The above posts were really useful in identifying problems, thanks everyone
Rob K
* "A "modest" spec would be say 1.2Ghz P4 / 256MB RAM / GeForce 4MX"
Yes I think you're right. By moddest I meant its hardly top of the range, and many users here have a higher spec PC than mine. Bearing in mind how quickly such technology evolves and how this game is aimed at a high range, but won't start to be commercially viable for a few months (even then It would be a budget release!) Perhaps the reason I think of my PC as "modest" is that If I try and run Halo or Far Cry, it is unplayably slow even on low resolutions. My game runs far better than these do (for iobvious reasons
)
However the spec you mentioned is roughly the same as the lowest PC I have at home, which as I said, runs the game well at medium settings
"Also the game is definately indeed of some optimisation."
Yes thats agreed. I have said there is a lot of optimisation needed, I really rushed some of the coding, and it shows! I have plenty of ideas of how to improve this in later releases though
"It looks nice but I have a Radeon 9700 Pro graphics card here and it chugs at about 5-10FPS. I have a 1.6Ghz P4 CPU btw."
Wow that surprises me to have such a low frame rate on such a decent gfx card. But its very useful as this suggests to me that perhaps the CPU is under more strain from my game than the graphics card. Yet again I shall blame that on my lazy rushed programming
"You have put a lot of work into this and its unfortunate that there are some issues at the moment, once you get them worked out this will be very impressive - Hope I didn't deter you too much."
Thank you! And no not at all these are exactly the kind of posts that are useful. You are right that I have put in a lot of work, but its only a weeks worth, and I was very ware it needed a lot more to be done before it would be ready for mass use
It was more a test to see what I coulod achieve in a week. But with the many positive comments I've got Im not spurred to work at making it a finished product, along side the other work I'm doing for people :
Esc
"Ran pretty slow here also. Got a 2.53 gig processor and 512 megs of ram plus a radeon 9700 pro, so I was kindof surprised at how slow everything was moving."
Ok thats very surprising, perhaps its an issue with radeon cards, as all my cards are low end Nvidias, and work fine. Don't want to start a ATI vs NVidia arguement though, I am sure I can optimise it a whole lot more anyways.
"It looked very nice, though, and it has a lot of potential if you can manage to optimise it some."
Thanks! Yes I hope too get it a lot tighter
"Also, if you want some nice animated caustics for the underwater section..."
If you put it on the highest detail settings, the caustics DO animate already
But thatnks, yes thats a cool tool, I've seen it around here before.
MikeS
"The intro and music was nice. Menu's were good also. (A nice atmosphere to start the game) I can also see you've included many future options (mods, more game modes, settings,etc.) and this definitly has high potential."
Thank you. Yes I have tried to realise this as a good all round package of a game for its eventual release. I'm especially keen to have it moddable for people, this adds so much logevity to FPS style games. Incidentally many of the modes are already at least half coded, its coming on well. I want to put the effort into decent level design, AI and story mode
"whenever you get some free time I'd love to talk about lighting with you."
I'll drop you an email this evening
"I'll check this post frequently to see updates and download a new demo.(If you release)"
Thanks, do. I will be updating this, I definitely will finish it, not sure when. I have lots of good contacts for giving away OEM versions, magazine versions, budget game distributers, Digital download distributers etc. If I can eventually make a steady stream from it I'll be excited to make more projects on a lrage scale like this. I already have plans for a retro pack (3d nice looking versions of pacman, space-invaders, breakout & tetris) an Arcade style racing game, a futuristic racing game, an urban racing game, a War style FPS with vehicles, and a fantasy RPG and RTS. All of which I would like to work hard on to finish and release through similar routes. I want to get this project finished first though, one at a time, not what I usually do, which is do everything at once and finish nothing!
"Also, if it's any assurance I'm sure you'll get some good free marketing for your game if you submit some screenshots for the TGC newsletter."
Yes I'd like this. Perhaps it'd be better to wait until its properly playable. Another good quality commercial game could really boost the DBP community
Walaber
"I was pretty impressed with the game/demo. all of the afformentioned bugs/intentional stuff aside, the game looked pretty nice."
