3D question

[Marko]

The latest patch of Unreal introduces a continuous level-of-detail rendering technology for the "actors" (e.g. monsters). In a nutshell, the number of polygons used to describe an actor diminishes with distance in a continuous manner. After reading about this, I naturally wondered if such a technology was being used in CM. If so, can you describe it in a couple of paragraphs; and if not, might not this go a long way to solving the problem of infantry representation in CM?

Marko

[Guest Big Time Software]

There are 5 different resolutions for each model in CM. The further away, the lower the polygon count. This is standard for all 3D games. I strongly suspect that the Unreal engine has just been tweaked to do it better than the original, as I can't understand how they could have gotten away without using this trick for the original. In CM, because it is outdoors with hundreds of "actors", the game would not run on even a 500MHz 4 processor CPU without this "trick" Cool thing is that you can't notice this at all, ever. Reason being is that all monitors are too low res to pick up details for small complex shapes anyways. Can't WAIT for the adoption of higher res monitors, like IBM's R&D 100dpi screen. That would be cooooool!

Steve

[Marko]

Upon reading the Unreal tech document a little more closely, I find that they've always had an LOD model. It's just that the 224 patch introduces a new smoothing technology into the picture. So, there's no speed increase associated with it, just an increase in let's say "visual quality", with respect to how the polygons are culled.

I'm interested in these technical details, and that's why I find the Unreal Technology Pages (where you can find the LOD article) so fascinating. Here's the link to it if anybody else is interested:

http://unreal.epicgames.com/

It would be nice if when you released CM, you could add, say, no more than a page or so describing the technical side of your game engine.

By the way, what was your main reason(s) for choosing Direct3D over OpenGL? I've heard that Apple are going to be fully supporting OpenGL one day. I'd imagine that it would probably be good for you to have to deal with only one 3D API.