Labyrinth section for air-race track

[Xjazz]

Hi

Okay, the "Labyrinth" section measures are 5280ft long, ~2640ft wide and 660ft tall. Self made “limestone wall” texture with some green bushes at the top. Each 2D curve has 14 surfaces and 26 vertices.



1.How to build fps efficient “Labyrinth” section?

- Build a separate TE objects for each curve size and fences and use these building blocks in TE?
- Build labyrinth in OE from the smaller AC3D objects and use ready labyrinth object in TE?
- Build a complete labyrinth  in AC3D, finish it in OE and use ready labyrinth object in TE?

2. Tall and narrow 2D objects like forest & rock fences are pretty difficult to the right place. Just can’t see them too well from above. How much it would effect to the fps, if I give a 1ft thickness for each object:

2D fence with Total objects: 2   surfaces: 1   vertices: 4
3D fence with Total objects: 2   surfaces: 6   vertices: 8

TY for help

Ps. what if two objects over lapping each other? Crashes? Dot-bugs

[Waffle]

If you're looking for the easiest way -

Make 2 sets of curves in the OBJECT editor - one large, one small... make sure under 5280'.

save and create shape for the 2 objects you've made.

Use the Terrain Editor to  place the objects to make your path. You can turn/rotate the new objects there.

[BlauK]

You can add some vertical visibility by doubling the surface count... build 1 horizontal surface e.g. at the outer side of the vertical surface. It wont look perfect from close distance, but it will do the job when viewed from higher or from high speed.

Whether you buid it all in AC3D or in OE does not matter in the end.

Each separate object brought to TE increases the file size, but using them over and over again on the same map only adds coordinate specs to a text file.

Then again, at the moment you can have only some 128 (?) files in texsrc folder (this should be fixed in new version) and if you want to build lots of shapes in TE, it is more painful to place them all correctly.

So you need to find a suitable balance. If your picture shows everything you are going to put on your map, it is just the same to make a single object. But if you want to build several of them with some slight variation and the file size becomes an issue, I suggest you break the object in some modules which can then be used to build the shapes in TE.

[BlauK]

Object overlapping should not be an issue in your case.
It may become an issue if you use different looking co-planar surfaces because they do not always get rendered in the order you would like and the ZBias object tags work differently with different vid cards.

[Easyscor]

I’ve been wondering how Xjazz can set the LOD for object a mile long.  When flying close to the wall, you’ll want high levels of detail to give you a sense of how close you are but you don’t want that level of detail extending out for a mile?  I don’t have any useful experience using ac3d or the Object Editor but wouldn’t you need to break up the fence into short sections to keep high levels of detail nearby and high fps?

Let us know what happens

[BlauK]

IMO, the need of LODs depend really only on the total amount of polygons in that labyrint, not on the size of it. There are no LODs in the mountains in AH terrains either.

I would suggest using a large enough texture for the wall and texturing it so that the texture is repeating several times over on the large polygons.

[Xjazz]

Originally posted by BlauK
I would suggest using a large enough texture for the wall and texturing it so that the texture is repeating several times over on the large polygons.

Jep, I try my best with these (darn) textures...


I took this from real life photo and turn it to the 256colour bmp file...


ok, it goes...