Thank you! Glad you liked it
"did run pretty slow on my system but it was difficult to tell if the movement is just slow, or the framerate was the problem."
A bit of both I wager! It definitely needs optimisation anyways, but the actual game controls run as standard, so its faster anyways
"the level is just too dark in my opinion..."
Yes, I'll add a gamma control, obviously from what people are saying my monitor & card must be quite bright, there isn't a single area of the level thats pitch black on my machine
However, the levels in the game are split into three major groups, on space ships (very bright corridors) or planet surfaces (usualy very bright) or under the planets surfaces in underground caverns/tunnels (dark) guess which level type this one is?
"I'd like to see it with moving enemies, full controls, etc!"
I should post another demo with everything back in place in a week or so. I'm gonna work hard on optimising it properly to see if I can get better performance from people's PCs
it'll be chalenging lol
Raven
"On my Duron which is a fairly adverage low-end system, the game pushed a respectable, if not seemingly unplayable 16-22fps.
On my Athlon64 it was very nice and smooth running at nearly 200fps."
Good! I'm glad. This was the kind of performance I was expecting from your two systems
"Now something interesting I noticed, which I was very surprised at was when I changed the graphics mode, i gained almost nothing in speed; infact I noticed that running FSAA 4x even on the FX5200 i saw basically no performance hit.When I changed processor though, that was an entirely different story. So I have a feeling that this game actually depends far more on the processor your using as it has processor intensive tasks."
I think you may be bang on there. My lax programming I'm afraid. Lots of code in there can be optimsed much further and I was very aware of that when I posted, hense the apology. My findings above back up your suspicions of Processor intensive stuff rather than graphically intensive. The only really strong hit I've noticed is on cards with less than 64mb ram, which is unheard of now for a serious gamer I wager.
"For the game itself, my monitor is set to 50% Brightness and 100% Contrast... even by setting the Digital Vibrance this game still appeared a lil too dark to me, which is worrying as often my 'a lil dark' = black to most other people. So you may wish to put in a gamma control."
Lol yes I've already said I would do this. Seemingly my set-up is a load brighter than everyone else's
"Another problem i saw was whenever you shot the gun for a split second a DBP command appears on the screen progressively falling each time. Although a lil amusing you might wanna make sure you don't have any print commands"
Aha I hadn't noticed that. Yes I'll clear that. 2d commands such as text seem to kill frame rates in DBP for me.
"When I got underwater, you've obviously opted to do the caustics as an overlay mesh rather than as a blended texture."
Yes I have. That is because the lighting detail is already a blended texure on the object.
"I think you would gain a much better effect if the caustic was had a faint transparency and cube mapped onto that area of the level. It also mean you wouldn't have to double up the polygons."
Yes, a cube map would be a good solution, although in my current level setup, that wouldn't be exactly possible. I am re-writing how the level will be stored and loaded though, so perhaps that will be a good thing to add when I change that. As a side question do you get any cliping between layers? I don't get any on any of my low end Nvidias, but a friend of mine with a FX5900 does
"the controls were although reponsive, unless you do hit close to that magic 60fps mark it really doesn't move like it should.
Have a feeling you've not setup a timer loop for controled movement."
No I'm not yet. This is because when I'm developing it I let it run as fast as it wants to, swo that I can notice any major lapses as I add stuff. For this release I just capped the framerate at 60 and hoped lol Lazy I know but I wouldn't dream of actually relasing a game like that, its just a time thing, as I said I would release on Monday so I felt I should
You are right though, any lerss than 60 nd the controls go all out
"Aside from a few minor bugs like that it was pretty decent. Look forward to v0.2"
Thank you! I hope I can make the next version a lot faster and more fully featured. Its the engine optimsation thats important though, everything else will fall into place quite easily then. Just a case of making decent levels etc after that.
Thanks everyone, very positve posts, all useful
The forum user formerly known as Kangaroo2.
If the appocalypse comes, email me
