Next Steps

I'm still having trouble getting my transmission looking correct because I've been focused on the occlusion culling. I've figured out what I'm going to do to thread the system, but I don't think I'll be able to finish before the end of the quarter.

I will be threading the system by calculating the occlusion for the next frame while the current frame is rendering. Essentially, I'll be delaying the system by one frame so that the occlusion mapping can go head and do its rasterizations on the next frame. This system is very similar to how object-space motion blur is done. Transformation matrices are stored from last frame and used for rendering by the transformation matrices for this frame are used for occlusion culling.

Discussing this with the Ogre team led me to the current plan. I will use the existing WorkQueue system in Ogre but I need to augment it so that custom thread pools can be created. The thread pool for the occlusion system will be reserved for per-frame tasks. Since both this and the double-buffered transformation system are considerable changes I doubt I can finish them in time.

Instead my plan is to create a hierarchical z-buffer. In theory this can lower the amount of rasterization needed. This combined the octree should be able to speed up a lot of calculations. The rest of the quater will focus on creating good example scenes and doing performance testing of the non-threaded system.