Hi,

I've read some topics on forum and i assumed that there is not support for Occlusion Culling. However on http://www.devmaster.net/engines/engine_...php?id=600
this feature is listed under scene manager.
I would love to get official info, because hardware occlusion culling seems as an must have in modern game engines (Is Early Z counted as occlusion culling ?)

I love Esenthel, and as graphic designer i'm impressed by amount of features helping increase wow effect in games. But sadly lack of occlusion culling is blocking my decision to dig deeper into engine.
I've tried Early Z, but i can only get performance improvement for one object with couple meshes. There is no performance gain for scene with many separated objects.

I saw Advanced Occlusion Culling listed really low in Roadmap and i don't understand decision behind it. Is it dictated by order of requests send by users ? It seems as important feature.

Last question. Is it possible to implement occlusion culling by myself ? I'm new in that topic and i wonder if there's everything exposed by Esenthel engine for creating hardware occlusion culling with possibility to set static mesh occluders.

Thanks a lot for a help.

I made a little research on topic of occlusion culling. And i found that most universal and quite fast method is Coherent Hierarchical Culling. I was impressed by performance of provided examples. Everything is in addition described in detailed paper, nice lecture.

I don't know yet if it's possible to implement this technique in Esenthiel with currently exposed api but i hope it is.

If someone is interrested.
Paper:
http://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/research/vr/c...chcull.pdf

Examples (only second one works for me) http://http.download.nvidia.com/develope...ent/06.zip
Press 1 for occlusion preview, space for changing method (frustrum by default)

City example: http://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/~matt/chc++/F...ulling.zip
There is whole folder available with some examples http://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/~matt/

So i hope that some more experienced users then me can say something about this method and i hope it will be possible to implement it within Esenthel easily.

Other technique worth mentioning is Hierarchical Occlusion Maps
http://www.cs.unc.edu/~zhangh/hom.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8i0A00iNijs
But it looks like bounding box based. Probably good for some use cases.

Now time for PVS research for mobile.

I agree, efficient occlusion culling is critical in modern engines ... specially when large worlds are used. I also look forward to hearing comments from more experienced users about this.

Also I wonder what larger developers like Moli are doing re culling?

I'm new to GameDev and Esenthel Community. I didn't heard of Moli Group before. Are they working on Occlusion Culling for esenthel or some neat occlusion culling implementation generally ?

I think they've made a MMO game on EE, so we may assume, that they are "more experienced"

I totally agree about Occlusion Culling, IMO this should be one of the top priorities for this engine, but it's unfortunately one of the last on roadmap :(

I await this feature, because it might solve performance problems that EE has

These are very unfortunate news. We are checking possibility to convert our project from Unity3d to EE, but without occlusion it would be never posible. We like features of EE, but we have thousands of objects and materials in majority of scenes. Without OC, we would have 6k+ drawcalls in average, which is totally out of question.

Other disturbing news are, that there are performance problems? How EE stands in compare to Unity3D?

(11-23-2011 09:47 PM)Hemi Wrote:  I think they've made a MMO game on EE, so we may assume, that they are "more experienced"

Is it an MMO game? Or a multiplayer game?

There's a big difference : having an engine deal with multiple players (in tens or even around 100) is VERY different to dealing with MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online).

Is there more info on why its called "Esenthel MMO" : I'd really like to try understand that. The demo videos I've seen seem to suggest its more just multiplayer than MMO?

Can someone with corporate license comment on this please ... We're interested in corporate license but would like to understand it better.

(11-24-2011 02:24 PM)Demostenes2 Wrote:  Other disturbing news are, that there are performance problems? How EE stands in compare to Unity3D?

Performance wise i only created simple unit tests (lots of simple objects). And in comparison with Unity3d, EE performs nicely.
There is only matter of damn Occlusion Culling. I would feel a lot better if it was higher on incoming feature list. There is always possible to use some available papers and sample codes and write ee implementation. But for now i'm to fresh to EE and GameDev in general.