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Hey

I've been with tgc through the rough and the smooth, since early days of dbc. I've always been impressed by their ease of use and verstility (except t3dgm but we'll ignore that!) but eventually gave up on DBPro after too many bugs and too long to fix them! This is not a criticism, I'm aware how difficult it is making this type of softweare, I have attempted it myself!

I have been interested in fpsc for a while now and following these forums tho not posting in them - but have recently tried the EA version on a fridns computer and the demo version on my own, and I have a few comments / questions.

1. The user interface is very good But why was it made in DBPro? Anyone who has tried to run 2 or more dbpro progs at once will know that this cause huge slowdown, hense why people are posting that their games are too slow, but work better as standalone... The interface could have easily been made in C++ with far quicker results....

2. Speed is an issue, but people alerady know that. Frame rates on even 3Ghz+ machines with monster graphics cards still waiver very easily. I appreciate its capped, but surely it should never need to go below 20 on such a machine?? PS I'm using a freshly formated hard drive with a new nstall of WinXP SP2... I'd be willing to bet that this is due to internal faults with dbpro, I tried many optimisations and for years I still coldn't get decent frame rates in busy medium poly games. Tech demos, yeah, but add any real interactivity and AI and it started to chug...

3. I am STRONGLY oposed to compulsory online regitration, as recently introduced to DBpro for many reasons, including the fact that my pcs aren't always online as I move them about a lot, and also that i reformat my pc all the blummin time! Also with dbpro, adding various plug ins caused all kinds of registration problems! Plus I feel if I've paid legitimately for a product people should trust me to use it!! Will V1 and above FPSC have these measures too?

4. Just how easy or difficult will it be to import & rig your own models into fpsc? I'm unlikely to ever use the included models (no offense to them tho they look nice!) I have read reports of it being very complicated to get them looking and scaling right - and animating them is reportedly a nightmare? Although from my brothers side of things, will the models included in fpsc be royalty free to use in your own DBPro games also? I know the t3dgm models weren't - (which was a shame, he loved the starwing style ships )

5. Why oh why oh why wasn't there a 3rd person mode added? We all know how easy it would be just to move the camera back and up a bit, and put a model there... The same box style collisions would be perfectly acceptable, I'm sure nobody would expect tombraider style actions available from an "FPS"Creator - but I've known many FPS with 3rd person modes, especially helps in jumping sections...

Anyway, hope this didn't sound like a flamebait - I'm still very interested in 1: How fpsc develops, and 2: how it helps fix bugs and spped up dbpro.

I'll certainly buy version 1 one it hits the shops - although I cincerly hope its a little faster!

Thanks, Kelly Kapowski

I'd be interested in hearing the answers to those questions too

bump that really bump that that needs answer that guy is
"smrt"

Good post Kelly,

Surprisingly no response from anyone from TGC.

***BUMP***

I would like to see a response also

1. It wouldn't say much for DBPro if Lee couldn't use it himself to write the software

2. Speed is pretty naff at the moment when running in Test Game mode it seems - although it shouldn't have anything to do with running two DBPro apps at once since the map editor closes whilst Test Game is active.

3. V1 is quite likely to have this but I couldn't be sure.

4. I'll let the artists answer that one.

5. FPSC was designed purely as a first person shooter creator. There is no player model at the moment AFAIK.

1. The user interface was written in C++ using MFC. What you see in the main window where all the action takes place is written in DB Pro. The interface basically sits on top of things and directs messages to and from the DB Pro based app. When you run a test game from the interface the map editor part written in DB Pro is terminated leaving only the interface running and then the game exe runs. There is only ever 1 DB Pro app running at once. Perhaps at runtime the interface is still taking up too many resources. I would be interested to see the kind of differences people end up with in frame rate from running from the interface and standalone.

2. There's a great deal we can do to improve the frame rate. As this is the EA version a lot of the optimisations have been left out. Between now and the release of V1 we have many opportunities to work on this and improve the rendering. I'm sure that we'll see good increases on this side of things.

3. I can't see V1 needing any kind of activation. I expect it will just work in the same way as the EA version - you buy online and get a serial code.

4. We could do with writing some info on this one. We also have the segment editor as well which has been held back for now. When this is released it will make importing models a fairly simple process. You will also be able to customise the segments in many different ways when the editor is released. You can do this now by editing some of the files manually but the segment editor will make this easier.

5. I like the idea of having a 3rd person camera . Will have to see what Lee and Rick think about this one.

Thank you very much Mike Johnson for the detailed responses here - all of which I must say are very encouraging - very good news and I hope that those things will come to fruition.

yes, nice post and nice response.
I'm glad the frame rate is being looked at.

Thanks for the bumps, I thought this post was lost, and thanks to Rob and Mike for the detailed responses

Some very good news there, especially that the full product shouldn't require online activation I hope that the same will apply if I buy a commercial liscence too? Or perhaps a dongle if a security measure is needed?

"I like the idea of having a 3rd person camera . Will have to see what Lee and Rick think about this one."
Ooh give em a push from me please - I'll be extra nice to em! Nothing complicated is needed, simply a possibility of a player model & 3rd person view, as i said often included in modern fps games - in fact the first game like this I can remember was DukeNukem3d on PC all those years back!

"will the models included in fpsc be royalty free to use in your own DBPro games also? I know the t3dgm models weren't "
I don't think anybody answered that, any word from TGC? Mike, Lee et all?

Otherwise good work guys keep it up