If you take a look at Refractor 2 (Battlefield 2's engine), CryEngine & CryEngine 2 or any other modern game engine, you'd probably notice the vertex and triangle counts of the scenes they render are not as much higher than the older ones (Quake III/MoHAA, for example) as you would expect, yet the scene contains much more detail and the drawing distance is much larger.
These engines owe it to LODing. Basically, the farther you are from an object, the less detailed it is, resulting in large graphics rendering workload savings, which can be spent on refining the detials of objects closer to the viewer.
Now, the id Tech 3 engine and its descendants (including MoHAA) suffer from total lack of LODing on the level rendering. I.e., all the stuff that is made from brushes is always rendered at full detail. This of course depends on the amount of detail put into brushwork in an individual map, but 1 thing is sure - vertex/triangle counts make the bottleneck that prevents huge maps from happening in Q3 engines.
So, what I'm proposing is a cooperative project to investigate whether the id Tech 3 engine has potential to become a next-gen one without a major rendering engine rewrite. The results of this research will be used in the OpenMoHAA project.
It would be a mapping project of a huge map with goals and features like:
- modern-day Middle-Eastern-themed city with some non-urban areas (think Battlefield 2's Strike at Karkand or Road to Jalalabad, or Project Reality's EJOD Desert)
- 4 to 10 square km of accessible, outdoor space
- nearly 100% of accessible buildings
- view distance (farplane) no smaller than 1 km
Probably the first map ever to actually suit those 64-man servers! And here's the part where I'm asking all of you mappers for your help. I don't have the skills and patience to effectively push brushes around.
Therefore, I'd like you to help me by creating prefabs of buildings that I could place in the map. Just simple buildings, without any detail - plain walls and floors. I'll do the terrain and assemble all the stuff together and compile it. It's understood that all credit will be given where due. But, I must request that you follow these few guidelines:
- everything is caulked properly
- stock textures are used only
- structural brushes are used only (:!:)
- no detail is included - i.e. no furniture, no decoration models, no railings, no windowpanes (windows ought to be just holes in walls), etc. - keep them as simple as possible, just the basic structure
- windows, doors and other openings in buildings' walls should be sealed with brushes bearing the "hint" texture
- any kind of building that could possibly appear in a Middle-Eastern city goes
- the interior should only be textured, interior walls are of course allowed in order to have some room layout; stairs are also allowed - they're the only exception where detail brushes should be used
- generally, the less detail the better
- the prefab should be built around the (0 0 0) point - this is to make the insertion into the map easier
- normal MoHAA scaling (16 units per foot = 30.48cm; a player is 92 units tall) is used
All of the detail I'm asking you not to include can be added at a later stage (using models and patch meshes, which both support LODing, and not brushes, however), if the current low-detail plan works out.Will you help me? I think the goal is worth pursuing, and the help I'm requesting should be no big deal considering the map design skills of you all.
Please don't ask about a theme change; this map might make it into Modern Warfare Independent Ops some day.
I'm going to sketch up a preliminary layout of the map tomorrow. If you want to help, please post in this thread with an idea of a building you'd like to create.
Thanks in advance!
