Forsythe on 13/6/2002 at 20:40

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He just hangs out here hoping for Dragons, methinks. ;)

(No, I don't want to know what he wants to do with them... :erm:)

astasenko on 14/6/2002 at 06:04

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oRGY, thanx for the idea (about DOUBLE MW DIST) (i'll use it when it will be working on most systems)

but I've to disapoint you in somewhat: of couse u can SET Render Distance near infinity but the game do not respond on it (u see the game loads world sector by sector, so u probably can't see more that just one sector at one time (for now i do not know how to "avoid" this restriction))

and perfomance impact is "terrible" (about 2 times low) on my Duron 650.
(probably P4 or Athlons XP will be better).

i'll post more screenshots on my site ((www.morrowind.nm.ru)) soon

P.S. I've probably fixed problems with Win2000 (and maybe WinXP) in version 0.3.

Demiurg on 14/6/2002 at 08:38

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But how do you get it to work? I'd appreciate a step-by-step guide for doubling the render distance. I've tried several times, but nothing happens.

Scrooge on 14/6/2002 at 12:18

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Concerning view distance vs performance, the ressources needed to render a given scene is more likely in O(r²) where r is the view radius:
To simplify, consider you see a perfectly flat landcape, made of polygones of equal size.
(say your polygon is 1m².). You see indeed a cercle made of Pi*r*r polygones.

That is, your view complexity is O(r²), which means when your view radius doubles, the number of polygones is multipliyed by 4, and the performance divided by 4.

Now it is a pure theoritical representation : All the work of the graphic engines out there is to make "the visibility determination" as efficient as possible, to pass to the renderer only the required polygon to display instead of all landscape.

The most efficient in this game is indeed the Serious Engine, not really because Object LOD,(characters, bots) which is now widespread since Unreal 1, but because of World LOD: building ,landscapes, mountains, have a variable polycount depending on the distance to the viewer.
To the extreme, the newly Matrox Parhelia-512 has a hardware LOD (called Progressive mesh something) which is apllied on Displacement Maps only. Those ones are used to generate, among other things, landscapes (what a surprise).

Even this apparently cursed Morrowind Engine has a LOD system, even if not that visible...

Make the following experiment: face a wall while your are in exterior. You obtain that way the maximum framerate possible. What do you obtain ? 100fps like UT or Q3 ?
No ! much more around 25fps, right?.

Q3 or UT are mainly indoor engines, which relies on precompiled optimizations, such as BSP. So a 500m² level weight about 10MB, but this requires little processor power while in game, so you can obtain 100fps.
Now imagine Morrowind rebuild has a UT level, it would weight tons ot terabytes.

In the contrary, Serious Sam and Morrowind use a rendering on-the-fly technique, which is a heavy CPU task on visibility determination, all the more that there is almost only portals/LOD available as optimization techniques.

The added difficulty to Morrowind engine compared to the Serious one is (apart a much more detailed world) an almost-continuous loading system. Look at Dungeon Siege, you are 25fps at best as well...

Conclusion: we need a Dual P IV 2Gz for Morrowind. (alternatively, a Displacement Map version for Parhelia).

Scrooge on 14/6/2002 at 14:55

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No, MW do not have load times ! compare to Serious Sam at least.

In Serious Sam, every level fits in memory from the start (textures, some precalaculation concerning shadowmaps...etc) so it is certainly much easier to manage than continuous or semi-continuous loading, architecture wise.
By the way, this is the job of NetImmerse: it is a meta-engine linking objects of the world in a most abtrait and generic way. The graphic part itself has nothing to do with NetImerse, but is Bethesda in-house engine.

Even if you have a famous "loading exterior", or simple freeze between "cells" in the game, the transition is blurry: you still see part of the next cell, NPC travels from cells to another... and the loading never occurs at the same place exactly.

Serious Engine runing MW would require sort of "event horizon" mechanism, implemented always in the same place (door, portal, gateway, Stargate :) allowing to cut this part of the world to the other in the most artificial way. If you know Undying, you know what it means.

I agree that MW should have implemented more sophisticated graphic part... you said that LOD is not present, that's pity but it can be improved (as I said, it was not the job of NetImerse) as Bethesda have done the gaphic engine.

Some Serious Code should be usefull there.... :cheeky: