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So, what are you working on right now?


Springheel

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@moonbo loving the green effect you have there! Other than that I think the scenes look really good, you have a great eye for lighting and design

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The FPS indicator is not accurate on screenshots - the game seems to slow down when you take one.

 

Anyway, good job! :)

Come the time of peril, did the ground gape, and did the dead rest unquiet 'gainst us. Our bands of iron and hammers of stone prevailed not, and some did doubt the Builder's plan. But the seals held strong, and the few did triumph, and the doubters were lain into the foundations of the new sanctum. -- Collected letters of the Smith-in-Exile, Civitas Approved

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That's correct, but the numbers displayed makes me nervous, too.

FM's: Builder Roads, Old Habits, Old Habits Rebuild

Mapping and Scripting: Apples and Peaches

Sculptris Models and Tutorials: Obsttortes Models

My wiki articles: Obstipedia

Texture Blending in DR: DR ASE Blend Exporter

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I think its safe to say Moonbo hasn't optimized the map yet. Maybe let's wait and see what the beta/final product runs at before jumping to conclusions

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Hey guys,

 

Yeah, the reason the framerate is low is because those screenshots were taken from my laptop. While I do want to optimize it a little bit more, right now it runs fine, with the worst spots only having a primitive count of 2,300.

But you should walk having internal dignity. Be a wonderful person who can dance pleasantly to the rhythm of the universe.

-Sun Myung Moon

 

My work blog: gfleisher.blogspot.com

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Vision and ambition over FPS, I say. -_-

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Come the time of peril, did the ground gape, and did the dead rest unquiet 'gainst us. Our bands of iron and hammers of stone prevailed not, and some did doubt the Builder's plan. But the seals held strong, and the few did triumph, and the doubters were lain into the foundations of the new sanctum. -- Collected letters of the Smith-in-Exile, Civitas Approved

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Yeah, the reason the framerate is low is because those screenshots were taken from my laptop. While I do want to optimize it a little bit more, right now it runs fine, with the worst spots only having a primitive count of 2,300.

I always turn show_fps and the lightgem off when taking screenshots for this very reason.

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Oops, my phrasing wasn't clear enough, I meant I'd like for your laptop to get more than that FPS, having nothing to do with "it" or "those" scenes. Our hardware will assuredly have our regular framerates.

 

Sorry to have unintentionally created a megillah. :/ It was meant as a positive sentiment which obviously failed.

"The measure of a man's character is what he would do if he knew he never would be found out."

- Baron Thomas Babington Macauley

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I disagree with Melan. Vision is good. Ambition is good. Poor FPS is sloppy.

 

If the mapper can do simple measures to improve FPS, they should do them. Close vistas for compartmentalization (especially windows or similar stuff of low-gameplay importance), put stuff on noshadows, and that sort of stuff.

 

I have a decent rig, and almost all TDM missions run fine on my computer. I admit that experiencing really choppy areas provoke two thoughts in me: i) sloppy mission building, ii) urge to get out from the laggy area (even kill ai to get it it over with) or quit the mission.

 

This is really a shame if the mission was otherwise really good.

 

So FPS (map optimization) is important!

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Clipper

-The mapper's best friend.

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Map optimization is important to a point. But I find that there's often a tendency for people to recommend levels of optimization that are unnecessary. This can cause undue frustration for mappers, which is a more serious problem than frustration for players, IMO, since frustrated mappers are less likely to continue mapping.

 

I don't mind seeing missions that are a challenge for my machine to run, as long as it's obvious they are a challenge because of their size and complexity, and not just sloppiness. Eventually my computer will catch up.

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+1

 

Getting good at optimizing in this is a challenge. Detailed scenes need to be very well thought out, all the way down to intersecting tris if possible.

 

It's tedious compared to just mapping away on dreams, but it soooo pays off to be thorough from the start, considering you can have your cake and eat it too... Visuals and performance ;p

Edited by Kvorning
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Obviously, this is not a debate that will be resolved until ca. TDM 4.07, when it just won't matter anymore since the game will run at 120 FPS on every possible type of contemporary hardware... and look dated no matter the resolution. Until then, people will have to differ.

Come the time of peril, did the ground gape, and did the dead rest unquiet 'gainst us. Our bands of iron and hammers of stone prevailed not, and some did doubt the Builder's plan. But the seals held strong, and the few did triumph, and the doubters were lain into the foundations of the new sanctum. -- Collected letters of the Smith-in-Exile, Civitas Approved

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Obviously, this is not a debate that will be resolved until ca. TDM 4.07, when it just won't matter anymore since the game will run at 120 FPS on every possible type of contemporary hardware... and look dated no matter the resolution. Until then, people will have to differ.

 

Lol. But yeah, improvements to TDM don't come as quickly as improvements to technology, so it's (slowly) becoming less of a problem.

 

Personally, working on my first map, I'm going to go through the optimization tutorial, do what I can, but probably ignore anything that's beyond me. It helps that it's a small map, I realize, but what Spring said about frustration in newer mappers is very relevant.

"Fancy burricks are afraid of dogs, if they encounter each other the dog barks and the burricks poop." - Thief: Deadly Shadows Game Designer

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Lol. But yeah, improvements to TDM don't come as quickly as improvements to technology, so it's (slowly) becoming less of a problem.

 

Personally, working on my first map, I'm going to go through the optimization tutorial, do what I can, but probably ignore anything that's beyond me. It helps that it's a small map, I realize, but what Spring said about frustration in newer mappers is very relevant.

 

If you ever get stuck with optimizing shoot Bikerdude a message and he should be able to help you out. He has helped me (and a lot of others) out a lot and I learned a lot of great techniques from him when he helped me release my first map. Now that i'm working on my second map a lot of his techniques are built in and makes things much better in the long run.

