Turn THAT Frown; UPSIDE DOWN!

[Jon Merriman]

Those shots for Serious Sam are impressive. Does it use hardware transform & lighting or does it use LOD?

The illusion of smooth terrain can be faked with clever texturing and lighting in Unreal Tournament. TerOmen came up with some pretty impressive stuff in his day. I'm not talking about his Grand Canyon map... it was some of his unreleased stuff. It still doesn't compare to what a real LOD or hardware accelerated terrain engine can produce.

 

[RogueLeader]

We need to remember that a game engine is basically just an envelope that does graphics and sound. As far as the actual game is concerned, you can do pretty much anything. The only limit is that when you are doing a mod and havn't licensed the engine you have limits on what you can change.

Jon Merriman: Serious Sam has hardware transform, but not lighting. Hardware lighting is planned in an upcoming upgrade to the engine. Serious Sam also has a very advanced LOD system. It automatically does LOD based on your settings and frame rate and number of polygons on screen, and you can customize LOD for parts of the map. So it does LOD on both models and the map itself.