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Lags?


maga

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I’ve got few interesting questions for you people. You made a great work. You transformed, ugly, shitlooking doom3 engine in to something similar to Thief. Fine.

 

But tell me, I’ve got PC that 3 years younger than this game (Doom 3) It is Intel Core2Duo E6300 OC to 3.0Ghz, with 1900XT and 2GB Ram. Why on this little street I see such low FPS? This street, it is not very detailed, it’s using muddy textures. And I’ve got here only 20-30 FPS? WTF?

 

 

 

doom32008030621304015ya6.th.jpgdoom32008030621310014hi8.th.jpgdoom32008030621312759nj0.th.jpg

 

 

Yes I’m playing on high quality in 1280x1024 with AAx4. But look at this

180g11024x640ng9.th.jpg

for example, Dark Messiah, it have much more detailed levels, much bigger and I’ve got there 60FPS with same resolution and AA, AF, 8 and higher.

 

 

 

What? There are no dynamic shadows? Well first of all, such shadows in doom 3 looks like shit because they are sharpened, and second is that in HL2 – EP2 We have soft real shadows.

 

So in conclusion I would like to say that idea of using such engine to resurrect or port Thief ideas was a very bad move.

 

We have got only two possible ways. First, all of us will buy something like 8800 Sly, or we will see such ugly blocky architecture like that

castleindoor08tz9.th.jpg

 

Because all other high poly places will simply lag.

 

Well we have some kind of unreal way, forget about Doom3 Engine and port all work to Source engine. Once again, there is some crew, they are making a full remake of original HL so they used united lighting model, but after ep2 they imported real shadows and real lightning in game, without any problems.

 

P.s. Guys, who make missions for Dark Mod, forget what you made under DromEd, such engine like dark mod needs new approach, more detailed. Cause same things which looked good under Dark Engine look ugly under DM.

 

 

Thank you very much for your patience and sorry for my strange English. Holland btw.

Edited by maga

Thank you very much for your patience and sorry for my strange English. Holland btw.

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Why on this little street I see such low FPS?

 

 

That's primarily due to the particle effects used to create rain. Particle effects, especially over a wide area, are very taxing.

 

Comparing TDM to other first person shooters is pretty pointless, as the amount of processing required for the AI to "think" in a way necessary for stealth games is much more processor-intensive.

 

or we will see such ugly squareness architecture like that

 

Ugly square architecture has absolutely nothing to do with performance. The D3 engine can comfortably handle massive number of polys, unless you throw in all kinds of complicated moving lighting.

 

So in conclusion I would like to say that idea of using such engine to resurrect or port Thief ideas was a very bad move.

 

Thanks for dropping by to tell us.

 

<various sarcastic remarks deleted>

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Well, other than your post seeming somewhat negative I'll say that some of the lag is due to unoptimized AI.

 

Some AI optimizing has been done since the release of Thiefs Den and it has helped increase framerate alot in some of the maps.

Dark is the sway that mows like a harvest

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Well, a troll has to hit a forum every now and then. Up until this point, I almost took it seriously:

 

... and second is that in HL2 – EP2 We have soft real shadows.

 

P.s. Guys, who make missions for Dark Mod, forget what you made under DromEd, such engine like dark mod needs new approach, more detailed. Cause same things which looked good under Dark Engine look ugly under DM.

 

Yeah, thanks for your valued opinion. Glad that you came along and told us this surprising news, because in all these four years we haven't noticed how bad a choice Doom 3 for our project really is.

Gerhard

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Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (which uses effectively the same engine as D3) has appearances/performance every bit as good as Dark Messiah.

928340_20070822_screen004.jpg

 

Just to second everybody else, most of the lag is coming from our (not yet optimized) AI. There's also the issue of us not fully utilizing normalmaps to allow us to decrease performance costs of models, so TDM's animation/lighting/shadow calculations take longer than they should. And finally a lot of our mappers aren't making optimized maps, which decreases what they can show while achieving good performance.

 

On the other hand jdude's most recent map looks gorgeous while running smoothly.

 

As for HL2 vs. D3, I've worked with both engines and greatly prefer D3...

