cylindrical polygons -- a way to save processing power

[thereaverofdarkness]

I am aware that the current engine may not support this, but I can hope, afterall.

The idea is fairly simple, though a bit unconventional. Basically the game engine would display a cylinder as a single polygon. Rather than draw it as a flat surface, it would draw it as a circle with texturing being draped along from one end to the other. If the engine could be made to do this and cylindrical rocket components could be redesigned for this, it could lower their polygon count tremendously without impacting their quality of appearance.

[chaos_forge]

Yeah . . .

1) That's not how graphics engines work.

2) Unlike other games, what makes KSP lag isn't the graphics, it's the physics calculations. Therefore optimizations to the graphics aren't that important (apart from well-known bugs such as the ocean lag)

3) KSP already has a pretty low poly count anyways

[thereaverofdarkness]

That makes sense. Oh well, it was a cool idea...

also, great job on not losing Kerbals! I don't know how you do it.

[chaos_forge]

It's mostly a combination of using probes, testing extensively, and quicksaving often xD

[Nuke]

this would probibly slow things down as opposed to speed things up. you send the videocard a list of polygons and they are rendered before the program has time to blink. you actually go out of your way to reduce the command rate. so instead of sending hundreds or thousands of bytes of polygon data, you just send a 4 byte pointer to the object and the video hardware handles the rest. rendering is stupid fast.

[Dunbaratu]

There are known graphics rendering algorithms that can do curved surfaces (you see them used all the time in Pixar films) but they tend not to be implemented in the hardware of home-market graphics cards. Some *really* high end cards have them but requiring that would kill KSP's sell-ability. Most graphics cards simply do large numbers of simple flat triangles and that's it. So to implement a cylindrical surface rendering you'd have to do it in software and not hardware which would be slow.

And besides the polygons aren't what people are talking about when they say "part count". A bunch of polygons making a single piece of the craft is still one part as far as physics calculations are concerned.