Of course, if you want good-looking alpha blended grass, you need to draw them from back to front, so collapsing the geometry into a single array is impossible.

Oh well, I am pretty happy with the...

Thank you for the feedback.

I found that in this case, it was much, much faster to collapse the meshes into chunks. For each cell in the grid, I collapsed meshes into one array. Before, I was...

I'm rendering grass using a method like UT2004's "decolayers". First I divide the terrain into a grid and create a list of mesh instances. Then I find the grid cells near the camera and draw only...

This is some information about my results, for anyone who might read this thread in the future:

I found that using a 3D gradient texture, I could use a very low-res spherical gradient. I am using...

That would probably look pretty good, especially is I used 4 texture units, and made the darkness of the shadow 25% the desired value.

I am rendering a projected texture.

If I set up the texgen planes, will subsequent calls to glPushMatrix (using the modelviewmatrix) alter the texgen planes? I mean, can I set up the texgen...

Are you saying that 4096x4096 textures are more than 16 times slower than a 1024x1024 texture? Perhaps the slowdown you are referring to is simply the geometric increase in texel count.

It's probably better to sort all your objects of the same type by texture. Set the texture up, render all objects with that texture, then move on to the next one. This will make a huge difference...

Oh, I see, so they use the "3D texture" as a lookup table and set up the player lighting using regular hardware lights, based on what the current voxel says to use.

So they must be pre-processing...

For a full-res colored sphere of light, you would need 256x256x256 = 16 mb of texture memory, just for the light texture.

Maybe I will use this method with a 64x64x64 texture. It would be a lot...

I am rendering dynamic shadows by rendering the object to an FBO and creating a texture which gets projected onto nearby geometry. The engine is limited to re-drawing one shadow each frame, so the...

I'm curious, how would you do a "3D lightmap"? Assuming you are talking about a cubemap, you could render all shadow casters as black on the cubemap, and if your player or whatever was behind the...

It seems to me most people who dismiss traditional techniques are either programmers who only code one-room demos, or large companies that want to mislead their users and scare their competition.
...

Unfortunately, no one can be told what a vertex array is. You have to see it for yourself.

My program builds alpha-faded terrain with multiple texture layers, and calculates lightmaps for the terrain. You can paint meshes onto the terrain like in UnrealEd. The program will calculate...

Testing the bounding sphere against the frustum is a good idea, too. That should be pretty fast, and it will cull more objects.

Can you define an "early reject"?

Well I'll be damned, using VBOs on the BSP geometry makes it about 20 FPS faster.

Here's what I have found:

The slowest rendering step, by far, is using glBindTexture(). When you sort your...

I wrote 3D World Studio, and I wouldn't call that process "the most fun you'll ever have". :rolleyes:

You could also use Radiant or Hammer, but they're not as easy to use,...

That's my point. A lot of times these cards will compile the shader and run it on the CPU, with no reliable way to alert my program to this, so the program gets 2 FPS with no explanation to the...

Okay, I was just wondering.

For the first release of my engine, I think I want to stay away from GLSL, due to the incompatibility problems. I'm very disappointed with how shaders have been...

Regarding VBO's, for batched/instanced geometry, I find VBO's to be an order of magnitude faster. I just set up my arrays, then draw every instance of the mesh.

For static geometry that only gets...

I imagine texture compression would make things faster, since it would have to transfer less memory.

There are three ways I can render BSP geometry:

1. Collapsed vertex arrays and a single...

I was wondering if it was possible to implement cube reflection mapping on the fixed function pipeline, without the annoying distortions / waviness you normally get. I've implemented this using...

I've been programming 3D World Studio for a number of years, and it has the features you are looking for:
http://www.leadwerks.com

http://www.leadwerks.com/screenshots/shot21.jpg

Can anyone explain how this extension is different from regular cubemap reflection texgen mode?