Work
Had a good meeting on Tuesday (got patted on the back twice, so as you can imagine I was instantly suspicious). The cause for celebration was the fact I have been hammering performance so much it now runs at 60 fps on an integrated graphics chip. Sure, it's a snazzy Intel HD 5000 chip, but it's still a far cry from a dedicated watt gobbling monster most gaming rigs are rammed with. It is the LOWEST shader levels, and I have some visual tweaks to make, but it's a great improvement over previous versions.
I also had a power cut today, all be it my fault as I invited an electrician to look at my antiquated consumer unit and his little box of tricks tripped the whole house. I was half way through an email too. The great news is that my PC, Monitor and main Hubs all remained powered, and the UPS device only showed about 25% drain after what must have been 30 minutes. Pretty good! My email was safe!
Today I have done a few things, listed out of context but of some interest. Sped up the reflection render by removing grass from all but the highest setting, stopped start marker texture from disappearing, save level no longer crashes under new DXT5 compression mode, modified simplest water shader technique to use a bluer blue, fixed the jutter and freeze when on water so the player can glide along it smoothly (water antics to follow after performance solved) and some smaller tweaks.
It's just gone midnight and I am tackling the water edge boundaries for AI characters so they can miss the waters edge altogether. Also investigating using the same technique to block off high hills so enemies cannot traverse over vertical cliffs to reach you. I am conscious however that I want an early-ish night to get up on Thursday in the AM for some parallel development work on some items for GDC so it's a tricky one. I will plod on some more and see where it takes me.
Finally finished coding at 3AM. Looks like another late start ;)
ReplyDeleteI'm so glad you are doing something about those gpu hogs of shaders. I hope the shadow shader takes less now.
ReplyDeleteFantastic news Lee.... I'm running the software on a dell laptop with an intergrated graphics card so am really looking forward to this update to see how my performance improves. I will post my old stats and new ones when the new beta is released. keep up the amazing work and thank you!!!
ReplyDeleteFantastic work Lee!
ReplyDeleteI know the focus is on DX9 for now and I saw a post hinting at a switch to DX11 at some point in the future. But with the arrival of DX12, would it not make sense to make the switch to this newer engine in the future? Our its the final decision still to be made?
If we went straight for DX12, there is the possibility we exclude Windows Vista and 7 (and maybe even Windows 8.0). I am not sure of the restrictions forced on us with DX12.
ReplyDeleteI agree. Currently, if you supported DX9 and DX11, EVERYTHING would be supported; DX9 for older hardware and DX11 for anything into the fairly distant future.
DeleteDX7?
DeleteHA! DX7?? Haha, NOTHING supports DX7 any more! DX9 has been around since 2002 and DX9.0c since 2004 so you'd have to have a seriously ancient card to require DX7 support. And besides, DX7 would not be capable of rendering the graphics Reloaded requires.
Delete@Lee
ReplyDeletewhat about OpenGl?
Since Valve released their Directx9 to OpenGL - Direct3D to OpenGL abstraction layer under the Mit License.
Here is the Link, maybe it can be useful
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/ToGL
(i have already posted this on the Feature creep but i guess ppl tend to overlook that are since its crowded)
At least we can talk about it and as there is a mobile support for reloaded to come, we should talk about it!
I doubt Reloaded has any market on mobile devices. It barely runs on PC as it is (although I'm waiting impatiently for the next beta for big speed improvements!) so it's not going to run easily on mobiles. And besides, it's difficult to play FPS games on mobile devices; they really are not suited at all.
DeleteI imagine a shift to mobile devices would be via AGK, and that already uses openGL. It's not got the features yet to implement anything like Reloaded though. I'm hoping V2 will add animation etc for 3D models soon. There is a convertor for getting classic FPSC maps into agk available, but I'm unsure of the speed it runs at.
ReplyDelete