Hi,

i can give also an example to make huge worlds: make all smaller: For example, i am currently making Dark Age a Role-Play game with a huge(huge)-world. I made the Players Size to 4 Quants. so the world is small and you can extend it very much. For things that are smaller or require more poratls i make a wmb file. all "sectors"(Mountins, cities) i have compiled into a wmb file. later i get them together in a main map.
Plane:

Code:

---

  
| & - =  Level Borders
/ & \ = Hights
S = Sector borders
|--------------|
| /\     s /   |
|/  \    s \   |
|sssssssss  \  |
|    /\  s   \ |
|--------------|

---

wll its not good explained but it shoul help you. What i mine is: Make all smaller to get more space to construct a huge world.

cu
XWCG(blue)

Hiya,

I found a good turtorial for the torque engine. It gives some ideas about how they use LOD and detail blocks to reduce poly counts on there large outdoor areas. Although its specific to torque which is designed for massive outdoor worlds, some of it can be applied to GS..

Torque Map Tutorials

You are right, collision dection isn't as good, so keep your models simple, again look at GTA's simple block buildings.

A shot in the dark, but doesn't setting the 'detail' flag on faces you will never see prevent extra portals from being created?

This has been most enlightening... and, at the risk of stepping all over my, errr two feet, here...

... I would think that dynamically loading separate entity maps as described in a previous thread (treadmill technique) might be the best way to implement an unlimited large scale world.

This would appear to eliminate the long build times, and all other problems associated with large scale world construction...

... and this method would also seem to allow an unlimited world size, ideal for flight and naval sims, or massive online worlds where users can construct their own lil properties and such.

I'm gonna try something like this in a few days... if I get it started reasonably soon, I'll post the results here.

--Mike

Here's another suggestion. I'm in the process of creating a huge world too and I'm mainly using models for my buildings and so on. To avoid the whole problematic collision with models (where players walk right through them) I've placed invisible blocks/cubes around, to get good collision. I've created a world with 4 labyrinths in it where the walls are models surrounded by these invisible blocks.

I had a problem for the ground though. I want to use fog, but when I created my ground from a block I always get the 'to big for shaded' error. Tried to use very small blocks to no good either. I can set the texture to flat, but then the whole texture dissapears becasue of the fog (I get one huge red plane --- red is the fog color used). Here's what I ended up doing. I creaed a huge block as my ground and made it invisble. On top I placed the texture I wanted as a ground as a sprite, duplicating as much as needed to cover the whole area. This works very well and no demand on the frame rate at all.

Perhaps buildings can be constructed this way to, by putting together sprites and placing invisible blocks around them...... this would give a great framerate.

At the moment I'm still using models, since the walls are a bit detailed in shape. At the moment my level is 16000 x 16000, it has far over 300 models in it (10 different models, duplicated lots of times), about 60 mountains (10 different hmp files), using fog, and I still get a framerate between 50-70. Except for at the biggest labyrinth, when looked at from one certain side, the framerate drops to 40, as soon as you go one step closer or further away the frameratr goes up again. Building time of the level is around 3 secs.

I dunno what happen with small blocks (acording to the manual its not convenient to use them smaller than 2quants).

Other engines have a kind of block that produces manual PORTAL SPLITS:
A block not renderizable nor visible, but acts like PORTAL in every surface.

So, u could place it into a valley as a "cieling". If u are climbing the hill to the valley's town (with hy polycount), the town will not render untill u reach the top of the hill.
Or if u are outside of a castle's wall with a tall Keep in the highly detailed inner yard, u could place the "PORTAL" block sized to fit the inner yard an as tall as the walls. The engine should render only what u realy see, leaving the inneryard unrendered till u enter or climb ontop the outer wall.

IS ANYTHING LIKE IT IN THIS ENGINE?????

sry i didn't reply erlier. I've bin kind of busy. I admit that complicated models have bad collision detection. It will make the game slow to! I found a program on inet that can export GTA (3 and Vice) buildings\models to 3D studio MX models. Which can be exported to gamestudio models. With a little editing, you will have prefabed buildings, bridges and alike (just give them a new skin and edit a bit)

Note: The models in GTA aren't that complicated, and if they are, it are multiple models (like the broken bridge in GTA 3).

Gamestudio doesnt have hint blocks or portal brushes or anything like that, what you can do to block rendering is setting a blocks faces all to none texture flag
the only problem with that is the block gets rendered solid black, so there pretty much usless for blocking items behind them. It would be great if map entitys would block rendering, but they dont!, so if you have door map entitys with a very detailed room behind them, when you look at the doors everything in the room behind them gets rendered as well.
Best thing to do is use curved hallways and things like that, because you can slow it down to a crawl if you have lots of long straight shaded areas, even worse if your adding terrain into the mix

Golum, thank U very much!!!
"Can slow it down to a crawl if you have lots of long straight shaded areas, even worse if your adding terrain into the mix"
Sadly, i went for an outdoor battlefield to test!! All polys are exposed and rendered, even behind uncapped surrounding tall walls...
.
Maybe someone experienced could use the numeric FLAGS (in the properties/surface tag) to attach a script or something else that behaves like a HINT BRUSH. (wander if that could be possible?)
Anyway, thanx again.