Thursday, September 21, 2000

Carmack on Unreal -- 8:45 am CST, Update by The Master

There's a short blurb over on Slashdot on visibility technology as it was used in Unreal. Thanks Blue.

PVS was The Right Thing when level geometry counts were much lower. With tens of thousands of polygons in a scene, creating a cluster tree directly from that becomes completely unrealistic from a space and time perspective.

The options are to either do PVS with a simplified version of the world, or ignore the geometry and just work with portal topology.

Unreal used a scan-line visibility algorithm, which crippled it's ability to have high poly counts or high framerates with hardware accelerators.

Tim Sweeny knows full well that the architecture is very wrong for modern systems, but many of the original decisions were based on earlier software technologies. Unreal was supposed to be a "killer app" for the Pentium-200 MMX processor.

I have a lot of respect for Tim and Unreal, but the visibility algorithm in Unreal turned out to be a bad call. He is changing it for future work.

News for 09/21/2000

The Haus is powered by:

All original information on this website is copyright © TheHaus.Net, 1999-2005. The use of original images, text, and/or code from this website without expressed written consent is prohibited. The authors of this site cannot be held responsible for any damage, real or imagined, which comes from the use of information presented on this site. All trademarks used are the properties of their respective owners. This site is not to be used as a floatation device (but if you try, I want a video tape of it).