Thursday 31 October 2013

Thursday BETA DAY

A Jack Daniels Day

It is days like this I feel entirely justified to buy myself a little treat by way of a small celebration drink (Bottle -Ed). Call it dutch courage for the ordeal ahead of me, known only to those souls who have released software into the world and bracing themselves for the whirlwind.  Despite my repeated disclaimers, notes and warnings, I will still get feedback of the most vehement nature. But that's fine too, it means people are passionate about their game creation, and quite rightly too!

The Launch

The official BETA1 launch occurred just before 9AM Thursday morning GMT and gave Brits and Euro types a few hours head start on any Americans not pulling an all-nighter. Such advantage is now the stuff of history as the downloads are proceeding at full kilter, and slowly melting our two file servers :)  The great news is that despite a few trips and stumbles, the server is holding up well and has braved the worst of the day one weather. My compliments to our server guy, Paul.

The Video

It was always my intention to create a whistle stop tour of the software once the beta was out the door, and so I have spent some of the day creating just that. As I write this, I have handed the raw footage over to Rick who will process it into something more presentable and should be with you soon. It's not comprehensive, but it does address questions put to us at this early stage in the beta testing process. Hopefully it will be a nice intro to what it is you've been downloading all day.

The Remainder

As I have a few hours of today left, I plan to take a tour through the blog comments, you tube commands, forum comments, twitter comments, Facebook comments and intermittent emails that constitute the reactions so far. I may also find time to fix one or two small bugs that have been squarely placed in front of me.

The First Patch

I have absolutely no doubt I will be releasing some sort of patch to BETA1 users before too long, so I have set my stall up to prepare for it. I am keeping away from adding new media, and focusing on producing a better executable. Tweaks, bugs, stability, compatibility, usability will all be under the spot light for the next few days. We'll deal with fancy new assets and features once we've absorbed the early bumps associated with any substantial release.

Signing Off

All in all, we're quite pleased with the launch so far, and we also know full well that the work has really only just started. On receiving the beta you are now enrolled into the official development team and your comments and feedback will now shape the future direction of this project. Of course we have ideas of our own, but as far as possible we want the community to decide the order in which these happen. We have some ideas how to organised that and you will know more once we've investigated and created the framework we have in mind (watch this space as it's going to be cool). In the meantime, tinker and play, create and destroy, get a feel for the current version and get those blue sky minds working to imagine what amazing new features you want to see in what has now become YOUR game creator.

We have a good start, and a LONG journey ahead of us. As they say, it's not the destination but the journey that's important. If that is indeed the case, let us never reach or final destination and continue on into the infinite horizons of possibility. Before such grand adventures though, let's make sure we have everything we need and most importantly, not leave anyone behind. This is your software now, so please let us know if it does not do what you need it to do. We'll take care of the rest ;)

18 comments:

  1. Hi lee(: Im experiencing alot of lag while in test game (can hardly walk around ) :/ im running windows 8 intel core i7 with intel hd 4000 integrated i can run most games on medium and some on high so i shouldnt be lagging this bad ... Im not sure what it is but i thought i would ask if this will be fixed in the next update ? i turned down reflections and shadows and im still experiencing hardcore lag ..

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    1. intel HD 4000 chipsets do not count as graphics cards and do not have the proper *type* of calculating ability to run something like this, a graphics card of the equivalent power should be able to run this

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    2. You should not expect Reloaded to run on an Intel HD 4000. In fact you should not expect Reloaded to run on any Intel HD chip.

      You should also not expect Reloaded to be able to run on an Intel HD chip for a long time, if ever. Intel HD chips are extremely limited. They may run some games at reasonable settings and speeds, but if the game (or in this case, Reloaded) tries to use more of the conventional abilities of normal graphics cards, the Intel chip will fail miserably.

      However I know Lee will be spending a lot of time on optimising even further, in particular the terrain polys.

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  2. Yes experiencing lag on HD 4000 is expected (and indeed all integrated solutions). It's the 350,000 polygons I suspect from the terrain system. Modern games run their levels through some intense optimizations to ensure polygon counts are tamed. Reloaded throws it all out there right now. I have a few integrated machines here including HD 4000 so will be able to study this issue first hand. Also try reducing your desktop resolution as fill-rate might also play a roll and many modern games switch you to full-screen mode to reduce the resolution for medium and high modes.

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    1. I am pretty sure that question is for another time :) There is some logic to a little work in this area as Reloaded sits upon this technology. We want to get Reloaded off the ground first and then we can look at maybe a kickstarter or crowd-funding campaign for DBP users.

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    2. Thanks Lee!!! You do amazing work anyway!

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  3. So far I put on approx 100 houses tree's approx 30. No lag at all and full settings on. Gtx660. It is awesome dude. Gonna come to Wales and buy you jd all night.


    Collision with trees is a problem and a few other houses I put into the library. Looks good but I can walk through some parts of the house and can't get near trees. Just incase you were unaware. But it is a titan piece of software. Not sure how to sort day and night out except f9 -11 looks awesome

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  4. Congratulations and thanks for the Beta 1 release and all the hard work Lee.

    Have a great Halloween Night and enjoy your Bottle.

    :-)

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  5. One very weird bug I've noticed is that if you have more than one monitor and you drag the FPSCR window to the other screen after it's started and then run a test game:

    https://www.dropbox.com/s/idg8725xbeienad/multimonitor.jpg

    Anyway there are probably more pressing issues than that. Overall, I'm very impressed with Reloaded. It's a hell of a start.

    Also, the player seems to sort of glide around a bit, rather than walk. But again, it's not fatal.

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  6. Ensure you use W,A,S,D keys not ARROW KEYS. The arrow keys are a smoothed camera mode for video recording. Something Rick wanted ;)

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  7. Simple DEMO :)
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnCZyLx1qPg&lc=fCI9jssNiCEegl_5j_dALxsVF-JyCGOf4j4i14Yu440

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  8. "The arrow keys are a smoothed camera mode for video recording. Something Rick wanted"

    Goo idea I did not think of using them for that purpose, but should be very helpful now thinking about it. Nice one.

    :-)

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  9. Lee making Reloaded is like going up a hill but coming down a mountain.LOL
    Its not Jack Daniels you should be drinking your in Wales, get that 200 year old bottle of Glenlivet. Congrats.
    We need to start crowd funding for the 200 year old bottle of Glenlievt for Lee.LOL

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  10. Hmmmm...Glenlievt. Takes me back!

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  11. @Lee: You're using BlitzTerrain, right? Are you using "BT SetTerrainQuadReduction g_TerrainID,1"? That should automatically remove any unnecessary polygons from flatter areas.

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  12. I quickly added that command and it added 2000 polygons :) Don't worry my investigations continue.

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  13. Hmm...strange. I'd ask kaedroho (BT creator) about it if I were you. It's meant to remove polygons, not add them ;)

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