DeleD Community Edition

[Jeroen]

Stunning!!

[evak]

heh, dirk said he posted my examples on here, they were originaly actually for a PS2 game that got dropped, hence the high poly count.

The method works really well so long as your level editor has good snapping tools. We used 3dsmax as our editor, max has pretty extensive object and subobject snaps. Also and if your engine supports instances the polycount isn't suh a big deal since all the seperate tiles are duplicates of the first instance of the mesh in the level and share the same memory plus draw really quick.

The tiles shown were for a top down baldurs gate 2 type game but scifi, you could get away with higher no's of polys as only the room you were in and tiles you could see through open doors were drawn.

Averaged about 70,000 polys per frame including monsters. Not a lot for current consoles, we even used software shaders on the PS2 to do masked cubic mapped reflections much like the xbox and the baldurs gate 2 engine did.

Not sure how well it would work in a more dynamic camera like FPS. Another reason for the high polycount was that everything had to be vertex lit since you can't tile lightmapped objects and use copies of the same tile duplicated multiple times across a level.

[granada]

Hi evak
Thanks for the info,hope you dont mind me posting your pics
(nice work by the way )
dave
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8.00 GB memory
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Nvida Geforce GTX 580

[evak]

Thanks heh, the stuff you posted looks cool too granada and I don't mind don't mind at all.

Have to say one thing missing from budget tools that I find immensely useful when building levels etc are snapping tools. its really useful to be able to have your mouse pointer snap to a vertex or other part of an object and simply drag the entire object till it snaps to a vertex on an adjacent object in 3D space. Makes level building with multiple seperate objects and tiles in particular really fast, and also allows you to seamlessly join larger objects structures made of multiple meshes together without cracks/seams and if done right no intersecting overlap that can cause slowdown in an engine due to the time it takes for z sorting.

One of the nice things about something like max is that you can simply shift drag (clone/instance) your tile to create another one, and once you have tiles facing each axis direction things progress really fast.

thought I'd mention it because it's probably the one single most usefull tool outside of regular modeling tools that I can't live without and so far I havent seen any low priced tools that do it. would be nice to see something similar in lower priced editing tools like DeleD.

(I should probably try DeleD sometime and see what it's like, hear great things on other forums

[granada]