[Diaz]

What the hell, lol....

I was suspecting you could have loads of Polymer lights as long as their radius was small and the number of objects affected low, but I wasn't expecting it to be true to this extent...

Just look at the number of lights and the framerate....

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[Tea Monster]

Holy crap! So what has everyone else been doing wrong then?

[Diaz]

Tea Monster, on 22 April 2012 - 02:36 PM, said:

Holy crap! So what has everyone else been doing wrong then?

I guess using higher radius lights, which causes many objects to be redrawn for each light; that's assuming I'm understanding how lights work, of course.

[Danukem]

Diaz, on 22 April 2012 - 02:40 PM, said:

I guess using higher radius lights, which causes many objects to be redrawn for each light; that's assuming I'm understanding how lights work, of course.

In that shot you have a simple map area with some models (the arcade machines). My understanding is that the complexity of the map, and especially having lots of child sectors, greatly reduces performance and increases the amount of light calculations. On the other hand, Polymer handles models very well. So my guess is that the good performance there has more to do with the map than the radius of the lights.

[Fox]

But the map itself is converted in a model of sort. But I guess a detailed map is a complex 3D structure no matter what.

[Mblackwell]

Note: The number of objects visible across sectors slows the engine down regardless of the number of polygons in them. 1024 objects with 10k polys will be slower than 100 objects with 102,400 polys. Sounds strange maybe but the engine (Polymer) is a beast when it comes to rendering each polygon, it's the separate objects that make more of a difference in speed.

[Tea Monster]

Is there any way to run some kind of "pre-compile" on the map while the level is loading? Maybe you could run this as a seperate process before hand?

[Danukem]

Tea Monster, on 22 April 2012 - 05:03 PM, said:

Is there any way to run some kind of "pre-compile" on the map while the level is loading? Maybe you could run this as a seperate process before hand?

BUILD maps don't ever get compiled. It's one of the best features of the engine and allows for great versatility and ease of mapping. The ability to change things on the fly in-game is also pretty awesome. When you realize that all the Polymer lights have to be completely dynamic with nothing compiled, it makes the performance challenges a little less surprising, no?

[Diaz]

Trooper Dan, on 22 April 2012 - 02:47 PM, said:

In that shot you have a simple map area with some models (the arcade machines). My understanding is that the complexity of the map, and especially having lots of child sectors, greatly reduces performance and increases the amount of light calculations. On the other hand, Polymer handles models very well. So my guess is that the good performance there has more to do with the map than the radius of the lights.

I believe that every object needs to be drawn once for each light that hits it. So if an object is hit by 10 lights it will have to be rendered 10 times.
A light with a large radius means more objects will be affected, and several lights with a large radius means you're redrawing the entire scene several times. So it doesn't depend on either the amount of objects or the radius of lights, but rather a combination of both. I have several more complex scenes where the framerate still stays above 60.

And yes, when you notice how fast Polymer is drawing models (which are the basic building block of today's engines) and you realize that every light is dynamic, the renderer doesn't look to be badly optimized at all!

[Fox]

I wonder, is there any planning to include all the Sector Effectors from Shadow Warrior in EDuke32?

[Master Fibbles]

I think all of the tags were at some point integrated but it is kind of moot. TROR makes the system in Shadow Warrior useless (and it was buggy).

[TerminX]

Fox, on 23 April 2012 - 06:04 AM, said:

I wonder, is there any planning to include all the Sector Effectors from Shadow Warrior in EDuke32?

Nope. The code is completely different and it would frankly be easier to re-implement the Shadow Warrior features using CON scripts than it would be to try and hack the stuff in as additional hard coded effects.

[Carl Winslow]

currently getting a strange issue with Eduke32 (latest from site) on Win7 with a Nvidia GTX 550. keeps saying my drivers don't support OpenGL or something and won't let me choose the graphics modes for polymer and the like. what gives?

[Diaz]

I'm not sure if this is a known bug or a problem with the renderer itself, but I'll post here...

