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3 Dimensional Chat / How many polygons are allowed in DB Professional, and some other questions...

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3D_Master
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Joined: 23rd May 2006
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Posted: 31st May 2006 22:51
I have some links standing below from some of my models that i'm definately going to use in a big project of mine.

http://img330.imageshack.us/my.php?image=laatsteontwikkeling5fb.jpg
This model consists of around 7400 polygons (4 point and edge sided faces) and should be one of the stations where we can arrive.
Now I do know that 7400 faces are not a problem for DarkBasic as some matrixes use more than that.

But the track you see, should that be a object on its own so that the train can drive over it, or can it stay a part of the station?

Then there is one of the trains:
http://img432.imageshack.us/my.php?image=nieuw3xt.jpg
It consists out of 40000 polygons (4 point and edge sided faces)

The wheels should be rotating so that, when we're in outside-the-cabine-view, we can see the train definately rolling.
Should the wheels be a object of their own too?
If so, that's going to be a lot of coding i'm afraid.
Or are there commands that make different objects OF objects parent to others?

I know this is a lot for a newcomer and I know I should put up 'something' VERY simple for a beginning, so I can evaluate stuff.
But I just wanted to know this for now already.
John H
Retired Moderator
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Location: Burlington, VT
Posted: 31st May 2006 23:03
It's not a matter how many polies it allows, its a question of what the computer can handle, and if your going into that much poly detail, your going to have quite low FPS I'd imagine....with other scenary of course.


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BenDstraw
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Location: Arizona
Posted: 31st May 2006 23:04
im not sure of the limit but i think its higher than what you have there. but after applying other features to your games and those models i think your game will lag like crazy. but i dunno anything bout that just what i think.

God modelled man in his own reference image.
comment my art at: http://www.bendstraw.deviantart.com
RUCCUS
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Location: Canada
Posted: 31st May 2006 23:06 Edited at: 31st May 2006 23:06
As far as the limit of polies DBP can handle (im pretty sure there isnt one), just keep this in mind; if you ever have to actually worry about exceeding this limit, then you've got too many polies already. Though to give you an idea, the average player model has from 5-10k polies and a map is anywhere from 20 - 300k polies. You can, however, achieve enourmous amounts of polygons in a map, it just comes down to your programming skills. If you play around with DBP and come up with some custome culling functions, you can have multiple maps with hundreds of thousands of polies.

The train tracks, unless required to be manipulated in-game with some code for some reason, dont have to be a seperate object. Then again we cant decide this for you as there are hundreds of reasons why you would want them to be a seperate object;you could be making a sound occur when the user walks over the tracks, you could be manipulating the vertex's of the tracks in real-time, you could be texturing the train tracks with different textures in real-time, the list goes on, all of which would be easier to accomplish via using a separate track object.

The wheels of the train are much the same case, usually for something as small as just having them turn, you'd animate in a 3D animating program like anim8or, and then just use the PLAY OBJECT and LOOP OBJECT commands to play the wheel turning animation. This would probably be your best bet as usually trains have quite a lot of wheels, so programming them to turn in sync would be a bit of a hassle, though if you used a loop or two it could be done in a few lines of code.

If you did decide to have the wheels as separate objects, you'd most likely want to add limbs to the main object (the train), offsetting them to the appropriate position of the wheel, then position the wheel at the limb's position, then... well, it gets harder and harder from there.

Quote: "Or are there commands that make different objects OF objects parent to others?"


Not sure what you mean by this. Objects are made up of limbs, each limb having a unique number, allocated by the parent object number first and then the limb number second. Im sure through using the vertex commands, the mesh commands and the memblock commands you could separate a limb from one object and add it to another, but for a newcommer such as yourself this is, in my opinion, too much of a big task to take. Id just stick with animating the wheels in a 3D animating app.

Lastly, though the questions in this post do have something to do with 3D Chat, this is a question involving DBP and programmig, and belongs in either Darkbasic Professional or the Newcommer's Corner.

- RUC'

Van B
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Posted: 1st Jun 2006 17:48
For detail counts, those models are a bit high, by bit - I mean the train needs to loose about 39,000 polygons!

<8000 should be fine for an object when it's pretty much got the screen to itself, but the train should be a fraction of those polygons.

The detail you have on the train is not gonna work, you should develop your texturing so that the detail is taken up in the texture itself so it costs much less in performance.

A good tip for you in this case is Alpha - if you use alpha textures, you could make your train wheels from a single polygon if you like, and still be infinately smooth, you wouldn't even get that sort of detail with 10000 polygons per wheel. Just use transparency mode 4 in DBPro and your jammin, perfectly sharp and clean edges, perfect for wheels and wheel arches, plus lots of smaller details can be done this way.

For the actual wheel limbs, I'd use axles, like each parallel set of wheels would be a single limb, then once you link them to their main trams, and orientate the pivots - you can easily rotate the wheels with code or an animation - personally I struggle to get perfectly smooth rotation anims working so tend to use code.

I think you'll find that having the track as 1 big object is kinda bad for performance, it would be faster to use sections of track and stick them together like Hornby. Like a straight bit, and 2 corner sections of about 30 degrees would let you do a great deal on their own, using each objects pivot point to signify both sides of the track. Complex, but just think that your track pieces glue together end to end, so using the limb pivot point, position it at the opposite end, while the closest end is the object centre. On corners the connection side would need rotated, but with these 3 bits it's quite neat to lay down track, and you can lay it down wherever you like.

Aegrescit medendo
NeX the Fairly Fast Ferret
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Posted: 3rd Jun 2006 18:17
Joking, aren't you?
8 players at 20000 polys each and a 400000 poly landscape runs smooth at 640x480, and reasonably at 1024x768.

<OMG></OMG>
NeX, you cant be serious - CattleRustler.
Van B
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Posted: 4th Jun 2006 15:33
Erm, ok, maybe if you spend £1000 on PC hardware .

Remember, once you've got game logic in there, you can basically half that tech demo frame rate - and add polygon collision, even line intersect collision with 1/2million polygons will kill any frame rate.

Any game modeller will tell you, start with the minimum amount of polygons and use more if you need them, you simply don't need that level of detail, commercial games don't use that level of detail.

Aegrescit medendo

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