My first map – questions & work in progress

[peter_spy]

Ok, so it's a bit more complicated with my laptop. While I can have pretty high number of drawcalls and triangle count:

 

 

it's the shadows that bring the hardware to its knees, just like Steve said. I will most likely hit the shadow limit before any triangle or drawcall limit, so all I have to do is to stay below 130k per scene:

 

 

Which seems like a a pretty generous limit. So far my scene has around 15k for shadows. And this is all without SEED, so there should be some room for improvement as well. All in all, that's definitely good news

[Springheel]

A shadow count of 130k is quite high. I always recommend less than 100k at most, preferably < 80k. Though from lots of testing, there isn't any magic bullet...sometimes the numbers interact in unusual ways, and performance can rise and fall when there doesn't appear to be much reason for it.

 

Kind of pointing out the obvious, but if you work with loads of meshes, you have to use SEED.

 

 

I suspect SEED is highly under-used. Partially because the documentation for it is, at least for me, extremely unhelpful. Case in point, the "Seed -- combining entities" page does not actually explain how to use SEED to combine entities.

[nbohr1more]

A shadow count of 130k is quite high. I always recommend less than 100k at most, preferably < 80k. Though from lots of testing, there isn't any magic bullet...sometimes the numbers interact in unusual ways, and performance can rise and fall when there doesn't appear to be much reason for it.

 

 

I suspect SEED is highly under-used. Partially because the documentation for it is, at least for me, extremely unhelpful. Case in point, the "Seed -- combining entities" page does not actually explain how to use SEED to combine entities.

 

Yeah, that article needs to be updated with the actual implementation here:

 

http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=SEED_-_Watching_entities

[Springheel]

 

Yeah, that article needs to be updated with the actual implementation here:

 

http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=SEED_-_Watching_entities

 

I read that one too, but even that doesn't help much. Most of it explains when and why you might want to combine entities, but it doesn't actually explain how to do it. There's one reference to a SEED entity, but nothing about where to find it or how to use it.

[peter_spy]

I didn't understand much of it either. I actually used the watch entities option. All you have to do is surround your scene with brush,right-click, create SEED entity, create link from SEED to one instance of a model and put the seed_watch_brethren 1 property in it. It reduces drawcalls a lot, shadows and model tris go down too. It probably could do wonders with things like grass and forest missions.

 

I agree on 80-100k, those test don't involve AI and other calculations, so having more overhead is always a good idea.

[Spooks]

I await to see the SEED implementation used practically in a map. If you use seed_watch_brethren and turn g_showEntityInfo on, you'll see that SEED combines entities as it pleases, meaning entities that aren't practically next to each other will have wild bounding boxes that will, no doubt, show up through VPs and overdraw.

 

Another thing is the wiki mentions using hide_distance, but when all your entities are combined into one all of them hide at once. I tried to SEED combine the fencing in Parkins' house in KOD when devving it only to find that as a fun surprise.

[Obsttorte]

It also depends the specific hardware used. The bottlenecks can vary depending on that.

 

But in general your observations meet the expectations. idTech4 is good at dealing with lots of tris. Shadows are the real performance killer. (This and bad visportalization).

[Springheel]

Another thing is the wiki mentions using hide_distance, but when all your entities are combined into one all of them hide at once. I tried to SEED combine the fencing in Parkins' house in KOD when devving it only to find that as a fun surprise.

 

 

Ah, well that answers a question I had. Not useful for me then.

[nbohr1more]

As I take it,

 

Well, in the world of SEED "cull_range" takes on the same role as "hide_distance" according to the docs.

I haven't tested whether that works any better though.

 

As for the workflow:

 

• In DarkRadiant, create a brush the size of the area you want to cover
• With that brush still selected, and select Create entity and select Darkmod/Info/atdm:seed

Note:
If you want to resize the SEED entity after creating it, select it with SHIFT + and press TAB to select the brush, then resize it normally.

The next steps could either be for existing entities inside the SEED brush or you could add new entities now.

 

Link each entity from the SEED entity by selecting first the SEED, then the entity, and then press CTRL+K.

 

Add combine, cull_range, (etc) spawnargs to either the (target) entities or the SEED entity (depending how granular you want to get with what is controlled by SEED).

[peter_spy]

Maybe I did something wrong, because I could never resize SEED brush after I created the entity. Nvm, tab option works. Also, you should use SEED at the very end of your mapping process, because if you start cloning meshes within it, weird things can happen. At some point I cloned the lamp mesh in my map, it wasn't even linked to SEED, and when launched the game, I had over 21M tris worth of lamps at my ceiling.

Edited June 8, 2017 by Judith

[HMart]

Don't know if this is true anymore, but when i was playing with making my own TDM mission, i saw that some light prefabs add a light for any single candle and all of them casted shadows, causing a really ugly shadow crisscross on the floor, and we all know what happens in this engine when many lights hit the same surface at the same time, that is totally the wrong thing to do, it should be one light for one prefab, no matter if the model has 20 candles, just imagine how much light those 20 candles would cast and make the single light size accordingly to that.

