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Natural Selection 2 is the sequel to the popular Half-Life mod Natural Selection. It is built on our own engine and will be distributed through Valve's Steam platform.

Report RSS Friday Update - Level Processing

Apologizes for the delay in getting this post up, the video encoder wasn't being very cooperative.

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This Friday we have the third part of the Spark Q&A series for you (if you missed them, you can find the previous installments here and here).

Dalin asks: The basic geometry isn't compiled like it is in Source/Unreal Engine, but what does happen with it?

This week we're super busy with the Game Developer's Conference, optimizing the game for our engine test, and cleaning up our Lua integration for the modding release. But why should should that stop us from creating a video to answer this excellent question? Without further adieu, we present a look at level processing in the Spark Engine.


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Armageddon104
Armageddon104 - - 3,128 comments

That's some smarts! Great job on the engine. Do level have to be all models though?

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Soulseker
Soulseker - - 137 comments

No they won't... you use faces (not brushes) and then you (should) use some models to fill the level up :D

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V-H2O
V-H2O - - 174 comments

wow and u did that without compromising on the efficiency.....wow...

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SG1Shadow
SG1Shadow - - 597 comments

cool techniques

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KUB3ISM_GAMEWORKS
KUB3ISM_GAMEWORKS - - 164 comments

Amazing stuff, very smart way of rendering :)

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Flazor
Flazor - - 767 comments

AWESOME! Smart o_o

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Blandr3ws
Blandr3ws - - 84 comments

CHC ftw! combining it with the bsp is pretty cool.
Keep up the amazing work :D

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TeamWolf
TeamWolf - - 449 comments

I thought you guys would use something like that. I can see that FPS lag won't be much of an issue due to you not looking at all the map when you can only see about 5-10% of it at a time.

Great work.

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MrTambourineMan
MrTambourineMan - - 717 comments

Cool video, but what's even cooler is watching it on youtube and turning on Transcribe Audio beta. The last line that developer says is: "...or anything that modders dream up..." It's transcribed to: "...for a single mother's dream of..." :)

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56er
56er - - 1,253 comments

Did you ever think about making a sp. campaigne in a AvP style? That would be very nice i guess.

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Soulseker
Soulseker - - 137 comments

Nothing planned (maybe after initial release though).

And even if not, there will be enough modders to do that for you ;)

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Lockdown323
Lockdown323 - - 275 comments

This went beyond all my expectations, superb work.

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archkyrie
archkyrie - - 1,134 comments

Great, I love that you care about potential modders down the road.

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Worldwideweb
Worldwideweb - - 111 comments

you really put a lot of work in your project and you deserve a price for that, i'm sure you're one of the upcoming studios of the year, i hope other good games will follow....

btw: "awesome" graphics for an indie-game with an own engine, i couldn't imagine a better lightning, i guess it's going to kick avp's a**....^^

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AJ_Quick
AJ_Quick - - 1,321 comments

Nice. This technique was also actually used in Unreal Engine 2 - "Zone culling"

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Blandr3ws
Blandr3ws - - 84 comments

"Zone culling", or working out a PVS of zones/areas/vis-leaves only covers the first part of their overall technique.
CHC is an optimised form of object occlusion culling: seeing whether individual objects occlude each other. Where as the 'zone culling' just works out what area of the world you can see into from another.

Just though I'd make that distinction because they've implemented something a fair bit more advanced than UE2 tech and deserve the credit for it :)

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masterchief396
masterchief396 - - 425 comments

Nice job on the new Spark engine. Looks amazing.

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-Str!ker-
-Str!ker- - - 33 comments

I have to say the work in this area is much appreciated, nothing bugs me more then getting poor performance in a game because of bad optimization.

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Rukus_
Rukus_ - - 660 comments

SCREW YOU AREA PORTALS!!!!!

I love this, maps will take so much less time.

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