[IncendiaryLemon]

Truform isn't generated on the fly I don't think.

[Bobboau]

yes it is generated on the fly, that's what makes it so cool.

yes the ships will be subdivided based on distance. LOD0 will go from no subdivision at the furthest point were it first gets rendered to a level that is entered in the comandline.

[DaBrain]

"Truform is ATI's new technology for curving the polygonal surfaces of 3D models on the fly, making for more natural looking models in 3D games. "

-from: http://www.insidemacgames.com/news/story.php?ArticleID=4887


But it's not enough to put it in the code. You need to do, ummh "something" with the models.

Am I right ?

[Bobboau]

no, as long as the models are being rendered in 3d (wich ours are) a simple implementation is literaly two lines of code, the implementation I have is about 20 becase it figures in the distance of the ships in question, a third implementation I'm planning will be a bit more complex fixing the cracks that form when you enable positional smoothing on hard edged objects
it's basicly a form of geometry compression.

http://www.insidemacgames.com/previews/view.php?ID=35&Page=6

[Inquisitor]

Liason And yeah, that was what I meant.

redmenace suggested it, I think it's a good idea, some kind of pie in the sky jam session where we brainstorm about the future.

After E3 though.

[Lightspeed]

I don't think that is necessary. In LOD2 the model is smaler and has less round areas, so there is less that will be "trueformed".

It is. On high settings (like most of the True-Form'ers will have set) the LOD will actually not change at all in a long distance

I.e. a fighter is still LOD 1 viewed from 3 km distance.

Originally posted by Bobboau
yes the ships will be subdivided based on distance. LOD0 will go from no subdivision at the furthest point were it first gets rendered to a level that is entered in the comandline.

Cool. Just make sure it grows exponential - you wont notice it anyway unless you're really close to it.

[DaBrain]

Originally posted by Lightspeed


It is. On high settings (like most of the True-Form'ers will have set) the LOD will actually not change at all in a long distance

I.e. a fighter is still LOD 1 viewed from 3 km distance.

I don't get your point. There will be no performance hit, so why make the the models uglier as the distance increases ?

[Bobboau]

well there is a bit of a performence hit, if everything on screen is subdivided 4 times you'r going to have 256 times as many triangles, lighting and transformation calculations will all go up, now this is all being done on the card so it does it realy fast but if everything on screen is over subdivided it will cause a slow down, with the way it's set up now everything looks smooth and there is no performence problems.

[Ransom]

Are we going to see bumpmapping and/or dynamic shadows at some point?

[Bobboau]

yes, but not by me