Is this why CoV is so laggy compared to CoH?!

So today I had an interesting encounter.

I logged in, and realized that I somehow ended up spawning inside a building. No worries, I thought. A simple /stuck would fix that! But then I got curious and decided to zoom the camera in to see what's inside...

And these are pictures of what I found:

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

Figure 4

I have drawn the red lines to indicate the edges of the geometry. In Figure 1, I have just taken a picture from inside the geometry. In the rest, my character is standing at a single spot, and I have merely rotated the camera to get snap shots from inside and outside the geometry.

As you can see, there is a big chunk of fully-rendered wall INSIDE that building, and it's not even visible from the outside! The computer is rendering two separate faces of two different geometries, and we only see one of them! I can only assume that the entire building is a bunch of textured cubes clipping into one another. It even has doors!!!

Isn't this inefficient design? Could it be that the lag of CoV (relative to CoH) is due to numerous number of these design flaws?

If so...should we fix them?

Yes.

You can see this quite a bit in Founders' Falls too, where the buildings are more jumbled together - you sometimes see one building with half windows, with the rest hidden inside the building it's been merged with.

I seem to recall that huge chunks of Grandville were found to be walls on top of walls.

And then there's the huge areas built below the normal world for stores and some missions.

I've never understood why things were done this way. I still don't know why looking toward the abandoned lab in Port Oakes hammers my FPS by 50%.

I surely hope that Pretoria will be treated differently, especially with it having no war walls....

It was probably faster to make - if they make a set of ready made buildings that can be merged with each other and the scenery, then they didn't need to make individual buildings for each location.

They're seem to be going for a new approach with GR, by making each building unique.

CoV is also more graphically intense than CoH.

Quote:

Originally Posted by TargetOne Yes.

But yes, this doesn't help at all. Nice documentation, though.

Grandville was horribly, horribly designed. There are buildings inside buildings.

Compare that to Peregrine Island where there is almost no wasted polygon anywhere to be found.

I hope there are lots of holes in Preatoria during beta so we get a good under-the-hood look of the world design.

Wait, wait... what lag?

Oh, right... my machine is rather... um... new, so I wouldn't notice stuff like that. Nevermind. Carry on.

Meh. This is nothing. Someone's clearly never been under Faultline before. :P

Building geometry probably isn't an issue. They're very simple structures, and even on a low-spec machine it probably wouldn't have a significant impact. The memory used by a simple building, which is generally a box with other boxes on it, and the textures, is not too big.

Other objects in the world have high poly counts, or significant particle effects, and there are some instances where it is clear that objects that shouldn't be getting rendered are anyway. The "doodad" count, to use Blizzard jargon, is far far higher in CoV than in CoH and a lot of them are also more complex than entire skyscrapers.

Why would a computer without a dedicated graphics card even be relevant in this conversation?