Jens, 2009-05-04, From 3D model to interactive door in the HPL 2 engine

[Thomas]

Question to the devs: Does the game optimize walls/multiple objects in rendering? I'm pretty stupid in how engines work still, but in most game engines object calls are more demanding than polygon count.

Yup, the engine merges static objects of the same material in order to minimize the number of draw calls. Still it cannot merge all objects with same material, cause the occlusion culling (removing unseen objects) would not work. So trying to keep a good balance.

The fun thing in the new engine is that it automatically does all this. In the old engine (and many other engines) one has to set up all of this manually. For HPL2 there is no such thing to worry about, and focus can be put on creating nice levels instead!

[WindexGlow]

Another question: How are rooms/portals done? Do we still have to lay everything out and than add portals, or does the game do something else?
Lastly: In the demo video a while back, the textures seemed pretty low. I understand this is an indie game, but most people I know start high and lower them as the game becomes more demanding.
So - what setting where the textures in the first gameplay video a while back?

[Thomas]

Portals/Rooms: No such thing. The occlusion system is dynamic and autogenerated.

Textures: First of all, youtube videos are crap at using as judge for texture quality. We use 1024x1024 or higher for most textures and a recent map has over 100mb of compressed textures in it and that map is not graphically complete. Considering other stuff take video memory, it would be hard to increase textures further. There are also loading time issues connected with this.

[WindexGlow]

:p Almost double (sometimes quadriple) of penumbra no?
Thanks for answering, can't wait to get my grubby hands on the tool. Might actually make something this time = )

[Argoon]

I'm not a blender user but i'm a wings 3d and Modo user and this engine of yours seams to be like a dream to 3d modelers like my self, i always wanted to do level design for a game only using my 3d tool of choice and now it seams i can. Good job guys.

[Loftberg]

As usual, looks great. Top stuff. And the music is just...wow, brilliant and epic. I can imagine walking towards a castle while having that theme tuning in.

[EnjoyCoke]

The more I stalk this palce, the more I want to play CoC again...!

DAMN you ... For damning me. Also, who plays all this music? I have taught myself to play the old music_theme (Original soundtrack), but it ... I think it is meant to be played with 4 hands? Also, is there somewhere I can download all the music? And who makes it? And can I find nodes for it so that I can be sure to play it correctly?!

[Xanthe_]

Nice too see how you great some objects in the game and you used Blender! Not +3000e over priced 3DSMax etc..

[Skaruts]

Nice too see how you great some objects in the game and you used Blender! Not +3000e over priced 3DSMax etc..

Ye, blender is bound to tear all those money leaches down. I hope. It proves to be a very powerful tool so far, and 2.5 is on the way. There's very little you can't do in it. This makes me happy.


Anyway, I love to see devs working on their stuff. Keep stuff like this coming. And, man, this editor is gonna boost mods so much. It looks really great and with good functionality. Thumbs so up.