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# Quake Hidden Surface Removal

Graphics and GPU Programming

This is the third of the references provided by Derek Nickel, another article published in the Dr. Dobbs Sourcebook:

[bquote]Michael Abrash, "Quake's Hidden-Surface Removal"
In: Dr. Dobb's Sourcebook, May/June 1996, #257
Ramblings In Real Time, pp. 48-52 [/bquote]
In this article Michael Abrash discusses the Hidden Surface Removal (HSR) that still has to follow the Visible Surface Determination he (VSD) described in an earlier arcticle.

[size="5"]Moving objects and a z-buffer

He starts with some remarks on the problems of handling moving objects (billboards/sprites, BSP models like doors, items, polygon models) with a BSP, and the solution revealed in his CGDC talk: using a z-buffer. The BSP provides all polygons of the static world in a perfectly sorted order. This could be used to z-fill the z-buffer (saving a separate z-buffer clear) without read/compare. He states that the performance impact for this pass is about 10 percent. Note that this pass has to be done separately from actually texture mapping the polygons in question (which involves a z-calculation per pixel, too, for perspective correct texture mapping), due to the lack of registers with i586 processors.

If I understood correctly, the z-buffer is actually used for billboards (sprites) and polygon models (whose triangles potentially could intersect) and special effects introduced later (once the z-buffer was already in) like particles. BSP models are handled differently (see below). The z-read/compare/write performance impact is reported to vary a lot, averaging to about 20 percent.

Finally, the memory footprint is about 128K for 320x200. According to this, the same 16bit z-buffer depth uses 1.3MB with the 960x720 modes I am occasionally running with Linux/XFree86. This sounds like much, but according to Michael Abrash, the game requires 8MB anyway, and the surface cache is likely to use a lot more if only available.

[size="5"]Level performance and Sorted Spans

The back-to-front approach to render the static world which John Carmack tried with the PVS did not provide level performance because of varying overdraw. I guess back-to-front rendering with painters algorithm is not a useful approach for scalable, densely occluded environments anyway. Michael Abrash states that they considered a beam-tree like approach (I wonder whether Weiler-Atherton clipping would be a good idea), and discarded it, because they already tried it for Visible Surface Determination, and it suffered from overhead and varying performance.

In consequence, they decided to solve the HSR task on span-level instead of polygon level. He sketches the basic idea of sorted spans, and discusses two alternatives: edge sorting or span sorting. I do not know much about the latter, and will not attempt to summarize his explanation of the former - a good description of Active Edges based rendering can be found in Foley, van Dam et.al, in the VSD/Scan-Line section. Btw., Chris Laurels "wt" and the scanline-based renderer we wrote used a modified edge-sorted rasterizer - with DOOM-style restrictions it is a good idea to rotate by 90 degrees, to draw wall spans in the most efficient way.

Following the overview of both approaches, he summarizes that there does not seem to be a conclusive answer which technique to prefer. For Quake, they decided to use an edge-sorted rasterizer with some advantages:
• horizontal coherence allowing for quick sorting
• edges can be shared between adjacent polygons
• concave polygons are possible The details of the exge-sorted rasterizer will be described in the July/August issue of Dr. Dobbs Sourcebook. The source has been available since March.

[size="5"]Some Basics of Edge Sorting

The remainder of the article covers some details. Abrash explains that using 1/z instead of z as a sorting key has various advantages:
• 1/z is linear in screen space
• increasing resolution with decreasing distance He refers the reader to Chris Hecker's much recommended series on Texture Mapping in the Game Developer's Magazine with respect to the behaviour of z gradients in various spaces. The alternative he goes into is using the order given by the BSP traversal to assign keys. The did this in fact with Quake, but were using 1/z keys at the time the article was written. Abrash comments that the decision might well happen the last days before they ship. The disadvantage of BSP-based keys is that moving BSP objects have to be split by world BSP planes, which increases the number of polygons. Using 1/z sorting, it is not necessary to split BSP model polygons. In addition, the 1/z key solves merging the BSP model drawing order in the world BSP drawing order (which ideally breaks down to merging two already sorted lists, methinks).

He finishes by explaining how to obtain an 1/z value and an arbitrary point on the polygon in an efficient way, using a plane equation in terms of viewspace z and screen space x,y, and gives the approximate costs on a Pentium as about six cycles.

[size="5"]Handling BSP Models

As stated above, the BSP models are not rendered using a z-buffer read/compare. BSP objects therefore provide overdraw reduction - doors, most notably, block any surface behind them in the edge-sorted rasterizer. In consequence, BSP models have to be clipped against world polygons, to avoid interpenetrations (I wonder if a sufficiently large bounding box for wall-object collision detection is not sufficient). This is not necessary for polygon models and billboards and particles, as z-compares account for intersections. This is obvious from passable lava/water surfaces.

[size="5"]Sources

The README says: a Z-sorted spans demo program, consisting of a Visual C++ Makefile, resource and include file and, more important, the demo itself: zsort.c. The download archive of the source that will be discussed in the next issue has been available for quite some time already, and there is a local copy with permission. Remarks by Michael Abrash:

[bquote]Note: In this implementation, polygon faces must not be interpenetrating. Also, correct sorting is not guaranteed if two polygonal objects butt up against each other. In other words, each polygonal object must be made of a continuous, non-self-intersecting skin, and polygonal objects must not interpenetrate or touch in order for proper sorting to result. More complex, slower sorting is required to make those cases work reliably.

Note: polygon processing could be considerably more efficient if polygons shared common edges and edges shared common vertices. Also, indirection to vertices could be used to avoid having to copy all the vertices during every clip test. Outcode-type testing could be used to determine completely clipped or unclipped polygons ahead of time, avoiding the need to clip and copy entirely for such polygons. Outcode-type tests work best in viewspace, with the frustum normalized so that the field of view is 90 degrees, so simple compares, rather than dot products, can be used to categorize points with respect to the frustum.[/bquote]
[size="5"]References
• James D. Foley, Andries van Dam, Steven K. Feiner, John F. Hughes
"Computer Graphics - Principles and Practice",
• David Rogers
"Procedural Elements of Computer Graphics"
McGraw-Hill, 1985
• Chris Hecker
"Under the Hood/Behind the Screen: Perspective Texture Mapping",
in several issues of the Game Developer's Magazine, from April/May 1995 to April/May 1996. Author: B., email to bernd@nero.uni-bonn.de, with public PGP key
Source: $Id: ddjzsort.html,v 1.2 1996/06/19 23:50:29 b1 Exp$
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