peter_spy
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Posts posted by peter_spy
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1 hour ago, MirceaKitsune said:
Yes, but it might be drawn in an area where only the ambient light hits it.
That ambient light would already act like tris multiplier. See the comparison I made in the newbie thread again. Even in complete darkness, the tris are still drawn. That's why it's better to address this at model level.
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If a model is large and unoptimized, it will still be drawn, even if there's no light. So it's not that much of a performance, but aesthetics-related thing now, and that is subjective. I'd hazard a guess that changing lighting conditions like that will look more jarring than a switching between model visibility or lod stages in the same lighting.
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That's why you can have a noshadows lod, and also you can hide models being hit by these lights. As Duzenko wrote, lights are expensive only when they hit something expensive. In that regard your performance won't get magically improved just because you turn off the lights.
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That plus you can reduce distant shadowcasting by using as many "noshadows_lod_x 1" as you want. That should help quite substantially, since lights that cast no shadows are much cheaper in terms of performance. It's just that in this case you can achieve this by turning off shadows on the models, not in the light entity. Bear in mind that none of the optimisation tricks will help you much, if you have dozens of overlapping lights hitting tons of objects. That would be just using lights in incorrect way.
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IIRC a skybox is always rendered, that would also explain the increased number of subviews and higher texture memory use.
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1 hour ago, geegee said:
The counts may be "superhigh", but they're IDENTICAL in both pics. The geometry is quite complex and what you see on screen isn't the whole picture.
Well, not exactly, in the second shot the number of subviews is higher, number of draws and tris is a bit lower, but the video memory is higher. That would imply that something else is being rendered too, as it uses more textures/materials. No idea why that would bring down the fps so hard. Out of curiosity, what would cause so many drawcalls and such huge triangle count in this simple looking scene? Are these pillars and grooves made with geometry?
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First of all, these counts are super high for what's visible on screen: 3k draws, million tris, 156k shadow tris for simple geometry. Also, the number of views increases from 3 to 5, so it might mean you have a material with cubemap or a mirror? Just a guess.
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Also, if you use shadows with stencil, these will pop in and out at fade distance; only maps with fade in and out smoothly with the model (which kinda makes sense).
According to my notes, stuff like lod_x models should work correctly, but things will get wonky when it comes to skins for different lods. It seems like the model will always switch to lod_0 skin when going between hide_distance and lod fadeout range.
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Sorry I didn't prepare a test map, just grabbed what I had from my stuff, as I don't want to be distracted much from the level design exercises I'm doing right now.
But you can imagine this being applied to stuff like distant trees or grass, or perhaps even buildings (you could couple that with some distance fog, etc.). In general it should be pretty versatile and work with almost every object.
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1 hour ago, HMart said:
The only "fade" I could easily do, was the normal monster burn effect used on Doom 3, but is bad for LODing and like I said uses alpha testing, not alpha fading.
Not sure why it would be bad for LODing, it kinda depends on what you put in the alpha channel of the texture. It can look a bit like the reverse monster fade out in Doom3, and from a proper distance it looks good; it beats an object popping in and out of a thin air.
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@kingsalIt might be Tels' work, no idea either. I did some experiments with it and I have some snippets in my notes, but I must have discarded that test map. We can use Discord and try to recreate it though.
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39 minutes ago, kingsal said:
We do not have fade in/out capabilities currently
There is alpha fade in and out, it needs alpha channel in the texture and particular material setup. I wasn't able to blend between lod stages though, only fading out from nothing to fully rendered object.
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28 minutes ago, Kurshok said:
It's off topic. And who are you to say nobody cares? You don't speak for everybody.
He speaks for me. Because of you, the forum view looks like this:
The forums look like a news site because of you, and I don't have any way to ignore it.
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I meant an Ignore function on a thread level, not just single posts. I check forums using the Activity tab, because that's the fastest way to see all the recent posts. Right now all posts are from the taliban thread which I'm really not interested in but have to navigate through, to see TDM related stuff.
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An option to ignore the whole thread would be very appreciated. Just ignoring a user is not much of help when the activity stream is filled with responses from other users.
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6 hours ago, STiFU said:
Music is usually too distracting for me while coding.
If I'm working from home, I either work in silence as well, or have something fairly generic and relaxing in the background, e.g. one of the chillhop playlists. For creative stuff I can actually focus with a podcast in the background, or I use something that matches the mood of what I'm doing, yeah
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There already was a feature request to extend LOD to other entities, I believe there was more than one. So don't expect anyone rushing to fix this for you, because it's not that simple.
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Bear in mind that LOD system is very old, IIRC it was designed by Tels and never improved upon much since. Ideally, every entity except worldspawn should be able to use LOD, but it's not an ideal situation.
And yeah, performance is still your responsibility. Either you get to know the engine and design maps to leverage its strengths or you will see players complaining, whether you like it or not.
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Oh yeah, sound design is also fantastic. I have no idea how they pulled it off in the Ashtray Maze, but the way music changes there is awesome, it's like the song was split in parts that overlap dynamically.
Similar goes for the regular combat music, the tempo gets faster when there are plenty of enemies around and it slows down when there are 1-2. No idea how they did it, but I'm pretty sure it's not a real-time effect, since that reduces audio quality quite much.
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17 hours ago, Zerg Rush said:
"It's ignorance of not knowing the difference between what needs to be proven and what doesn't need it."
AristotleOn 7/10/2021 at 3:10 PM, Zerg Rush said:arguing with paroles and set phrases, this is certainly counterproductive and only causes rejection by those who think differently.
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If anything's convenient, it's sitting on your ass and being a facebook warrior. This is obvious but nothing beats gathering people and doing something positive together, and seeing a change in the world, even if it's slow. Also that's how change of mind is also being perpetuated, by regular participation and doing. If anything, poorly phrased/targeted forum topics like this are doing more harm to the cause than not.
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Forums is hardly near. And actually doing something, like raising a fund, or joining people who are already doing something for a cause is 100 times smarter than yelling at strangers on niche forum. World doesn't need internet warriors or facebook revolutionists, there are plenty of them already, and it does nothing.
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9 minutes ago, Kurshok said:
Well I refuse to just shut the fuck up
Couldn't you refuse it elsewhere?
You're not really reaching anyone with your, ahem, message, interwebz warrior. Not on a stealth gaming forum, where there are maybe like 20 active people at best.
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hide_distance broken again?
in TDM Tech Support
Posted · Edited by peter_spy
Ambient light does that already too, as I demonstrated earlier. You have to account for the initial tris count to be at least tripled when you're placing a model in a map (ambient world + regular light, or + distance fog, so quadrupled even). If you're using lods/hide distance for models and func portals, and still can't get decent performance, you either need to up your level design game, or find better models (or both). Just hiding lights won't save you.
It can be fun gameplay or aesthetic trick though, I guess it will be easier to use than scripts.