So, what are you working on right now?

[HMart]

On 3/22/2023 at 12:43 AM, MirceaKitsune said:

Thanks, that is good to know. Only issue I noticed with deforming glass is any other glass material seen through it will be invisible which can look ugly. Performance wise it's still good, volumetric lights remain the biggest hit so far though that's also manageable. I have a pretty crazy visportal setup which can look scary due to the quantity used but is actually working quite well.

Those pics look very good.  

About glass behind glass, that is a problem in all game engines, using rasterization, no matter how modern they are, is a limitation of rasterization itself, is not impossible thou, there's a trick to make it work called "Order-independent transparency" but afaik is complex and demanding and apart from a very old AMD (or was it Nvidia?) demo, I never saw any game use that trick, specially not now that real time raytracing is a thing.

Thou on the link I posted it says the ancient Dreamcast console add special hardware for OIT. 

[AluminumHaste]

I posted a demo from Humus a while ago, would take quite some work to get the technique added.

[JackFarmer]

On 3/29/2023 at 8:54 AM, kin said:

This mission sounds like 2023 winner, or is it to early to tell? Is there a release date?

This depends on my progress. If I can finish the world building for the last mission until the end of April, then a December release might be possible. Though, I am bit exhausted of mapping and thus did not do anything this week.

[MirceaKitsune]

Market area and restaurant with the basic outside detail done. It was thankfully easy to create a colorized / toggleable version of the new lampion model: Only disadvantage is you don't see a light source inside which sucks a little, might end up using a flame like for candles later. The ones on strings swing which gives off a nice effect as the light moves around!

[thebigh]

Very nice, Mircea! Looking forward to seeing this released.

[datiswous]

On 3/29/2023 at 8:54 AM, kin said:

This mission sounds like 2023 winner, or is it to early to tell? Is there a release date?

Yes @JackFarmer this has to be better than Seeking Lady Leicester. No pressure

Have you figured out how to do the mission intro? I thought you said earlier the guy who did that (partly) for you isn't around anymore? Sorry if incorrect.

[JackFarmer]

8 hours ago, datiswous said:

Yes @JackFarmer this has to be better than Seeking Lady Leicester. No pressure

Have you figured out how to do the mission intro? I thought you said earlier the guy who did that (partly) for you isn't around anymore? Sorry if incorrect.

Your reminder is correct, but I now have a newcomer on hand who is doing training in this direction and is now helping me. The SSL video was made with Premiere; however, for the HHBAM briefing videos we will prolly switch gears and make the whole thing with Fusion or AE.

[JackFarmer]

@MirceaKitsune

How many draws in here?

[datiswous]

So I think I post it here as well then, because I think it's pretty cool:

A while back (2011) grayman posted about an option to have multiple starter locations in a mission and select the starter position from a list in the briefing. This is documented in the wiki.

Unfortunatelly the modified gui file grayman made for this got lost and the functionality got broken in 2.10. This was recently fixed by stgatilov (2.12 dev16789-10349), but the gui file remained lost.

With some help I created a text-based mainmenu_briefing.gui with a mission starter location screen with 3 locations (but you can make as many as you want):

So this is based on the textbased mission briefing, while grayman's version was based on the Button Controlled Animated Briefing originally made by Sotha. But it can probably be added to that as well.

Edited April 6, 2023 by datiswous

[datiswous]

Here is the testmission, with the modified mainmenu_briefing.gui in it for testing.

You need at least 2.12 dev16789-10349 to make this work.

mission1.7z

Edit: Btw. the missiontext is a lie, because the mission starts without weapons, so you can't knockout the guard.

Edited April 6, 2023 by datiswous

[thebigh]

[irrelevant remark]...I always thought it was grain spilling out of that bag.[/irrelevant]

[datiswous]

I was thinking, not sure if relevant, but you could trigger things like scripts and stuff based on what location you start, so it only triggers if you started there and thus give you an unique experience. 

[MirceaKitsune]

18 hours ago, JackFarmer said:

@MirceaKitsune

How many draws in here?

What was the command to check? I haven't added most of the actual detail so it will likely increase. I positioned my lights strategically and visportal everything quite aggressively thus I'm not worried: At the moment I'm not dropping under 60 FPS anywhere which is a good sign.

I added some pockets for the stalls where I'll probably have moors selling food (decoratively obviously). Also remodeled the open-air restaurant / cafe thingie to be more fancy and detailed, tables and AI and such will be added much later.