 

Btw imo a good way to cut on shadow casting, and I've said this before, is to follow what Frictional Games does, even tho they use a deferred shading render (so they can have many more, non shadow casting and small lights, then TDM at one time) they still suffer from the same limitation for shadow casting lights, what they do is give a importance scale for their lights in the scene, the hero lights (one or three) are the most prominent the ones that illuminate the most and the ones that cast big and obvious shadows, for example a skylight window in the ceiling casting lighting and shadows into a room, a open window casting moon light into a big corridor, a fire place casting big scary "dancing" shadows, etc, then all the other small lights don't cast any shadows, a light illuminating a painting, a unimportant candle on a small table in the corner, etc, is not perfect i know and one thing that TDM lacks that FG games add (after penumbra) was SSAO, this helped ground the objects even if they didn't casted any shadow.

[peter_spy]

That's definitely a waste, if you have multiple light models (like candles) in a small area, they should just be models, and you should use one source of light for them all. Model + light combo is useful when that source of light is one of the major ones in the scene.

[peter_spy]

Ok, I did one more test on my desktop PC to see the hardware gap between it and my laptop, in terms of number of overlapping lights. As I expected, it's huge. GTX 1060 can handle 32 36 overlapping, shadow-casting lights, + ambient + fog, before framerate goes below 60, in 1440p. Definitely not going to exploit that in any way, although that hardware is going to be cheaper someday, which means more freedom for mappers. For me it's more freedom in lighting design now, and making some adjustments later.

 

Edited June 10, 2017 by Judith

[HMart]

Judith please on take this wrong but imo that is hardly a fair test, there's no AI, no sound and portal calculations, no particles, the amount of polys is also relatively low, i don't see any shadows either, on that small square scene there's no doubt that idtech 4 would be able to eat overlapping lights, the render is very well optimized but do the same on a real scene and you will see overlapping lights capability falling really fast.

 

Btw imo you can light a scene really well with a minimum amount of lights, if you are just careful with light size and clever with the play of light and shadow, personally I don't want a TDM scene to be really well illuminated, shadows should exist for the player to hide in.

[peter_spy]

Yeah, we talked about this on Discord yesterday. Placing a just a few shadowcasting objects brings the framerate down, and the number lights goes down to 18. Which is still a lot, but I won't be using that much anyway. The idea is to try to pinpoint general scene complexity, both in terms of lightning and geometry, and to get stable 60 fps on my desktop, and at least 30 fps on my old laptop.

 

As for good lighting, it requires either fake GI and lightmaps, or using multiple lights to simulate light bounces, so that's mostly what those tests are for. In "real-life" situations, on my laptop fps goes down to 45 with just two overlapping lights, so I'm trying to find something in-between.

[peter_spy]

Man, I haven't bumped this thread in ages. I could do an asset dump, but I'll leave that for later, as mesh tileset for corridors is almost complete

 

Now I'm working on my first door, and I have problems with default frob settings. The small grate below is on hinges, with origin point placed on the side, to make it snap to grid better, and go along with the door. The thing is, frob uses origin point, and it kind of flickers on and off when I approach the grate:

 

 

My question is, do we have a command to see frob bounding box in-game? And, is there a way to model frob box, e.g. like a collision model? That would make things easier and more controllable than tweaking some numbers, at least for me.

[Bikerdude]

I could do an asset dump,

Look forward to that.

[Obsttorte]

 

do we have a command to see frob bounding box in-game?

tdm_frob_debug_bounds

[peter_spy]

Thanks Obs, this might come in handy. For now, I decided to have this little box in the middle, so when player looks at the center of the grate, frobing wil be a bit easier.

 

If during playtests people will report problems with shooting stuff through the grate, I'll change it so it doesn't allow any object through.

Edited January 6, 2018 by Judith

[peter_spy]

I'm making candles right now, and I guess I'll have to give them some basic functionality like flame and smoke particles, as well as the ability to be extinguished by player, whether by frob or water stim. Any idea where I should start looking that kind of stuff? I tried to use candle_tall as a reference, but couldn't find it, neither in defs nor in light scripts.

[Destined]

"candle_tall" can be found in tdn_moveable_candles.def

In this file I would have a look at the entry "atdm:moveable_candle_base_sp". This is the base entity for the moveable candles and has a couple of comments that might help you further.

[peter_spy]

Thank you! I'll look into it as soon as I finish sculpting base models.

[peter_spy]

So, almost a year later, here's the model set that will be released sometime later in 2019. I didn't know quite a few things back then, so I'll probably fix the errors first.

 

 

Edit: not sure why it came out so blurry, but the Artstation screens are sharper https://www.artstation.com/artwork/gJPEzL

Edited February 4, 2019 by Judith

[Petike the Taffer]

So, almost a year later, here's the model set that will be released sometime later in 2019. I didn't know quite a few things back then, so I'll probably fix the errors first.

 

Cool Builder props ! All your work ? These'll look really nice if included in the next building modules release or as main assets.

 

If I may nitpick one thing, isn't the Builder quote on that decorative stone slab potentially copyrighted ? It comes from a Thief cutscene, so I'm not sure whether it breaks copyright or doesn't. You might want to ask demagogue or Springheel, if you're still using it.

Edited February 4, 2019 by Petike the Taffer

[peter_spy]

Yup, that's all built from the ground up.

 

You're right about the quote, it was a placeholder and I forgot to change it. I'll either make a few skins with a few proper TDM world quotes, or distribute it with .xcf files, so people can easily put their own texts there.