Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Adventures in virtual texture space, part 6 B

As promised in my last post, here's a video of what i got so far.

Random thought:
I'm wondering if it would be useful to have automatically generated page 'samples' spread around the level, each containing a list which pages are near it. That way it would be relatively simple to 'look ahead' and determine which pages could potentially be required in the near future.

The samples would contain all the pages for a specific miplevel in all directions and limited to the distance to the sample where a miplevel would be used.

Since this would only be possible for static pages / geometry, pages for dynamic objects would have to be handled differently.

Potentially, this could remove the need to do a readback completely..

But would this approach be faster? It could be more accurate though.

Maybe navigation meshes, if they're accurate enough, could be used to simplify the process of creating the samples.
The same information could be used to determine which pages could never be visible.
It would look pretty horrible when some pages are missing but turn out to be visible after all though.