Occlusion queries on the world didn't work out either. The overhead was just too much in the end, so I ended up losing anything I may have gained.
I seem to be touching on close to a practical maximum number of occlusion queries that it's sensible to have running through the pipeline each frame. Bottom line is that each such query imposes some extra workload, and it gets to the point where results may be potentially outstanding for too long. I need to decide on a policy for this, and right now I'm thinking that if a result is outstanding for more than one frame we just draw it anyway - better to draw too much than too little (and have holes in your view and blinking models).
With this in mind I've also cvar-ized the use of occlusion queries with an r_occlusionqueries cvar. It's also in the Video Options menu. So now if use of occlusion queries causes you any trouble you can just turn them off. In practice you don't even need them 99% of the time, and the slower, older hardware that would benefit the most from them doesn't even support them. Sigh.
The possibility of replacing all of this with an alternative approach does occur to me too. Something like doing software rendering into a small in-memory rectangle in a separate thread is one option. In principle I'm opposed to the general notion of depending too much on anything that requires a certain level of hardware support and needs some special and careful handling. We'll see.
Speaking of menus, I'm going to remove the "go to console" option from the main Options menu. The rationale for this is that if you wanted to go to the console you would have gone to the console, not the menu.
That's it for now.
Sunday, June 27, 2010
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Posted by
mhquake
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2:44 AM
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2 comments:
"Speaking of menus, I'm going to remove the 'go to console' option from the main Options menu. The rationale for this is that if you wanted to go to the console you would have gone to the console, not the menu."
-- mhquake
I'd recommend keeping it in there, just for those rare cases where your key-binds get screwed up and hitting the ~ key won't work..
The menu option to go to console saved me a few times..
Okeydokey. :)
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