Track limitations

Hello everyone.

I'm struggling a bit with hardware/format limitation on track meshes. I'm trying to create 3D elements to replace the boxes that dot the track banks, starting with tyre walls.

I'm created a simple tyre stack, made blocks with 4 tyre stacks, duplicated it it GP4 builder to create a tyre wall that looked quite nice:


Then saved, ignored the warning messages, repacked the wad and fire GP4 to see how it looked ingame, only to be met with a crash during load.

Looking at the warnings (too many faces in one scene), it seems i'm hitting a limitation that is inherent to the file format, and I'm wondering how I can find where the limit is ?
Looking at the visibility list in GP4 builder, it's red almost everywhere, with as many as 212698 faces visible in most sectors. My tyre wall alone weighs 84k faces, that's one only, I planned to replace these all around the track, so i'm guessing at least 30-40 times as much polys.

How much can I stuff in the track ? Am I wrong in thinking the visibility list is a indication and not linked to the crash ? (only a way to indicate the computation load, which should be ok with modern hardware ?)
Can I put as many polys as I want just by creating many scenes ? How many faces can I put in one scene ? Is it as simple as 65536 ?

Thanks in advance to anyone who can help me understand the limitations.

edit: I have remove a few piles to get around 60k polys, it loads, but I have huge glitches: the game doesn't seem to know if a face is backward or not. I tried reverting the faces, it doesn't change anything.


The first time I tried to load the track, with only one tyre stack, I didn't have issues.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 09/23/2021 10:36PM by zifox.

Max limit for the whole track is 300000 vertices.

Glenn

Maybe you can optimize your tyre wall without problems. 84k face is too for this shape

--------------------------------------------

The face limit for a single scene is indeed 65k, plus what gap177 said above about the overall limit. As Duffer said, you'll have to simplify your mesh in order to keep the idea of 3d tyrewalls.

You're correct about the Visibility List, it's merely an indicator and does not relate to the crash.

About the backward faces, check if you're not using a 2-sided material in the objects.


My unfinished tracks: [www.grandprixgames.org]
Send bug reports and track editing questions to f1virtualblog@gmail.com

I'm using 2 sided materials, but I think I went over the max vertice limit, and extra faces are not drawn.

I need to do some math before I continue: I'm not sure I can refine much of what I initially wanted to change: tyrewalls, hills, tress, spectators, parked vehicles. I really didn't really realize how low polys tracks were.

Thanks for all the info.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/24/2021 01:16PM by zifox.

Still a great attempt. Those tyre stacks would be really nice to see in the game even if simplified

___________________________________________________________________________
For a list of EVERY download for GP4, look here:[docs.google.com]

I really had to simplify the meshes a lot to get a poly count that is acceptable, and the result is not satisfiying.
I have to get rid of the creases between the tyre in the stacks, and still reduce the number of faces to create the cylinder, from 16 to 8, to stay below the max polygon count.

The result is then not that different from having a single box, seen from the track, it's not worth spending the time doing it for such a little improvement.