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The latest entry in Pirates of the Burning Sea designer 'Heidi's' developer journal describes an internal design feature called the portal system. There is also a brief review of Heidi's mountain climbing exploits, including a close encounter with a baby
guanaco.
A portal system is a way to more intelligently decide what we draw and simulate within a scene. Basically, we divide the level into a series of “rooms”, which is essentially an group of stuff you expect to see at a single time. Connecting these rooms are volumes called “portals”. Those allow me to tell which rooms I should expect to see from other rooms. So when I’m in a room I can quickly determine which portals I see, which I can then use to quickly determine which other rooms I can see from which I can determine … etc. etc.. Anything not seen is discarded and not drawn. Not terribly exciting, but it allows us to have bigger “play areas” and to allow you to stay in them longer before we have to have a giant load from the disk. One of the problems found along the way was that our art really wasn’t created with this system in mind, so I had to write some code to appropriately split the art along the boundaries of the chambers. While this wasn’t terribly tricky it was gruelingly slow. Hence the part of my job where I go back and make existing stuff work faster.
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