Real-Time Engine Optimizations

Adaptive Tessellation - All road and terrain geometry created in CityScape can be adaptively tessellated based on curvature and other geometric properties according to user-specified parameters. This allows the same world to be tuned to match the performance of multiple hardware platforms.

Level of Detail - Terrain and road geometry can be output to various levels of detail to support runtime LOD switching. LODs can be grouped in a flat or hierarchical manner, and can support blending between different LODs.

Cull Hierarchy Generation - CityScape can generate an efficient cull volume hierarchy of either spheres, axis-aligned boxes, or oriented boxes containing all geography, roads, and props.

Overhead Image and Normal Maps - Terrain feature details are automatically baked into an overhead image and normal map to allow for high quality rendering of distant terrain with minimal polygon counts. Additionally, roads and small props can be rendered with geometry for realistic up-close viewing and can be baked into the image and normal map for high performance long-distance viewing.

Flexible Tiling Options - The entire world can be partitioned into uniform square or brick zones for paging and memory management purposes, allowing for the creation of worlds of unlimited size.

Object Instancing - Duplicated props and buildings are treated as instances to reduce memory usage and increase performance.

Object Clustering - Clustering allows the world builders to control performance with fidelity unavailable in other software. The geometry of all the objects within a distant cluster can be tagged and thereafter automatically combined into into a single mesh to minimize draw calls. Also, the corresponding texture maps are packed into a single map to reduce render state changes.