Progressive Mesh Streaming: Knowledge exchange

@Mugen87
On the original topic. I looked into progressive mesh streaming for my game engine. My verdict was:

  • streaming meshes are not straight-forward to use, implementations that do exist are lacking in various way when it comes to prformance
  • if you connection speed is slow, loading a huge model with DRACO compression is already fast enough for me
  • if you’re loading something super-detailed using a progressive mesh - you get a lot of popping, unless you’re a technically savvy person - it just looks dirty and buggy.
  • all of the streaming meshes I looked at require additional space, in some cases a lot of it. Those that do tricks of sorting vertices typically sacrifice performance for that - which is not a good compromise in my estimation.
  • Internet speeds are improving, and currently internet is fast enough that geometry itself is rarely the bottleneck in terms of file size, it’s usually the textures, by a long shot.

I think streaming meshes is a cool concept, and I’m sure it has a lot of great applications, but computer games are generally not it, I believe.

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