Edited by Goldwell
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I'm going to go through the optimization tutorial, do what I can, but probably ignore anything that's beyond me. It helps that it's a small map,

 

Yes, you don't have to worry as much about optimising small maps. As long as you use the corridor approach, with lots of corners to block long views, you don't even have to worry about it in medium maps. In A Reputation to Uphold, I used a couple tricks to optimize in one or two places where I had especially long views or lots of AI, but for the most part I just made sure I had good places for visportals. I never worried about how many drawcalls were being used or how many polys were in a scene, or even much about whether lights were overlapping. To do so would have sapped the life out of me.

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Me? I have three simple optimization principles.

 

1) no useless object should cast shadows. I usually disable shadows for everything except meaningful gameplay changing geometry, or something that obviously would look bad without shadows. Nobody is bound to notice. You can type "noshadows 1" into the entity inspector, multiselect all clutter objects in the room and assign the spawnarg to everything with a single click. Paintings, wall banners, stuff on a shelf.. They really do not need shadows!

2) Avoid having more than three overlapping lights in a room. This is really easy to control in DR. Select lights per room and check if the radii overlap too much. Reduce radii until they barely don't touch. I've noticed having smaller well placed lights makes the scene look more interesting, rather than a single big light.

3) Visportallize every door and every corner. Build with encapsulation in mind. Fake exteriors with skyboxes, do not do real large areas.

 

I do not feel they are any extra work as they are integral part of my mapping technique.

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Clipper

-The mapper's best friend.

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My point of view is more simple. I came to TDM from Dromed because I felt there was promise in a new fan project that could handle scale, interaction and detail better than the Dark engine, and because the editor was less painstaking to build with. (Both DR and TDM have advanced tremendously since then.) If I have to sacrifice the exact things TDM offered just to fit an arbitrary performance standard, then what use doing it?

 

While I have built my corridor-paradigm FMs in DR, and that's fine, I have also built Disorientation almost exactly five years ago (the anniversary of its release is this Sunday), and that is the kind of thing I want to be thinking about. Maybe I can't do something as sprawling and complex anymore due to being older and more busy with my life, but I want to build with that sense of scale and freedom again. My current mission is perhaps badly suited for visportals or whatever has somehow become more important than the actual game, and it has its performance problems, but it is the first (non-campaign) mission in a long time I can be proud of without reservations, because it does the things I wanted to do in TDM in the first place. That, to me, makes sense to do.

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Come the time of peril, did the ground gape, and did the dead rest unquiet 'gainst us. Our bands of iron and hammers of stone prevailed not, and some did doubt the Builder's plan. But the seals held strong, and the few did triumph, and the doubters were lain into the foundations of the new sanctum. -- Collected letters of the Smith-in-Exile, Civitas Approved

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At the end of the day, some missions may require more resources than others and not all mappers can use the

same building techniques (etc).

 

This is why I go on like a broken record about renderer fixes. Id Tech 4 is too reliant on mapper optimization.

We need to get someone like Robert Beckebans to work his magic and then this topic will be put to bed.

 

Maybe Obsttorte's renderer dabbling may help in the same way some day...

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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Vision and ambition over FPS, I say. -_-

I disagree with Melan. Vision is good. Ambition is good. Poor FPS is sloppy.

 

If the mapper can do simple measures to improve FPS, they should do them. Close vistas for compartmentalization (especially windows or similar stuff of low-gameplay importance), put stuff on noshadows, and that sort of stuff.

 

I have a decent rig, and almost all TDM missions run fine on my computer. I admit that experiencing really choppy areas provoke two thoughts in me: i) sloppy mission building, ii) urge to get out from the laggy area (even kill ai to get it it over with) or quit the mission.

 

This is really a shame if the mission was otherwise really good.

 

So FPS (map optimization) is important!

I have an ambivalent opinion on this matter. It is actually possible to do a lot of things in TDM building, but you have to know how to do it (which is the difficult part). I don't think you have to optimize every little thing in your map just to end up with two additional frames per second. But the more ambitious your project gets, the more you have to plan it and take performance into account.

 

Not carring about the way the engine works and how this will affect performance by stating that the vision is more important then the result is just a lame excuse. Don't get me wrong, I'm not stating Melan does this here.

 

On the other side, the level of optimization possible is obviously restricted, and sooner or later you gonna reach that limit. However, the more cautious you plan the higher that level is, and if I play a mission with bad performance and get the feeling this is due to the fact the mapper did not care about this matter at all or started caring about it too late, I'm sad.

 

It's not that I'm angry on the mapper like "bad mapper, you could have done better". But it feels like lost potential, not to mention that low performance may result in less people playing and enjoying the mission, which is bad.

 

What, however, makes me angry is if people are blaming the engine for their own lack of knowledge about it and for the performance issues resulting from it. This is the most easy way to go, and visionaries don't choose the easiest way ;)

FM's: Builder Roads, Old Habits, Old Habits Rebuild

Mapping and Scripting: Apples and Peaches

Sculptris Models and Tutorials: Obsttortes Models

My wiki articles: Obstipedia

Texture Blending in DR: DR ASE Blend Exporter

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Is the transition to 2.02 going to affect FMs in development? I ask because I'm probably not too far from completion on mine...maybe a couple weeks or so.

"Fancy burricks are afraid of dogs, if they encounter each other the dog barks and the burricks poop." - Thief: Deadly Shadows Game Designer

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The biggest impact is the sound fix. If you're using location entities in your map you will notice a big difference in how AI react to loud noises like yells for help. If you weren't using location entities then there will be no difference. There shouldn't be anything else that affects map-building.

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