Large world

Question

I know this is a difficult topic and that has been discussed
before, but I searched and searched and cannot find many answers.
Does anyone have any pointers, or know of any tutorials about
making a large world map in Director without using TONS of memory.
Is there a process of constantly loading small sections at a time
around in the player's line of view? What about loading texture
maps and creating the world dynamically, but have it look the way I
design (not random)? It woul dbe nice if it could be loaded from
the internet without long wait times. I am just exploring ideas.
Any input or direction would be appreciated!

Answer 1

Hey there extol. A couple of pointers from what I have
experienced. Some of this might be obvious to you, but I will list
them anyway.
- Where you can repeat the use of a single shader over do it.
Many unique shaders will effect performance.
- I have found that mesh objects perform much better than
using the internal prims. Also, if you want to create a world that
is dynamic, in my opinion, this is the way to go. In my application
I have to create thousands of 3D objects at run-time that are user
defined and may be unique every time. I would not have the
flexibility to do this without the mesh objects. By the way, I can
load 2000+ dynamic mesh objects at run-time in about a second using
Lingo. Many of these objects are using the same shader.
- Use powers of 2 with your textures. To my knowledge, this
happens automatically if an image in not a power of 2; but is an
extra processing step that can be avoided.
- I have found it interesting to load images dynamically from
the internet or a web server without using too much memory. It
really depends on the size of the image and the bit depth. Avoid
using 32bit images where you do not need them. Unless I am using
alpha I never use 32bit. Others may have reason to say otherwise.
Rememeber that when you import an image from an external source in
Shockwave you will have to create a member at run-time to store it.
Once you load this as a texture then unless you need the cast
member just discard it. You can use unLoadMember() or
member("").unload to do this. I use the first one and I am not sure
of the difference.
- Shockwave 3D does a pretty good job of handling the loading
and unloading of objects that are not in the viewing plane of the
camera.
- I cannot remember any of the sites off hand, but there are
definitely examples (and code) of folks dyanmically loading maps
within the viewing plane of, for instance, a walking character
inside of Shockwave. I bet you could find some links on Google.
Ok, I could go on for a while, but I will leave you there and
hope that some of my comments are useful. Good luck.
Sonic