Path: chuka.playstation.co.uk!news
From: Jim <jim@micronetics.com>
Newsgroups: scee.yaroze.freetalk.english
Subject: Story so far......
Date: Fri, 23 May 1997 10:58:35 +0100
Organization: PlayStation Net Yaroze (SCEE)
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I have listed a few thing that you may find useful.  And pitfalls I have
already fallen down.

1)  Its not really worth creating a huge tmd for a map or world, its
often just as effective to make a tmd for each poly of the world. Then
culling is much easier.

2)  Have one huge array for all vertices and normals. That the single
world polys index into.  GsSortObject4 (or whatever its called)
transforms each vertex as its used.  So there is no speed hit in having
all your tmds used the same huge vertex table.

3)  I don't think the normals in the tmd are used for polygon culling,
just light sourcing.  (I would like to be contradicted on this).

4)  Larger textures greatly effect performance.  With lots of textures
over 128*128 you will see a performance hit fairly soon on a relatively
low poly count.  It is worth having different scaled/filtered textures
for polys that are closer.  Texture polys that are close with 128*128,
further away by 64 * 64 and still further away with 32*32.  Maybe even
flat fill some way off ones.


I think that's all for now.

Jim