ZEQ2 Lite

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

unlimited size in the maps. Meaning that the only limit is how far the player is actually prepared to fly. So you can fly in a direction for 3 hours and you'd still be going forward if you wished to.

I read this in Earth Special Forces forum >>> http://forum.esforces.com/new-map-system-revealed-t76050.html?t=76050

this is cool,can ZEQ2-lite(the team) make unlimited size of maps 4 ZEQ2?

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

I think that Earth Special Forces made a really cool move there. Can't wait to see the result.

It would be cool if in ZEQ2 would be that possible.

Thursday, December 17, 2009

IDeas wrote : unlimited size in the maps. Meaning that the only limit is how far the player is actually prepared to fly. So you can fly in a direction for 3 hours and you'd still be going forward if you wished to.

I read this in Earth Special Forces forum >>> http://forum.esforces.com/new-map-system-revealed-t76050.html?t=76050

this is cool,can ZEQ2-lite(the team) make unlimited size of maps 4 ZEQ2?

Oh joy for yet more uninformed people getting completely the wrong end of the stick to thanks to other people giving an incredibly poor description of what something does. This has been asked and answered in detail before, but I'll oblige with a fresh answer.

No, that "upgrade" does not allow them for unlimitted sized maps. NOTHING allows for unlimitted sized maps. They don't have any zoning systems, any coordinate shifting and warping or any such techniques to enable huge scale environments while maintaining single precission floating point accuracy.

In human terms: Maps are "limitted" in size for many MANY reasons, most notably performance, memory usage and filesize, but also because when floating point numbers (which are used for storing positions) get very large (or very small) they get very imprecise and cause positions to be juddery at best.

You look at any map on that engine and they are all TINY. Fact is, what they're doing is just to avoid the horribly restrictive limit of HL1's maps through use of loading the whole level into a single vertex buffer object, which is hardly a good method of managing level geometry at all for obvious reasons.

ZEQ2Lite currently supports far larger maps than standard Quake 3 but in order to allow for absolutely MASSIVE levels in the engine it would require a complete rewrite of the level management system from the ground up to work with zoning and virtual coordinates to keep every zone centered at the origin and surrounding zones shifted into position. This manner of level management is how the majority of open world games avoid precision issues. That, however, is far too much work for it's purpose.

Thursday, December 17, 2009

Technically Earth Special Forces really does have a limitless map system. If this makes sense, think of the Earth Special Forces mapping system as the 3ds max viewport system. You can zoom out as far as you want without hitting a border. All you need to do is create a box and you have your playable boundaries. It's really, really not worth creating such a large map, though.

As for having this system in ZEQ II, yeah, I'm sure it's possible but it's not really worth it. So I'm not sure if Brad or anyone else are willing to put this in ZEQ II, IDeas.

Thursday, December 17, 2009

Technically it's possible to have a million particle systems spewing billions of point sprites every frame, but you wouldn't even attempt to do such a thing without expecting it to grind to a halt. Technically being able to do something is of no relation to realistically being able to do something.

But, in any case, no, it's not technically possible to have a single mesh in a VBO go on for a "limitless" distance as single precision (32bit) floating point values are only with in the range of 3.4 * 10^+/-38. Far from limitless and the imprecission issue I mentioned are met long before reaching that limit. The fact you can "zoom" in forever is insignificant and unrelated, zooming is just a matter of adjusting the projection matrix to encompass a far smaller field of view.

Actually translating the player position into infinity could quite literally cause the player to "exist" in two places at once and cause the vertices in the area to shake incredibly badly. If you want to read up about this issue there's a good article here going into more detail.

So, as I said, Earth Special Forces most certainly does not support "limitless maps" in any capacity, it's just hacked it's way around HL1's size limit. Such a method is completely unnecesary for ZEQ2Lite's engine as it already supports very large levels and geometry can be imported from 3DS, ASE, OBJ and a couple of other formats. These meshes can thus be used as visual geometry, collision geometry, light mapping geometry and even visibility blocking geometry and works in tandem with Quake 3's highly optimized renderer which, while doesn't make use of VBO functionallity on graphics cards, only renders what is needed and in an efficient order with efficient batching.

These are basic concepts for any graphics coder and having people like Earth Special Forces make obsured claims such as "OH MY GOODNESS! Limitless maps are possible by just dumping the whole map into a single VBO!" makes it even more of a pain in the arse explaining the actuallities of the technicallities behind it.

Thursday, December 17, 2009

Again and as usual, Al knows.

The only real way to achieve even pseudo limitless scales is to do as Alex mentions. You'd need be streaming in your map resources as well as chunking them by localized zones so you could keep the positional system relational on a scale to the zone you are in. Alternatively, you could procedurally build a heightmap from noise or other data and instance out some general objects (as some old games have done), but it wouldn't quite give that same hand-made unique feel plus can easily hit consistency issues if you're not careful with your regional seeding.

All in all, it's really nothing to be mildly concerned with. It's not a revolutionary breakthrough, something that's "next generation", or even something mildly new or innovative in any way since it takes literary a few seconds to slap into most open engines made in the last 6-7 years. To achieve up to the maximum position limitations for ZEQ2-Lite, one would really just need to tweak a few q3map2 constants and perhaps adjust the entity's position vector to a larger range numeric data type.

It's important to remember that the terms huge/vast do not equate to limitless.

Thursday, December 17, 2009

Maybe you could do a repeatable map:
when you head right you get left or foward backward it could work online too

Thursday, December 17, 2009

Wow what a pointless idea, do you understand how lost some people could get?

Thursday, December 17, 2009

like I understand you can make it but is pointless ,okay nwm-now I need to wait until next update to see how big is the next map anyway thanks for reply