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DarkBASIC Professional Discussion / Opinion - Matrix Size

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BatVink
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Posted: 3rd Nov 2003 13:18
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How big do people tend to make their Matrices:

1: In number of cells (X * Z)
2: In actual size (e.g 100 units per cell, or 1,000 units in total length)

The reason for asking? I'm trying to develop a Matrix moulding tool, and was interested how people tend to size their matrices.

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spooky
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Posted: 3rd Nov 2003 13:54
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Good question!

I have messed around a lot with matrices and tried every conceivable combination.

1.
With old patches, size was limited to about 104*104 but with latest patch, matrix size is unlimited. Trouble is once matrix size gets to about 100*100, things start slowing down badly. You can however have multiple matrices that are same size as one big matrix and it goes faster. Anyway back to your question. My alien compo game is using a matrix 75*75, but with clever use of shift matrix and updating tiles, game area is actually 500*500 tiles.

2.
I have found that tile sizes of 20 or 30 units each is best for my purposes.

Boo!
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Van B
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Posted: 3rd Nov 2003 14:06
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I like to work to a scale that makes geographical sense. For example, a lot of matrices might have tiles that are scaled to 1 metre wide, which suits me because a metre is like a standard measurement scale. Like if I was making a matrice for a town, I'd make my tiles 100x100 DB units, each tile equating to 1 square metre, a good scale because a pavement is about 1 metre wide, a road can be 5 metres wide with the white lines going in the middle tiles etc etc. It really depends on your engine, but - bear in mind that if you can use integers, always do - my engine uses integers all the way because the scale is so big, I don't need real values because I can just move my guy a certain number of units. Standard units like that are good for calculating speeds, because you can work it out from the real world KPH. Integers compute much faster than real numbers - so there's a nice little performance boost.

My engine uses a 64x64 memblock matrice, I design it with a classic matrice then in the engine it is made into a spanking gorgeous vert coloured matrice. My game only really needs 64x64 tiles, it's not very fast paced.


Van-B


I bet you've never even been to mars.
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BatVink
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Posted: 3rd Nov 2003 22:34
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Thanks for the feedback. What is your opinion on a tool that would generate Matrices based on "rules", rather than conventional methods.

The idea is that you create a set of rules based on templates, and you can keep regenerating the matrix and tweaking the rules until you get what you want. For example, you could...

Create a Hill 50 metres high
Raise the edges by 10 metres
Add a road round the hill
Add a rule that ensures the road doesn't camber.

After generating, you might decide the hill should be higher, and the tool could cope with this without "breaking" the camber-free road.

Sound any good, or a waste of time?

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ReD_eYe
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Posted: 3rd Nov 2003 23:00
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sounds cool, would you be able to position the hill? or make multiple hills?


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BatVink
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Posted: 4th Nov 2003 00:25
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Yes, the idea is that you add as many transformations as you need, and they are processed in turn. If you don't like the result, you can disable, add more, change the way they interact and so on.

Each one can be set to merge with the previous, override it, average etc... I'm looking for feedback on how people use matrices so that I can create the transformations.

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Andy Igoe
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Posted: 4th Nov 2003 01:53
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The last matrix based landscape I created was a few million by a few million in 3D units and assembled from 1000x1000 matrix pieces. I did this with a dynamic matrix of around 30x30 matrix pieces. Any matrix system which does not yield the benefit of size wouldn't (from a personal point of view) be worth toying with because graphically they are very primitive.

With clever coding a matrix can be near enough unlimited in size, but they'll always look very basic, so to be restricted to conventional matrix parameters is the realm of beginners. This is no bad thing, but if that's your target audience for your program then you need to think 'beginner' at every step of the way.

Therefor think massive numbers, and as many tiles as you can cram in, as from the forums that is pretty much what beginners want to do

Bit of a paradox isn't it

Pneumatic Dryll
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BatVink
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Posted: 4th Nov 2003 10:04
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Pneumatic, you have progressed into the realms of V2. My methodology is not restricted by the constraints of the matrix, the calculations are "truncated" afterwards. The idea being that once I have this running for one matrix, I can extend the functionality.

V2 - I'm at least a month from completing V0.99!

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