Today I noticed I was getting quite poor Polymer performance in one of my mods, and it seemed to get worse the more time I played. It was strange. I double checked my 3D video driver settings and all and everything seemed to be OK... then I tried to do a restartvid in the game, and voila, the framerate magically doubled. I kept playing for some time and the framerate started to slowly descend again, then I did another restartvid, and full performance was restored.

Quite weird, but looks like a memory leak of some kind...

[The Commander]

I know using "restartvid" isn't very stable on the ATI card end and can cause a crash.
But I shouldn't have these problems soon when my GeForce GTX570 turns up. (Thanks DanM)

[Hendricks266]

Cody, on 29 April 2012 - 09:47 PM, said:

But I shouldn't have these problems soon when my GeForce GTX570 turns up. (Thanks DanM)

Envy.

[Mr.Deviance]

Cody, on 29 April 2012 - 09:47 PM, said:

I know using "restartvid" isn't very stable on the ATI card end and can cause a crash.
But I shouldn't have these problems soon when my GeForce GTX570 turns up. (Thanks DanM)

Dude, why didn't you wait one or two more months to get a 660 or a 670 instead?

Hendricks266, on 30 April 2012 - 12:31 AM, said:

Envy.

Don't you mean, Nvi.?

[The Commander]

Mr.Deviance, on 02 May 2012 - 12:42 AM, said:

Dude, why didn't you wait one or two more months to get a 660 or a 670 instead?

Because if you knew the cost of Nvidia cards in New Zealand you would have already answered your own question.
Retail for a GTX570 in NZ around $700 NZD
Cost of getting it from DanM $250 AUD.
You work the maths out.

Edit:
Oh and a 580 costs a $1000 here.
Hence this is the other reason I have stuck with ATI as they have always been "A LOT" more cheaper.

[Stabs]

cause it will still be more than that

mind you $250 + plus shipping which was $41

bargain!

[Jblade]

movement_lock still stops players from surfacing if they're underwater whilst it's active. Was there any fix for that?

[TerminX]

James, on 04 May 2012 - 03:15 AM, said:

movement_lock still stops players from surfacing if they're underwater whilst it's active. Was there any fix for that?

Are you sure? Looking at the source, that doesn't appear possible.

[Jblade]

TX, on 06 May 2012 - 12:36 PM, said:

Are you sure? Looking at the source, that doesn't appear possible.

Well the issue was reported by someone else, I'll look into it and see if I can recreate the issue he encountered.

[Tea Monster]

DanM, on 02 May 2012 - 05:10 AM, said:

cause it will still be more than that

mind you $250 + plus shipping which was $41

bargain!

And as the commercial says: "Running Polymer, Crysis and anything else you can throw at it at improbable framerates....Priceless"

[Jblade]

Just noticed an issue with palfrom stuff, I'm guessing related to the fixes you've done lately - the screentint doesn't seem to completely fade away. If you go into a level like E3L1, grab the devistator and then hurt yourself with it you'll notice that the tint won't fade away completely. It seems to vary depending on how severe it is I think, but I took these 2 shots to show you that there's definitly something remaining:

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[Diaz]

James, on 07 May 2012 - 10:01 AM, said:

Just noticed an issue with palfrom stuff, I'm guessing related to the fixes you've done lately - the screentint doesn't seem to completely fade away. If you go into a level like E3L1, grab the devistator and then hurt yourself with it you'll notice that the tint won't fade away completely. It seems to vary depending on how severe it is I think, but I took these 2 shots to show you that there's definitly something remaining:

I can confirm this as well. When picking up items the tinting doesn't disappear completely.

[Helixhorned]

Oink.

Spoiler

I'm tired of saying the other word starting with "f".

[Jblade]

Helixhorned, on 07 May 2012 - 01:23 PM, said:

Oink.

Spoiler

I'm tired of saying the other word starting with "f".

Nice work, thanks for the quick response and fix

[Fox]

May I ask... why highpalookup doesn't work with Polymost? Is it because of Polymost being discontinued, or because of technical limitation?

[Micky C]

Yes, it's a technical limitation. Highpalookup uses polymer's pixel shaders, however polymost has no such shaders, so it can't work there.

[Fox]

Anyway, I got a little problem with highpal: it doesn't completely override tint values. Apparently it has something to do with the tint flag values?