Is this why CoV is so laggy compared to CoH?!
Until they found out that Paragon City was built around a small resort town called Silent Hill. And those villains you've been slaughtering?
You know how War Witch loves putting easter eggs in her zones?
She's moved onto building entire alternate zones just under the surface of the world.
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There very much is an algorithm for discarding hidden geometry, which can be seen in action in a few specific places. Next time you go by the Arachnos Tower in Grandville, stand next to the outward-slanted corners of the building and you'll see the engine cut out faces that really ought to be drawn, apparently figuring the line of the slanted surface to be farther out than it is. This causes the tiles on the ground to disappear, tile-by-tile, as you're left looking at the background, I believe.
Unless the CoHV world is being drawn with a Heedless Painter algorithm (and I rather doubt it), this is actually much less of a problem than it appears. The wall-behind-the-wall is only being drawn for you because your camera is inside the wall. If any kind of hidden surface algorithm is in place (and I'm willing to bet a considerable amount that a HS algorithm of some kind is being used, though I can't pretend to know which one), then your Figure 3 isn't actually drawing the hidden wall at all (or your character, apart from the hand, for that matter).
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Additionally, there is a big problem of this nature in the Rikti Base map that's under the shuttle, the one where you fight Hro and Nemesis. Polygon hiding there is wildly out of whack, hiding a LOT of things that really shouldn't be hidden. Again, the slanted "legs" of the shuttle cause the biggest problems, hiding enemies and the Rikti structures far to the side of where they should be hidden, effectively deleting half the scene in some cases. As well, the rest of the map will also fail to draw, showing you a "black wall" at the entrance and, presumably, not rendering the corridor beyond.
It should be noted that this algorithm does NOT hide everything, at least from what I can tell. In the Rikti example, Rikti and Rikti structures are hidden, specifically the walkways, handrails, portals and so forth. However, the cave outline itself is NOT hidden in any instance that I can see, leading me to believe that certain geometry is always drawn while certain other geometry is hidden. What's more, items hidden do not hide along a smooth line, they hide in big blocks. For instance, a flat, long walkway which should be just one face disappears in little squares roughly corresponding to the tiles of its texture, leading me to believe the face is still being calculated, but part of its texture tiling simply isn't rendered.
I'm not a graphic artist or a graphics programmer, so I've no idea what my observations technically mean, other than to say that graphics ARE hidden when they are behind other object.
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Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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So today I had an interesting encounter.
I logged in, and realized that I somehow ended up spawning inside a building. No worries, I thought. A simple /stuck would fix that! But then I got curious and decided to zoom the camera in to see what's inside... And these are pictures of what I found: Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3 Figure 4 I have drawn the red lines to indicate the edges of the geometry. In Figure 1, I have just taken a picture from inside the geometry. In the rest, my character is standing at a single spot, and I have merely rotated the camera to get snap shots from inside and outside the geometry. As you can see, there is a big chunk of fully-rendered wall INSIDE that building, and it's not even visible from the outside! The computer is rendering two separate faces of two different geometries, and we only see one of them! I can only assume that the entire building is a bunch of textured cubes clipping into one another. It even has doors!!! Isn't this inefficient design? Could it be that the lag of CoV (relative to CoH) is due to numerous number of these design flaws? If so...should we fix them? |
I had a similar experience in Nerva - I used my Mission TP and ended up physically inside the building able to see out. Some walls were transparent but others had textures etc, when there was clearly no way they were meant to be seen.

Thelonious Monk
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Some walls were transparent but others had textures etc, when there was clearly no way they were meant to be seen.
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They had "we h8 u Jack" written on them?
@Golden Girl
City of Heroes comics and artwork
i always assumed it was just redside zones were more complex. And they actually had things like smog and birds flapping around in the sky and stuff that blueside's atmosphere lacks.
i've never lagged too hard (places like PL central Cap and Atlas MA buildings were worse), but know people who would complain.
I'd always thought those chimneys in FF were mooring posts or something. I don't think they're part of R'yleh, though; my characters seem to remain sane when swimming past them.
On the other hand, I think the surreal, yellowish "night" of Faultline might indicate Cthulhoid influence.
"Bombarding the CoH/V fora with verbosity since January, 2006"
Djinniman, level 50 inv/fire tanker, on Victory
-and 40 others on various servers
A CoH Comic: Kid Eros in "One Light"