way. Would having this "Geometric LOD" feature help me? I suppose I have used just about every clip range-fog-camera trick I could think of and I just havent been too lucky with clipping out objects gracefully, the engine seems to clip them out very abruptly so I was wondering if the "Geometric LOD" feature would help.

(Obviously I could just make three different meshes with low medium and high poly's and create and remove them based on distance from player so I assume that this feature in NOT talking about entity LOD)

Another question(2) I had was about running lights in fog. I havent seemed to be able to make lights really stand out in thick fog, and was wondering if there were any good tutorials out there about thick fog/lighting. The type of effect I am looking for is say a bolt of lightning suddenly appearing in the thick fog, or an airplane's running lights in the fog. Will a higher edition help me with these types of problems?

1.) lod on geo is very important (at least for me) when modeling cities or huge landscapes. I create 3 lod stages of the buildings:
a) full model and interior of the building
b) just the outside shape of it (no interior at all)
c) a very low poly version of the building (very small textures)

the code will replace all stuff when needed and so you can make huge levels with indoor (watch out for not wasting to much memory...it needs to be reloaded!!!).

I know the engine clips away everything not seen all alone....but this way you have way more control of it and the engine doesnt need to bother if to clip or not.

Works like a charm for GTA like levels...for shoters it dont make much sense..or at least not very often.

2.) lightning is a little bit bahoo with the engine so far...i would recommend replacing a flare (either with an afterglow shader or a simple sprite) at the position of the light once you get far away.

check the halo() function for that...just make sure to fade out at a near and far distance to the sprite.

..should work

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1.) lod on geo is very important (at least for me) when modeling cities or huge landscapes. I create 3 lod stages of the buildings:
a) full model and interior of the building
b) just the outside shape of it (no interior at all)
c) a very low poly version of the building (very small textures)

the code will replace all stuff when needed and so you can make huge levels with indoor (watch out for not wasting to much memory...it needs to be reloaded!!!).

I know the engine clips away everything not seen all alone....but this way you have way more control of it and the engine doesnt need to bother if to clip or not.

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Thats exactly what I plan on doing so my guess is I will definately need an edition with Geometric LOD. I wish I could see an actual demo or an example of it in action so that I could see the difference. But that is ok, I'll be getting a better edition soon anyway. Thanks.

If this is the only feature you need from the next higher version, you can do it yourself with c-script.
Apply an action to each building and check its distance to the player.

I saw some code in this forum, just search a bit.


-- slacer

Actually I don't think the coding part would be very difficult, that is why I had doubts that it was an actual feature. I guess my biggest challenge would be for finding the appropriate distances for each particular level, but it seems like that all could be configured into a skill variable.

The problem I would worry about would be all those entites scanning for distance from player even when the player was not around might take too many cpu cycles, but I will look into coding it for myself.

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If this is the only feature you need from the next higher version, you can do it yourself with c-script.

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very true.

If you don´t work with an if-construction in your lod-action you will get no
problems for a long time. As Tobias Runde told me you should use a scripting
like:

action house
{
while(1)
{my.z = (my.distance_to_the_camera > something) * something_else}
}

Instead of using "if(my.distance_to_the_camera > something)"
it works with simple multiplikation and makes the code very fast.
But there´s no need for scanning the distance anyway.
Just work with the x- and y-values and a multiplication.
If both distances are to big the value becomes 1 otherwise 0.

Using that way you can handle a few thousends of houses without any problem.
I made a mistake in my script and it created more and more entities using an action like this.
The only problem I´ve got was: "To many entities(50000)".

If you want to know a little more, look for "manual-culling works" in user-constributions or wait for my tutorial.

cu
Lutz