[JackFarmer]

2 hours ago, MirceaKitsune said:

What was the command to check?

 

con_noPrint 0

followed by

r_showPrimitives 1

 

 

[MirceaKitsune]

5 hours ago, JackFarmer said:

con_noPrint 0

followed by

r_showPrimitives 1

Thanks. Hopefully within working limits? That does seem like quite a few tris... probably the stall gates albeit I use distance LOD for those, though even that doesn't explain why it would say nearly 2.000.000 especially when there's barely anything in view I believe I have portals thought up accordingly too, they're actually even denser in some areas:

[MirceaKitsune]

About the same on the first city hub, seems I don't escape the one million mark there either. Surprisingly though I get pretty good FPS which is why I didn't think much about it. May need to think if and how I can better optimize.

[datiswous]

10 hours ago, datiswous said:

I was thinking, not sure if relevant, but you could trigger things like scripts and stuff based on what location you start, so it only triggers if you started there and thus give you an unique experience. 

Another idea I had is that you could make multiple missions in one mapfile. This could be like a campaign, but players can play the missions in the order they want. So it could be taken place in one area but with different storylines etc. , but the sections of every starterlocation could also be completely in different area's that can not be accessed from the other starterpoints. Not sure about load-time though.

[thebigh]

How would that work with loot count?

[datiswous]

1 hour ago, thebigh said:

How would that work with loot count?

For the total loot count it might not work. I don't know if you can remove loot from a mission at start via a script.

[datiswous]

How does this look? This is the button controlled mission briefing that I just modified.

The image now also changes with every option.

Might as well make a package with all 3 current options..

Edited April 8, 2023 by datiswous

[datiswous]

And this is what the Timed Flowing Briefing looks like after modification. You have to click the cross to skip the briefing, instead of click somewhere on the whole screen. For the rest it works the same.

[JackFarmer]

8 hours ago, MirceaKitsune said:

About the same on the first city hub, seems I don't escape the one million mark there either. Surprisingly though I get pretty good FPS which is why I didn't think much about it. May need to think if and how I can better optimize.

The problem with the FPS counter is that it is quite unreliable when it comes to determining how the game runs on other computer configurations. Therefore, you should always use the previously mentioned commands to check. It might also be a good idea to do some kind of alpha performance testing. @Zerg Rush machine is a kind of benchmark for me; if the game runs badly on his machine, then many others will have problems as well in my experience.

How this is to be evaluated technically, I don't know exactly either, and I've heard several opinions on why certain things are very demanding. My experience is just:

1. Keep light radii in larger scenes as small as possible and preferably not overlapping.
2. Too many entities in large scenes have bad effects - use LOD where possible.
3. Design portals in such a way that they close. In one of your screenshots you can see only closed portals on the right side and a large number of open portals on the left side, which raises the question what these portals are supposed to do and what would also explain the number of draw calls.
4. Duzenko says that Draw Calls should always be around 2,500 - Springheel once said that they should not be above 4,500. However, I have noticed in beta tests that some people had problems with their computers when the draws were over 4,500.
5. Shadow count should be (as Springs once mentioned) below 80,000. I also noticed that this has a big effect. This can be reduced significantly if you proceed as described in "1." above. But your shadow count is zero. Can this be correct or is this defective? @nbohr1more

 

Edited April 8, 2023 by JackFarmer

[thebigh]

5 minutes ago, JackFarmer said:

The problem with the FPS counter is that it is quite unreliable when it comes to determining how the game runs on other computer configurations.

I agree. It's one reason why I maintain an absolute potato to test missions on, because that's where the performance issues will show up first and most severely.

[HMart]

John Carmack the main idTech 4 developer once said, "best way to mesure performance is not FPS numbers but frame timing" and I agree, we tend to mesure game performance by counting higher and higher fps's but you can have a very responsive and playable game at 30fps, if the frame timing is constant and a very lagging game if not, even if the fps numbers are 60 or higher. 

And today in the age of Nvidia DLSS 3 AI frame generation, FPS numbers, are imo becoming irrelevant, hardware unboxed found that with DLSS 3 you can have a game, for example show 120fps but feel almost exactly like a 60fps game (because is the speed the game is really running at, DLSS 3 is just inserting fake frames between each real one and artificially upping the frame rate).  

[jaxa]

No single number can tell the whole story, but if you know what the 1% lows are, and then cap your framerate below that, you're probably OK.