I think I may of thought of a way of pretty good clipping for mainly indoor engines. Also please tell me if this is known and used a lot, if not, Lets call it RJ Culling(or Sumtin wit RJ in itdat my name), Well, I was thinking, Every ten frames or so why dont you do a QUIK search through the Z buffer, Find the greatest Depth in it, and if it is smaller than your Maximun Depth(whatever it is) then replace the far Z Clipping with that, And repeat every 10 or so frames, Wouldnt this Speed up the procces by A LOT (if this is already being used, please tell me how, and forgive me, thanks) Copyright(c)2000 RJ's Games (hehe) Edited by - Esap1 on 2/2/00 9:20:22 PM

I dunno, why dont you try it!

Ive been trying to do it, but one problem. Does anyone know how to access the Zbuffer(like finding the farthest valus) when using Direct 3D7X. Thanks in advance

I can''t help you there, but what you should do is repost your question but put a better tittle

Well, if the Z-Buffer is stored as an LPDIRECTDRAWSURFACE4, it should be possible to lock the surface to a DWORD pointer (if you''re not sure how to do this, just ask.) As for whether or not the idea has been used before, I know that John deGoes introduced something similar called the "clear reduction" algorithm in his book "Cutting Edge 3D Game Programming" (Coriolis), I think, except it didn''t search for the deepest value, it just scaled the values.

Hey, Happy to know someone else has "Cutting Edge of 3D Game Programming", yeah, Think he just kept adding a counter to the zbuffer so he would have to clear the zbuffer every frame, but, I want to see if mine works or not, since it is different. The Problem is Im using D3DX to set it up and I cant find the surface the ZBuffer is in
Thanks for the help?