last time i talked about my new visibility system and how i compute lights and areas visibility, this time i improved my visibility system in a way that i could know the visibility inside each area and not just which areas are visible.
i call it internal area pvs, this pvs use the same mechanism of bitsets and gives me information about all the entities/surfaces etc that are visible inside specific area.
at first it sound like, why do you need it? well, when running big levels each area have lots of detail in term of level design and also game play by placing high detail models and pickup items, those can take a lot of power when rendering.
also note that computing internal area pvs is very fast and done when doing the portal traversal, so with a few lines i save lots of rendering, also what you don't see does not need to be lit so the saving is huge when doing the lighting pass!
here is 2 screenshots that shows it in action:
NOTE: the images in wireframe mode so you could see the data the visible without and with internal area pvs system.
without internal area pvsnotice the small red entities at the right side
with internal area pvsnotice the red entities at the right side was removed along with other surfaces
the red entities in the images are light flares, which is a nice effect to fake volume light effects. note that unlike billboard/sprites those are not simple quad aligned to camera view, next time i talked about them...
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