  • HL2 requires you to spend several minutes/hours compiling your map's lighting just to see any minor adjustments or tweaks you made. In Doom 3, you can see a perfect preview of your map while you're editing it. I can't overstate how much of an enormous help and time-saver that is for mappers.
  • HL2 lets realtime shadows bleed through walls. No thank you.
  • HL2 also limits the creativity of mappers in terms of texturing/rendering, because its material system isn't nearly as flexible as D3's. When was the last time you could make volumetric clouds and moonlight in HL2 without support from Valve? D3 is sufficiently powerful that mappers can construct their own new effects such as detail textures, volumetric clouds/moonlight, relief-mapping, bloom, etc, without id's help. This is what TDM's skies can look like, without even having to resort to pixel-shaders.
  • HL2 also makes it a complete pain to do pipe-work. You have to model pipes in XSI or hope some other map's pipes are close enough to what you're looking for. In D3, you can easily create your own curves/pipes/etc right in the editor, and they'll be perfect for your map. ...though I will admit that HL2's terrain vertex blending tools are better than D3's, since HL2's are in-editor whereas D3's require a modeler.

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I've worked with both the HL2 engines and the D3 engines. Trust me, the D3 engine is much better to work with. The last release was laggy mainly due to some un-optimizations, this will be significantly corrected in the future trust me. The HL2 engine's shadows are severely SEVERELY limiting. The lighting is based on the old burn into the texture type and the new dynamic shadows recently implemented are just as laggy in terms of performance as the Doom3 shadows. A comparison cannot be drawn between the two engines, but I assure you that this type of game would not be applicable to the HL2 engine at all.

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Does HL2 support real realtime shadows now? When I checked about two years ago or so, there were no real shadows. They were quite buggy and faked. Most of the time it looked ok, but this was because of the mappers and not of the engine.

Gerhard

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That's primarily due to the particle effects used to create rain. Particle effects, especially over a wide area, are very taxing.

Weren't you guys going to implement a more traditional precipitation system, where particle effects are only rendered in a specific radius around the player?

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Does HL2 support real realtime shadows now? When I checked about two years ago or so, there were no real shadows. They were quite buggy and faked. Most of the time it looked ok, but this was because of the mappers and not of the engine.

 

I believe episode 2 featured real shadows on that emit from the flashlight, but the majority are still faked or burnt. The ironic part is it's still as taxing as the Doom3 shadows.

 

But believe you me :) it is nearly impossible to make a HL2 map that is as detailed as the interiors as Doom3 due to the extreme differences in the lighting of the engines.

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The flashlight in Episode 2 allows for the casting of shadow maps. They're fairly low resolution, but they use some sort of strange interpolation (or something) that produces some "weavelike" distortion that looks extremely strange up close. And, yeah, it's very slow -- even for a single light source.

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The only advantage of the source engine is the HDR-rendering I think. On that thought, I wonder why nobody ever introduced proper HDR to Doom 3. I mean, they also implemented relief-mapping, so why not HDR. I guess it's impossible, because I only saw a few fake-HDR mods for Doom 3 which use the bloom and some other things, but nothing special.

 

But hey, I played a couple of alphas/betas and most of them didn't run as smooth as the final product. (Not even close) So I wouldn't worry about that. Besides, when you guys will finally have finished TDM, everyone has a supercomputer with 20 Ghz at home and can easily play it... ;):P

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I'd say the only REAL advantage the HL2 engine has over the D3 engine, is something that we could easily change. That is that models become lower-poly at far-distances to free up poly space. That is about it and that could EASILY be implemented into the D3 engine.

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The only advantage of the source engine is the HDR-rendering I think. On that thought, I wonder why nobody ever introduced proper HDR to Doom 3. I mean, they also implemented relief-mapping, so why not HDR. I guess it's impossible, because I only saw a few fake-HDR mods for Doom 3 which use the bloom and some other things, but nothing special.

For the same reason that no implements shadow-mapping or lightmapping: that would require a rewrite of the renderer itself. To be more specific, true HDR requires floating point color values to be used throughout the render pipe. I'd have to do a bit of research to identify whatever else missing from D3E that is necessary for HDR, but I'm pretty sure that HDR requires deferred rendering for good performance.

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Ah I see. But I still don't think that HDR would be useless! You can realise much more with it than just bloom and it always makes every game look an inch more realistic (if it isn't overused).

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But just how much eye candy does a Thief-like game really need? The best of Thief has always been about gameplay. I just don't see the need to be saddling systems with ridiculous amounts of 'realistic' features. If I want a game to be that realistic, I'll go outside and play a game of soccer.

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So, still only 1 post count for you maga?

 

Some the responses have been a bit harsh, but your initial comments were harsh too, plus ignorant and judgmental. Still, you could say something now to somewhat redeem yourself, something like "yeah, I see what you guys are saying now, and I was too quick to judge at first..."

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