morricone

Hey everyone, I noticed that your mirrors are quite slow (I'm looking at you funfreegameshq.com). I still have a Strato Server with unlimited traffic lying around, which is idling most of the timen so I'd like to help with some bandwith. I also noticed that your distribution process is subpar, as it requires access to the server or manual intervention. My recommendation would be to setup an rsync server on the official server, with which the other servers can be synchronized automatically (every hour or so). As rsync detects change between files efficiently this would speed up the distribution and not cause more load. (Mirrors would be whitelisted by IP) This is also the recommended distribution process by the Debian distribution. If you would like me to I would look into adapting the debian mirror scripts. So we can use them for the distribution of the TDM files. This would provide additional benefits like pushing to mirrors and multistage sync. What do you think? Greetings

AFAIK the problem is, that when you transfer something from the card RAM to the system RAM, the whole render queue is excecuted and the GPU is only fast when it gets batched data. The main problem is not the transfer rate. I'm curious wether transferig a 1x1 textur 2-5 times a second (I don't know how many enemies there are) won't slow the system down to much. Someone has to do some tests Unfortunately I haven't yet programmed a shader. It's pure theory for me

Don't get me wrong. This is what I have thought of so fare: For each enemy which can see the player, do 1. An RTT from the enemies postition pointing at the player. Use special matierials for that. e.g. the player has alpha 1, the rest alpha 0 and the lighting as a monochrome palette. (for this the RTT surface doesn't even have to be that big) 2. Let a fragment shader decide wether the contrast is high enough so that the player silhouette can be seen. (IIRC you can pass pointers even in shaders around (but I could be wrong)) This should be fast enough, but I don't know the D3 engine very well so the material changing isn't maybe very easy to do. And only people with a compatible card can get this extra difficulty. If some points aren't clear (because of my languange ) don't hesitate to ask me. edit: mmh... I just thought over it again and there still would be a problem if there's a very small bright surface directly behind the player, but that should be negligible. It just so happens that I've got another idea For each enemy which can see the player, do 1. An RTT from the enemies postition pointing at the player. 2. An RTT from the enemies postition pointing at the player with the player model invisible 3. Check wether there are big differences between the two images.

There's no need to do silhouette test more often than 2 times per second. Have you ever thought of implementing it as a fragment shader? They should be fast enough to do a quick test. But I'm still thinking of a way to do it.