Monday 14 April 2014

Almost Last Day Of Testing

Work

I get the impression that the version we are testing is also the version the 'everyone else' will be getting and I must say it's holding up to tests. Over 50 sequential clicks at Test Game button without crashing, no memory issues, faster performance across the board, many small tweak conveniently squashed, and who know what other small benefits. I think our trio did quite well this last few weeks, and a good formula for the future.  

I 'could' list all the small tweaks, but as half of them where fixes for things that formerly worked, it's not going to make much sense as an isolated list.  I can report general improvements across the board, and certainly some improvements in performance when you set the shaders to LOWEST. 

I am most pleased with the stability and memory activity of the software however, which allows extremely prolonged sessions without worrying about memory fragmentation. Of course, plenty of more opportunities for optimization but as far as final builds go, I think this one is pretty special. The internal and core teams will be testing this for some of Tuesday AM and with a little luck we can release to the whole pledged world very soon after that. Wish I could provide some nice screenshots for you, but truth be told, the community are producing some awesome shots already I dare not attempt to challenge their authority in this matter.  

Beyond the beta release, we make our plans to improve the next 'most needed' feature which is scripting and AI. We have a little of both right now, but we want to inject super-powers into both systems and get the game play as stellar as possible for FPSC Reloaded. In additional to the myriad of minor tweaks and fixes, our big feature for the next release will be A.I so place your characters in your levels now in anticipation of the hideously smart intelligence we will bestow on them in the next major release. 

The whole team are pretty buzzed with the current beta and we hope you enjoy it too. If you have any comments on the version, you know where to post it.  Until the next blog post, enjoy!

21 comments:

  1. Can't wait!

    On the subject of AI, let me suggest taking a quick look at Kythera AI (http://kythera.ai/). It's a highly dynamic AI system using Recast and Detour (industry-standard AI navigation libraries) that would be amazing for Reloaded, but I don't know whether you think it's worth the time. Anyway take a look :)

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  2. If you can find me a price or license agreement for Kythera AI I will be happy to look into it further, but having spent ten minutes searching on their site and Googling it, it seems these details are secret. If you have to ask the price, you probably can't afford it ;)

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    1. Haha yeah, unfortunately that's probably the case.

      I did some further research, and not only did I not find any kind prices, I discovered that it's currently only integrated into CryEngine and is not a generic C++ library. My apologies for wasting your time on that. However, after some more research, I wonder whether implementing Recast and its companion, Detour, would be a really good solution.

      Recast generates the navigation mesh almost entirely automatically, based on the parameters you set (things like max slope, minimum width of doorways, etc.). Detour is a "path-finding and spatial reasoning toolkit". It can use any navigation mesh, but is designed specifically to go hand-in-hand with Recast.

      I pulled a zip of the latest version of the library from GitHub and built the documentation with DoxyGen (a 10 second process), and from a cursory reading, I would say the library is very well designed and is laid out in a straighforward manner. Plus I really like the directory structure (I know that's kind of silly but I find so many C++ libraries that have overly complicated directory structures).

      So anyway, I'm currently downloading Premake to build the project files so I can attempt to build the demo and see how the code works. Oh, and in case you didn't get this already, Recast is open-source and licensed for commercial use :)

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  3. Just installed and received an error:
    DirectX files not installed
    You need to reinstall this product as the required DirectX files are missing.

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  4. The current installer has DX installer inside it, but it has a bug which can detect DX9 and skip the DX installer, even though it may still be required for a system. For now, just visit: http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=35

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  5. Thanks Lee. That takes me to a 96.5MB download, and now it works.

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  6. Loading the first demo level gives me "the fpm file is corrupt", and then it hangs. Killed it with Task Manager. Started again, selected the second demo level, then pressed cancel. Again it hangs.

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  7. Could you confirm you are using the latest V1.006 BETA and that you deleted any previous "FPS Creator Reloaded" folder before you started the install process? If you could make a private video of launching the software, loading the level and the crash, that would be of great help to me, thanks!

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  8. Rebooted, started again, this time cancelled the start up screen, where I saw a message to restart, running as Administrator.
    Done that and now I can at least load a demo level - good news so far.
    I thought you had that whole "run as administrator" thing fixed?

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  9. No previous install on this PC. Downloaded v1.006 minutes ago.
    OS: W8.1 Update 1
    Hardware: Surface Pro

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    1. Seriously? You're trying to run ANY PC game on a tablet??

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  10. Reloaded still saves some things Program Files, which requires admin privileges. I actually like this behaviour, because I DON'T like the way most programs save stuff to My Documents or somesuch; crappy Windows security stuff....

    Sorry if none of that makes sense, I'm really tired right now.

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  11. Replies
    1. Haha well what did you expect? Although you may get better speeds (maybe 10-15 FPS) with beta six- wait, did Lee just say Beta 1.006?? *runs off to My Products page of TGC site* HE DID!! Beta 6 is here!! Downloading now!

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    2. low spec hardware like that is not supported at the moment. This was talked about before previously.

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  12. For the surface pro, try setting everything in test game to LOWEST, and switch off things like Reflection, Bloom dial down grass range and terrain size and see if that helps your FPS score. We are planning to follow the 'crappy MS security advice' for the next version which unfortunately means dumping stuff in the MyDocs folder but I will look to see if I can place the writable files in a friendlier place..

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  13. I just tried Beta6, and.....WOW. I have to say I am VERY impressed with the improvements! Well done Lee & Co! MUCH faster, MUCH smoother, enemies now see you from a (mostly) realistic distance, the guns now work to a greater distance (although I think there should be no artificial limits on ray distance....if I want to try to shoot my pistol at an enemy 1km away; even if it's unlikely I'll hit him, it should at least be physically possible).

    Found a few bugs that I'm sure you're aware of, but I'll point out anyway:

    1) With the sniper rifle, if you zoom in and then hold right-click whilst zooming back out, the FOV reverts to normal but the scope image stays on the screen.
    2) Also with the sniper, you can't unzoom whilst the character is working the bolt. This is bad because a common sniping technique is: Zoom-Aim-Fire-Unzoom-Run away while still working bolt.
    3) The Uzi plays the sound and animation of firing around about its real-world 600 rounds/min, but only fires 1 actual-bullet for about every 5-10 sound/animation-bullets.

    I might take a look at reworking some of those animations myself, as while most are great, some are a little weird.

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  14. Everyone asks if I'm serious about playing games on a tablet, and of course the answer is NO. However, this isn't playing a game, it's designing and building (primarily) the map for one. Is there explosions and other high resolution trickery? No. Are there enemies sucking up CPU time by their individual AI paths/goals? No. Music? No. Dynamic weather? No. Get my point?

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    1. I do get your point, but in general the CPUs are quite fast on tablets and can even match those in laptops, and those things that you listed are primarily CPU-based, so removing them makes little difference to the GPU load (and regardless, AI is really the only thing that would slow it down anyway). The GPU in a tablet will really struggle with producing any kind of game graphics and THAT'S why Reloaded runs poorly on your Surface Pro.

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    2. This comment has been removed by the author.

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    3. I don't know what your comment said, but the fact that you removed suggests that maybe I should apologise. I'm not trying to rile you, or call you stupid for running Reloaded on a tablet, I'm just trying to say that you shouldn't EXPECT it to run, that's all. So I apologise if I seemed rude... :(

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