Chapter 13. Indoors Rendering

"His house was perfect, whether you wanted food, or sleep, or work, or story-telling, or singing, or just sitting and thinking, best, or a pleasant mixture of them all."

-J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

KEY TOPICS

• General Analysis

• Occluder-Based Algorithms

• Binary Space Partition Algorithms

• Portal Rendering

• Hierarchical Occlusion Maps

• Hybrid Approaches

• Hardware-Assisted Occlusion Tests

• In Closing

Indoors rendering has been a popular technique for game development ever since Wolfenstein 3D by id Software was released. Games taking place inside buildings have become widespread; their visual appeal increasing with each new hardware iteration or engine release. In this chapter, we will explore the building blocks for any indoors engine. Three popular approaches-Binary Space Partitions (BSPs), portal rendering, and octree rendering-will be explored in full, and some specialized solutions will be covered thereafter. As you will soon discover, indoors games often require quite complex techniques.