Displaying only thing that can be viewed

[mackwic]

Nowaday, in Atlas, all in your FOV is always shown. If you have a very far zoom and display all the map, *ALL* vertices will be send to your graphic card. Even the chickens, that are far too little to be seen.

Don't you think it would be a great improvement to display only entities with size of the same order of magnitude that our zoom ?

Obviously, for long-term planing, we can extend this idea for the game itself.

The same idea works too for particles (yes for huge smoke, no for little camp fire), for floor texturing (what about a simplification: if there is too little square of grass on the snow, display only the snow), for animations, etc.

All modern 3D RTS have a detail precision depending of your zoom. Even if it's not the priority, 0ad should have it too.

[historic_bruno]

You mean LOD (level of detail) In game, I don't think our zoom changes enough for this to be really effective and the problem with LOD is always ugly "popping" that occurs when you switch one quality level to another. Of course it would help performance somewhat in any case with a good implementation, I'm just not sure it's worth focusing on now.

[zoot]

A solution to LOD "popping" can be tessellation (on newer graphics cards). It has the added benefit of giving artists more vertices to work with at standard zoom, if someone is willing to make the required displacement maps.

[Yves]

LOD is also not very effective in our case because you usually have a top-down view which means most of the object are about the same distance away from "the camera".