Link cameras to display modules
- Thread starter AtraUnam
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Criss
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If you (currently) want to have cameras that actually display their input, well thats gonna be a bad time. Not only would the game have to render it in a decent resolution on the screen. But if the camera is looking at a large ship, it will then have to render a ship that may not be currently active with vbo. More cameras means more stuff that needs to be constantly rendered. Could lead to performance drops.
Aside from that this is not a priority and has been suggested before. It's cool, but chances are we wont get it for a while or we might have to settle with a mod that adds it.
Aside from that this is not a priority and has been suggested before. It's cool, but chances are we wont get it for a while or we might have to settle with a mod that adds it.
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Here is a solution:
Resolution on display block is very small. The max drawsegments the camera uses is also very small (100-200?). Don't have to think so negatively about every suggestion.
Also Minecraft managed to do this in a mod.
Thalanor
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For all those bringing in arguments on why it can't work, please read the other thread first, including the suggestions by IR0N MAN and me. We got together a fair share of suggestions on how to make it perform well (to the point of being unnoticeable in terms of FPS loss).
For a camera view mainly intended for indoor use, the max drawing distance could just be very very short - after all you just need to be able to check a corridor or room, no need to draw 3000m of universe objects. The camera could even be limited to rendering ONLY the structure it is placed on as well as astronaut entities if the other methods still deliver insufficient enough performance gain.
The only major caveat is some coding work required, which varies depending on how much actual engine work must be done. We know the game is already capable of rendering viewpoints to (depth-)textures, as it supports shadows. The shaders required for the camera scene rendering would be extremely simple if you omit textures and lighting, both of which are not really needed.
Bottom line: 100% possible. Amount of work might vary wildly depending on engine. The only real reason why this should not be in the game would be schema saying it won't
For a camera view mainly intended for indoor use, the max drawing distance could just be very very short - after all you just need to be able to check a corridor or room, no need to draw 3000m of universe objects. The camera could even be limited to rendering ONLY the structure it is placed on as well as astronaut entities if the other methods still deliver insufficient enough performance gain.
The only major caveat is some coding work required, which varies depending on how much actual engine work must be done. We know the game is already capable of rendering viewpoints to (depth-)textures, as it supports shadows. The shaders required for the camera scene rendering would be extremely simple if you omit textures and lighting, both of which are not really needed.
Bottom line: 100% possible. Amount of work might vary wildly depending on engine. The only real reason why this should not be in the game would be schema saying it won't
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Criss
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We shouldn't expect anything though. There's no reason to not discuss the problems and solutions here. We have no idea if it will perform well until it is in the game. This is speculation on all sides. Just because Minecraft did it, doesn't mean we can. Our cameras would be moving and the game draws objects with a different system. There is also a more advanced lighting engine to take into account. Lowering the resolution might mean the game has to load the object and then compress the image for the view screen. It could add a layer of coding. Who knows.
Thalanor
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Yup, problems and solutions discussion is what we do
And in the end it is all up to schema. Just saying, that some of the mentioned problems really are none. Whether a camera moves or not is irrelevant (there is one 4x4 camera matrix and that is it), lighting and textures both are not needed for the camera rendering (think infrared, not photographic), and the system the game uses to draw objects is pretty standard - also lowering the resolution of a frame buffer object you render a scene to means rendering is done at that resolution (there is no afterwards compression of a much more detailed scene). Think of it this way: when rendering to a display block at 128x128 (which would be very good quality actually) is making the GPU think your screen is 128x128 for one rendering process.
Rendering something onto a 128x128 FBO is in an ideal engine (means only the GPU is the bottleneck ever) about four times as fast as rendering to a 256x256 FBO, and optimized engines get pretty close. Your average HD screen requires 1920x1080 pixels to be rendered.
If an option to adjust resolution of camera output was given to the player in game options (256x256 being the max like texture sizes, maybe 32x32 the min), the effect on performance for the average player would be guaranteed to be negligible.
On a sidenote, minecraft was actually an abomination in terms of engine performance. Schema did it in a far more planned way from the start. The Schine engine is even in the current state already built with many future features in mind, from the way it works (there seems to be going on a lot of optimization even at this stage, including some advanced mesh simplification, or noone would ever be able to render a 1km titan). Of course, minecraft still has to be credited for spawning the cubeworld scenario, something that has changed much of gaming.
And in the end it is all up to schema. Just saying, that some of the mentioned problems really are none. Whether a camera moves or not is irrelevant (there is one 4x4 camera matrix and that is it), lighting and textures both are not needed for the camera rendering (think infrared, not photographic), and the system the game uses to draw objects is pretty standard - also lowering the resolution of a frame buffer object you render a scene to means rendering is done at that resolution (there is no afterwards compression of a much more detailed scene). Think of it this way: when rendering to a display block at 128x128 (which would be very good quality actually) is making the GPU think your screen is 128x128 for one rendering process.
Rendering something onto a 128x128 FBO is in an ideal engine (means only the GPU is the bottleneck ever) about four times as fast as rendering to a 256x256 FBO, and optimized engines get pretty close. Your average HD screen requires 1920x1080 pixels to be rendered.
If an option to adjust resolution of camera output was given to the player in game options (256x256 being the max like texture sizes, maybe 32x32 the min), the effect on performance for the average player would be guaranteed to be negligible.
On a sidenote, minecraft was actually an abomination in terms of engine performance. Schema did it in a far more planned way from the start. The Schine engine is even in the current state already built with many future features in mind, from the way it works (there seems to be going on a lot of optimization even at this stage, including some advanced mesh simplification, or noone would ever be able to render a 1km titan). Of course, minecraft still has to be credited for spawning the cubeworld scenario, something that has changed much of gaming.
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