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Page 2

Visit to Razorworks
By Kurt Giesselman

Neil Roberts and James Morris working on new graphic designs

We first took a look at several of the wire frame drawings for the Hokum

Hokum cockpit, exterior view, doors open

The Hokum cockpit has 12777 polygons. Compare that to the typical five or six thousand polygons in a first person shooter scene. Kevin told me that they had to develop a special masking system for views from inside the cockpit so that nothing unnecessary would be rendered for inside the cockpit views. These screen prints can not do these renderings justice.

Hokum cockpit, exterior view, close-up

Neil had to work on these graphic screens to get them to even be legible in a 640 x 480 jpeg format. The 250-pixel wide reductions are just a mess. The original Paint Shop Pro format (psd) graphics are available for download at the end of the article.

I am just wrapping up the Great Video Card Showdown this month. I was surprised to see how EECH performed with different video cards. Not to preview the results too much but compared to other programs EECH keeps its frame rates in a relatively narrow band. There appears to be a cap on frame rate set at 30 fps. Although frame rates can drop into single digits, especially in large metropolitan center, they generally stay between 15 and 20 fps. This is even more surprising in light of the number of polys being rendered.

If you are not impressed by the 12K plus polys for the Hokum cockpit then add on the pilot and co-pilot at 3876 polys each.

Animated pilot wire frame graphic

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