DeleD Community Edition

[seriva]

Hi all,

After a few busy weeks @ school, I finally had the chance to take a good look @ the new DELED. With of course special interest in the lightmapper .

PC config I worked on:

AMD 64 3000+ 2.0 GHZ @ 2.433 GHZ
1024 MB DDR 400 MHZ
Geforce 6800 GT 256 MB DDR 2

I spend almost an entire day making/using scenes and lighting them with various lights and configs. Here are a few pics of my experiments:

http://www.genesisdevice.net/backups/screen1.JPG
http://www.genesisdevice.net/backups/screen2.JPG
http://www.genesisdevice.net/backups/screen3.JPG
http://www.genesisdevice.net/backups/screen4.JPG
http://www.genesisdevice.net/backups/screen5.JPG

I am very impressed about what I have seen. The light maps look great and are pretty correct of what you would expect. Also the placing of the lights and setting properties is easy to do. This really adds reality to a scene! But there are also some things I didn’t like. Generating the light maps takes forever. A simple scene of about 3000 polys and 3 lights takes about 5 to 6 minutes on my pc. And when rendering the light maps is also very slow. 3000 poly in a scene with light maps @ about 10 - 15 fps isn’t very fast, especially on the pc I tested it. Of course this could be some problems with my nvidia drivers, or because I have a 64 bit processor. Also I don`t have much experience with other lightmappers. The only one is the unreal editor. This generates light maps in the fly , very fast. The input also becomes very slow when rendering the light maps, this is probably because the rendering takes almost al the cpu time when rendering the light maps. Also when I was looking @ the cpu time during rendering I saw that DELED had a memory load of more them 400 MB. This was after I rebuilded the light maps a few times. I saved the map and restarted DELED and loaded the same map. Memory load was about 40 MB. Maybe some kind of memory leak in the generation of the light maps? And then the final thing, the light maps are very very big 40 MB for the test with the warehouse map .

But overall I like where DELED is heading. It gets better every release. Finally a few tips that could make DELED a bit better.

-Start implementing rendering speedups A.S.A.P. Although DELED functionality is getting better and better al the time, the poly count that it can handle is getting to low I think. I suggest a simple frustum culling using bounding boxes. This should be easy to implement since you already can generate bounding boxes (the aabb option) and this can be used for 2d and 3d. Using displaylist for rendering instead of intermediate mode can also improve rendering a lot. And if you want to do it good right away, use aabb trees, not difficult and easy to implement. The links below are movies I made from my Editor. A scene with 18000 polys is rendered while the camera is moving (3d and 2d bit). You can see what impact such simple culling can have on the nr of polys you have to render.

http://www.genesisdevice.net/backups/leveleditor1.zip
http://www.genesisdevice.net/backups/leveleditor2.zip

-Make an option that you can save the light maps as JPG files. If you used the Delphi basic BMP class when generating the light maps, this won’t be much of a problem.

-Check out the possible memory leak in the light map generation.

-Make an option for selecting stuff in 3d. You can use my glPicking code if you want to. (You know where to find me ).

-Make 3d input completely by mouse and smoother.

-Speed up generation of light maps if possible , don’t have much experience with making a complete lightmapper. Maybe something like an option that you can only recalculate the light maps of parts that of the geometry or lights that have changed.

-When the pro version comes out, make a evaluation version. Something like that you can use it for 10 days after installing. This way people can check out the full package before buying

Well that’s about it. Hope you can do something with these suggestions Jeroen and Paul:), and keep up the good work. DELED is getting beter and beter!

Greetz seriva
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[seriva]

Forgot one sugestion

How about a mode where you only render the light maps. Like in this screen.

http://www.genesisdevice.net/backups/screen6.JPG

Is a screen from the unreal editor btw.
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[Jeroen]

Thanks Seriva for your review, it's much appreciated! Some remarks about your comments:

- speedups: yes, DeleD's rendering pipeline will be optimized so that DeleD can handle bigger maps more easily.

- 3D selection/input: selection in the 3D view is a must and will be implemented. Not sure what you mean by 3D input though.

- evaluation version: i don't think we're going to create an evaluation version because the LITE version is meant to serve that purpose. IMO the LITE version in combination with a good description of the PRO version gives a good enough impression of what to expect.

Again, nice comments, keep them coming!

[Jobyman]

thats a UT2k3 level , gotta love that level. nice renders, i havent actualyl touched the lightmapper yet...looks realyl fun to just play about with.