on large terrain and on your work
>Huge static terrains
Operation Flashpoint comes to mind... Impressive game. Should have received a number of awards...
This is exactly an area where pre-computing pays off. Keeping everything in memory is often not feasible (PS2 - not enough memory) or incurs significant overhead due to page misses and access to memory that had to be swapped to disk.
Precomputing all of the terrain's waypoints allows you also to partition the terrain representation into a number of overlapping areas. Only those areas that are necessary to support the AI characters would have to be loaded (rather than the full terrain description). And during movement, new area representations can be streamed/loaded from hard disk / optical disk. (Grand Theft Auto 3 does this with city geometry on the PS2 - perhaps it is a feature of the Renderware engine underneath).
I'd be curious how an 'on-the-fly' learning system would deal with an Operation Flashpoint situation.
(Frankly, I believe Operation Flashpoint does not use not either method, but basically navigates on the heightmap and a 2.5D mesh; the terrain is pretty much free of obstacles, and solely in a handful of buildings and in guard towers you can arrive above other accessible locations).
>[writing a paper]
If you need reviewers, I'd be glad to assist (since I'm curious what your approach can and cannot do). I guess I'm biased to my personal way of handling terrain, but at least I'm aware of that. And I'm used to reviewing papers...
William
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