obj based worlds?

[ceriux]

[mh]

It should be, but I think from reading it that what we're talking about is something that's more usable for terrain than for Quake dungeons. The lack of any kind of PVS would mean that we'd get horrendous overdraw (VBOs are really just about saving bandwidth, after all), and we now have a hard size limit based on how much video RAM you have (assuming that you want to avoid thrashing). Add in the framebuffer and textures and that hard limit gets smaller.

[ceriux]

even with quake like dungeons wouldnt it help any? maybe even for mods who use more open type maps rather than hallways and corridors?

[Spike]

Quake is windy corridors, where overdraw is a killer.
Just sticking everything in a single object works well only if its all going to be visible anyway.
Quake's BSP format is not ideal, no. But it does cut down on overdraw at the cost of increased CPU usage.

[mh]

For terrain 50% - 75% of it is going to be visible almost all the time anyway (at least of that in the view frustum) so overdraw isn't so bad. Likewise if you have a turbo-mental-nutter-ninja-bastard gfx card you'll get away with it. Bottom line in the Real World is that without some kind of PVS determination it's really just an interesting tech demo.