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Performance for railings

MatthewC

MatthewC

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unitedstates
Ok so i am making the main terminal of my airport and it has lots of railings and stairs. My question is if i was to make a real railing with cylinders and boxes would it make fs stutter alot or would a plane with a alpha channel be better?
 
MatthewC said:
Ok so i am making the main terminal of my airport and it has lots of railings and stairs. My question is if i was to make a real railing with cylinders and boxes would it make fs stutter alot or would a plane with a alpha channel be better?
Click to expand...

2D plane with alpha channel if you are using a computer built in the year 2000.

3D if you have a computer which is modern.....like 95% of gamers
 
I would use both.

When you are up close make the railing out of cubes and cylinders for nicest looks, and the using LOD make them out of a transparent textures when you move away for better frame rates.

H_Farfy:D
 
I tried the more detail look and i only lost about 0.5-1 fps with my 8800gt and its not that bad. I just didn't want to put time into making it and then having it that no one can run it.
 
The 'real' direction is LOD's. Make the rails turn into 2D objects from say 50+ feet away or greater where the human eye cannot tell 3D from 2D.

THAT is the way to go....
 
Hi,

I would always be careful with cylinders. In many cases a 3 or 4 sided "cylinder" is more than enough to make your 3D model of the stair or fence.

And if you are careful to use the same material (drawcall) for all parts of the fence, you'll be surprised how many triangles you can put in before the performance starts to go down.

If you should use LODs depends a bit. Without LODs you can use the drawcall batching functionality in FSX. But with LODs you can reduce the polygon count from a distance. What is best depends on the situation.
 
What sim are you designing for? If FSX, I'd forget about the LODs and use drawcall batching (you can't do both, it's one or the other). In my opinion batching will improve performance more so than LOD modeling.

I'm in agreement with Darren, on todays computers a few extra polys aren't a huge deal and it doesn't make sense to deprive those who've spent the money on modern 4+ gHz computers of detailed modern sceneries just so joe-blo can run it on his c. 2000 1400mHz Athlon Thunderbird system without whining about the frame rates.

Jim
 
I'd use LODs for your FS9 models and batch the FSX models. The "can't do both" reference just means you can't have drawcall batching and LODs in the same FSX model. There's no such thing as batching in FS9 (that I'm aware of) so LODs are the way to go (I guess? Sometimes I wonder if the overhead of the extra models, tverts, mapping, etc really make LODs worthwhile?).

For your FS9 models, there's a good tutorial on LODs if you have the FS2004 gmax gamepack installed, look for "gmax\gamepacks\fs2004\docs\gmaxSceneryTutorial.doc", commonly known as "the house tutorial"; it shows you how to weld some vertices and name your LODs so they work when you export to the sim. The FS9 gmax gamepack is available in the downloads section here if you don't have it.

Jim
 
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I think the best way is not doing LODs at first in FSX, use drawcall batching instead.

Then you can try switching your model by take out this bgl out and in. Compare the result. If fps does not effect much, you model is perfect there. But if it does effect much (I think more than 10 fps), you should go with LOD then.

No one can say which is the best for your model, only yourself and your experiment.

You don't need to waste your time doing LOD at the first time. Doing it after your experiment does not effect anything and save your time.
 
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