Hugely improving performance (may be impossible)

[Rhenium 10]

In multiple games i have seen walls that (can be added in map editor and) hides what is behind the wall, so if i stand in "front" of the wall, the stuff behind it is hidden, if i stand "behind" the wall, the stuff in front of it is hidden.

In other words, whats behind this wall is not rendered, untill the player gets to the other side of the wall. It would really increase performance if BI could implement this but im not seeing to this that much in arma 2, since it would be a huge patch changing the map and coding.

And example of this that i can give is FAR CRY 2, where the walls are.

Those walls could be put into hills and bigger buildings, so the stuff behind them wont get rendered. The only stuff that would be rendered is what you CAN see and HAVE to see.

No problems with Choppers/Airplanes because on a high altitude you can see OVER those hills (which also represent the walls) and view wouldnt be empty

[STALKERGB 6]

Hey, Welcome to the forums!

IIRC Arma2 does use a form of streaming to load/unload resources, the problem is often there still seems to be a heck of alot of things to load.

If you had a system that load ONLY what the user can see at that moment you would need a damn fast hard drive and lots of RAM I guess to load any new objects as the user turns round/moves the screen. ARMA already suffers from slow HDD loading issues so it might not actually improve the speed of the game.

[Pulverizer 1]

It's called occlusion culling and practically all video games do it, including OFP and Arma.

[Inkompetent 0]

ArmA already does that for terrain. However NOT for buildings. But I think that is a concious decision from the developers because - as STALKERGB says - without it most computers couldn't possibly keep up with loading the needed textures when something pops up, so the game keeps them loaded into memory for fast enough access. Plain gray objects/buildings would be a common sight otherwise =/

[Murklor 10]

The problem is that the enviroment is not controlled - at any time you may look over a house, sidestep so you see behind it, fly right past it 1000m up in the sky, etc. Calculating occlusion take alot of power and in such situations, its probably not worth the effort.

LODding take care of most performance issues, though its very aggressive in OA...

What I think would be a neat editor feature however, is a cookie-cutter clipping circle. So you could sort of slap down a 1000m zone around a town and nothing else of the world is rendered. The overhead map would zoom in on this section instead of rendering the rest. Of course, this would only be usefull in very specific situations (ie infantry/ground vehicles CQB in a fixed location), but still.

[sweraider 10]

I love this game and engine but I think its just at its limits now, based on 10 year old software I mean..

[DieAngel 0]

SO what, you're hoping they will rewrite it? I have yet to see any game company rewriting their engine. Nobody does this, ever, There are still bits of quake 1 code in the doom3 engine.

[b00tsy 28]

And example of this that i can give is FAR CRY 2, where the walls are.

In that game I can play it at max settings easily, while it is a fairly large map and loads of vegitation and wildlife etc. If I try ArmA at max settings I am happy if I get 5 fps :P

[MavericK96 0]

In that game I can play it at max settings easily, while it is a fairly large map and loads of vegitation and wildlife etc. If I try ArmA at max settings I am happy if I get 5 fps :P

AFAIK, you can't fly around in Far Cry 2. I don't think the wall thing would work for ArmA2.

[no use for a name 0]

The problem is that the enviroment is not controlled - at any time you may look over a house, sidestep so you see behind it, fly right past it 1000m up in the sky, etc. Calculating occlusion take alot of power and in such situations, its probably not worth the effort.

LODding take care of most performance issues, though its very aggressive in OA...

What I think would be a neat editor feature however, is a cookie-cutter clipping circle. So you could sort of slap down a 1000m zone around a town and nothing else of the world is rendered. The overhead map would zoom in on this section instead of rendering the rest. Of course, this would only be usefull in very specific situations (ie infantry/ground vehicles CQB in a fixed location), but still.

I think this is one of the better ideas I've heard. There's a lot of missions that only use a very small section of the map. There's almost no point in venturing too far away from the main objectives because the rest of the map is usually unpopulated; or it's set up with events/triggers to make survivability impossible (AAA threats, tons of enemy forces, etc.) I think if there was an option in the editor to only sections at a time it would greatly increase performance