Saturday, December 2, 2000

Terrain in Q3: Team Arena -- 2:28 pm CST, Update by The Master

Robert Duffy updated his .plan with word on the changes in the TA engine allowing some massive outdoor maps in the new TA release coming soon

I've had a lot of requests for info on the terrain stuff that Todd mentions in his plan and which is visible in the demo movie.

Several things are going on with the terrain stuff. There have been quite a few updates and enhancements made to the engine for TA but the engine has always been quite capable of the triangle counts necessary for terrain.

Jim did some amazing work that allows the terrain brush conversion along the other support necessary to do the texture blending etc. The size capabilities are quite vast. The old restraints in the editor were +/- 4096, the new restraints are +/- 131072. Now there would be some pretty substantial floating point precision errors seeing that distance but the fact is you can make HUGE maps. As long as you have valleys and canyons or buildings etc. you can do some truly amazing things. John pointed out that people will possible run into surface count limitations and so on but this should not be much of an issue.

As far as FPS issues go, the map with the large gothic looking castles runs about as fast as many of TA's indoor maps, not all of them but based on how they work they are not too hard on system performance.

To give an idea on size, the largest q3a map is tiny compared to the smallest terrain map in TA and that map itself easily fits inside the center section of the largest terrain map in TA. And to put that in persepctive, that map looks like a postage stamp in the +/- 128K area.

The playground just got a lot bigger.

The major complaint against Quake games has always been their very poor support for large outdoor maps. Guess the problem has been solved :-)

News for 12/02/2000

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