Like it is already done for blended meshes, need a function for drawing solid meshes immediately.

Mentioned here
http://www.esenthel.com/community/showth...p?tid=4784

Shouldn't be too much work to expose this option, since it is already available for blended meshes.
Thanks for considering

If I am correct, this will allow to implement custom render queue (render queue is unfortunatelly not accesible now - why?) and this will allow for example custom implementation of various occlusion methods (horizont culling, etc...). Definitely good idea, because this can lead to tremendous performance improvements.

(02-06-2012 11:15 PM)Demostenes Wrote:  If I am correct, this will allow to implement custom render queue (render queue is unfortunatelly not accesible now - why?) and this will allow for example custom implementation of various occlusion methods (horizont culling, etc...). Definitely good idea, because this can lead to tremendous performance improvements.

It could be used for that, however my reason for this was to customize the rendering like you can do with drawBlend.
With sorting and rendering the blended grass and vegetation myself, I was able to get a 2X or higher speedup compared to EE RPG2 (again, it is hard to say exactly how much since there are no profiling tools).

If you want to do occlusion culling you don't actually necessarily need to have the immediate draw tho, you need to do the world rendering yourself which you can do without this feature (that's what I am doing)

I am answering on the forum on this one because another guy was asking me about this on PM.

I did 3 things: batched together some patches of grass, wrote some better spatial partitioning, and wrote an efficient depth sorting for thousands of grass objects.
I can do that for grass objects because luckily there is a function to draw such objects immediately (DrawBlend).
Note that I am talking about the blended grass here (the best looking one) since the alpha tested grass doesn't require depth sorting.
Further speed up is possible but the problem is the grass shader uses the Y values in 0..1 range for the wind movement.

As a preamble, we are 2 professional game developers (the other one is an artist), working on this on our free time (very limited since we have families...)
We found that EE was a very quick platform for prototyping an idea of ours.

Now, my intention was not to rewrite the entire rendering pipeline (altough I knew I'd have to rewrite parts of it, doesn't matter which engine, because our prototype involves some special level creation) however that's the reason why I don't want to go into modifying existing grass shader for example - the focus is on something else, not on rewriting the entire rendering and I want to use as much as possible functionalities out of the box. I just had to do it for the world, terrain and grass, because I am also placing grass procedurally and I really need to have a huge amount of objects and grass compared to RPG2, to make it look good quality.

We are getting some inital good results but we do have some concerns about performance in deferred mode, but as I said without profiling/stats tools in EE I can't point for sure to what is causing it.
I hope we won't have to switch to another engine for production, after the prototyping is finished...
In general having direct support from EE on the forum is pretty good, but our concern is that EE is not going to look into improving Tools and Engine (including performance etc.) because the focus is on C++ scripting, and that is going to take a long time. He explained his reasons in another post, but sadly scripting is not useful for us...

I have scheduled some performance improvements to the roadmap (including grass) that will be done after C++ compiler.
My current task will not take so long as you may think, crucial stuff is already behind me and it works, couple weeks more and alpha version will be ready.
fixing issues, adding extra functionality (virtuals, templates) and putting the Editor into the Android will take another few weeks.
Sooner or later all issues will be addressed of course, it just takes time.