Unfamiliar with these graphic options in RCT3. Help!

[jpinard]

These are options in Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 that I'm unfamiliar with. Anyone know what they do?

Aggressive Z-Bias?

Geometry Imposter Distance?

Scenery Visability Alpha?

Bloom?

[Charlatan]

Bloom - it's the latest thing, both WoW and EQ2 have added it as of late. Micro$oft must have added some bloom generation stuff in DirectX 9.0c or some such, says my cynical side.

[EngineNo9]

I wrote a whole long thing explaining each of those in detail and then my damn computer locked up!  It hasn't locked up since god knows when, and now it decides to at the end of a huge post!!

I'll try again (maybe not so verbose)...

Agressive Z-Bias: Not sure of the specific implementation, but it generally has to do with adjusting the depth of certain polygons so that those what would have been coplanar are no longer so.  Probably has to do with geometry imposters (see below) and preserving the illusion of depth.

Geometry Imposter Distance: This is a technique used to reduce the number of overall polygons drawn by substituting 2D representations of 3D objects when they are far away (and you are less likely to notice).  Upping the distance makes it less noticeable but can impact performance negatively because you are drawing more 3D objects.

Scenery Visability Alpha:  Once again, I don't know the specifics of this game (don't have it) but I would deduce that it has to do with the transparency of objects such as trees so that you can view people/objects through them.  Shouldn't affect performance, more likely for user preference.  

Bloom: This is a graphical effect that is used to brighten light objects and make them appear to glow or radiate light.  This is done by capturing a screen buffer of those objects, brighteing and blurring it, and then adding it back to the actual screen buffer.  Will negatively affect performance, the amount of which depends on your system (it may be negligable if you have a decent one).

[jpinard]

Oh excellent!!!!!  Yea the game really slows down even on really high hardware, so thius is going to be a challenge to balance.

[Samurai93]

I didn't have any slow down with bloom turned on, but all the balloons were glowing too much for me. I had to turn it off.

[jpinard]

Hehel I'll have to try that out and check out the balloons.  Don't udnerstand why developers go crazy with an effect - just cause they can make it.

[Papa Smurph]

Hehel I'll have to try that out and check out the balloons.  Don't udnerstand why developers go crazy with an effect - just cause they can make it.

Being a developer, though not a game developer, I think I can answer that one.  It's the same reason you go crazy with a game - just cause you can play it.  To a developer, these cool effects are just that: cool (and fun to boot!).  Now, in my mind the producer should not be letting inappropriate use of effects happen...

[\/\/olverine]

There are some glaring graphical glitches when using the terrain editor, actually when I think about it I've come across a load of bugs. I really wish they would issue a patch soon.