In A6 Commercial USE_AABB could be used. Now with A7 in the manual it says P. Guess it became a Pro feature? May I ask why?

It is not. It's marked "Pro" in the manual because it only works with BSP levels. But unlike the new BSP renderer, the AABB collision detection is still supported in all editions, so you can safely ignore the "Pro". You need to compile the level with BSP tree of course.

Ok i've misundestood. Have a lot of USE_AABB in scripts that I try to convert to Lite-C, but get some strange results when I tried to replace AABB with OBB while using block geometry and mdl's. Thanks for the clarification.

Just one more question. I have A7 Commercial and can only make use of ABT. How does someone with Pro tell the engine to render not as ABT, but as BSP? Is there something like a checkbox, button or program code that must be in place before it will be rendered in either BSP or ABT?

Another set of questions comes to mind:
Is there any demo to show the performance of the new BSP (especially with shaders)?
Is it possible to combine static shadows with shaders?
How about static geometry in BSP levels? Do they get static shadowmaps and is it possible to combine them with shaders?
How good is clipping of static geometry in BSP?

I think a good indoor scene-management is a fantastic marketing argument. ABT is quite useless for big indoor scenery. So the pro-edition could be a good deal if someone wants to make shooter-games. But we need the chance to check how good it is.

D3D: You have to compile the level in BSP mode. That's the first button in the Map Compiler dialog. Compiling takes longer then because the tree and the PVS are calculated. The editions below Pro ignore the BSP tree and only use ABT for rendering. Pro uses three stages, first BSP, then PVS, then ABT.

Father: there's no demo that I know of, but that's a good idea - I should indeed do one for comparison. A BSP tree is a culling algorithm, it has has nothing to with shaders or with shadow maps. You can find a brief description about what a BSP tree is and how it works in our manual under "Rendering Engine", and more detailed in the Internet.

JCL: Thanks for the hint. Actually I know what culling, BSP and ABT means in general.

My question comes from the past experience of the "old" BSP system. I will explain more deeply to make it more clear:
The former system works with WED-blocks and produces many render batches through transfering single polygons. Besides that it does what BSP should do: it hides some geometry.
But it was too slow to apply shaders. Direct-X loves to get only few render jobs with higher amount of polygons instead of dozens of jobs with only a few polies.

Besides that the access to the second uv-set plus shadow map was not really clear.

I would like to see this in the new BSP-demo how fast it renders big worlds with shaders and shadowmaps. There is surely more involved than just BSP, but the result is important to the users.
A BSP vs. ABT demo with huge indoor and outdoor level is even better to show the advantages of each system (outdoor vs. indoor, ABT vs. BSP).

Maybe I did not explain everything perfectly right. You are far more experiencened with DX, culling and so on.
But as you can see above the former scene-management had much to do with render speed and shaders. There was a reason that nobody achieved to apply shaders to block-levels fast enough.

Nevertheless I am looking forward to this demo to check if it is worth upgrading to A7 pro.

Ah ok, now I understand your questions. No, the problem with A6 shaders on geometry had nothing to do with the BSP tree.

A6 rendered blocks one polygon at a time. This became pretty slow when you used surface shaders. A7 renders blocks together as a whole mesh, which is a faster method especially with large blocks or when using shaders. That's why it was not recommended to use shaders on geometry with A6, but is no problem with A7. The BSP/PVS algorithm is unrelated to that. It only determines which blocks or entities are rendered in a particular view.

The access to the second UV set is the same in A6 and A7. It's described in the shader chapter.

Thanks for the reply.

Still looking forward to a little demo. It dont have to be pretty for myself. I just want to judge performance. I would do it myself if there would be a evaluation version of A7 pro.