[enderandrew]

Forge, on 30 October 2018 - 05:15 AM, said:

(They might perform better because of it, but that probably depends on the system it's running on and how much having to run steam in the background affects available resources.)

I hate actual draconian DRM, but Steamworks itself has never once been shown to affect performance and barely counts as DRM.

The odd thing is that GOG is pushing GOG Galaxy heavily these days. Running GOG games through Galaxy with Galaxy features really defeats the whole argument of avoiding Steam. You need to log in and authenticate online and you have something interacting with your games to add online features/functionality. Except Steam has more/better features than GOG Galaxy.

[Phredreeke]

The difference is that GOG Galaxy is optional (for single player at least, a small amount games need it for multiplayer) You can always just run the game's EXE file. Unfortunately just because a game has a feature on Steam doesn't mean it has the same feature under GOG Galaxy (cloud saves, achievements, I think for a while it even required the overlay to take screenshots but that was changed in a later version)

[MetHy]

enderandrew, on 30 October 2018 - 07:44 AM, said:

I hate actual draconian DRM, but Steamworks itself has never once been shown to affect performance and barely counts as DRM.

Actually when testing early releases with the Steam overlay turned on, I could lose up to 10 FPS in some parts. Turning it off was part of the "Performance tips" post.

I haven't tested with the overlay on in a long time so I'm not sure if it's still the case.

[Forge]

My comp is pushing the 6+ years old mark, and it wasn't anywhere near top of the line at the time I assembled it. Every little bit of freed up resource matters.

Depends on the game.

The drm-free version of Ion Maiden, I can't get past level 5 or 6 in QotH because of lag.
The beta3 on steam - I played a couple levels past the one that says something about shotguns, and it barely hitched.

If the final drm-free version gets the improved performance, I should be able to play the entire game with zero issues.
Maybe I'll be impressed enough to make a crappy map or two. Maybe.

[gemeaux333]

The new voxel rendering looks great : https://twitter.com/...321379358560256

[MusicallyInspired]

Indeed!

[TerminX]

Forge, on 30 October 2018 - 05:15 AM, said:

The downside is getting it through 3dr means you'll have to listen to everyone go on and on, gushing over how great the game is, while you sit on your hands for two weeks waiting for 3dr to post the file to their server.
If you're the patient type, and can avoid the spoilers that are sure to flood the forum, then get the drm-free version.
But keep in mind that if a patch is ever issued, you'll probably never get it (at least not through the 'proper' channels)

Come on man, you know that's bullshit. There's no way we're ever going to release an official patch after the game is out and then not give it to some of our customers. You're talking about a one time delay that occurred because 3DR went to an expo to show off the game, and the guy with access to update the site with the new downloads got sick with something he caught at the expo.

We should have just waited to release the patch, but it solved some important performance issues so I wanted it out ASAP to stop further negative reviews on Steam about performance problems. Releasing it like that technically violated our publishing agreement with 3DR, so please, don't continue to blame them for this one. If I had access to release it elsewhere at the same time I would have. I still believe fixing the problem for 90-some% of our customers as quickly as possible was better than fixing it for none of them.

[Zaxx]

TerminX, on 30 October 2018 - 11:03 AM, said:

You're talking about a one time delay that occurred because 3DR went to an expo to show off the game, and the guy with access to update the site with the new downloads got sick with something he caught at the expo.

I think everyone's already forgotten about that at this point, guess he's complaining about Steam users getting access to test versions.

[Forge]

^presume nothing, and don't speak on my behalf.

@Tx
My real grief is that they ignored their forum, and couldn't be bothered to inform their customers of the situation. That's like a , "fuck you. we have your $, so now we don't have to address your concerns."
I have zero confidence in their customer support.

It doesn't boost my confidence any when they seem to 'accidentally' forget to mention who is developing the game in almost every press release or interview.
So I exaggerate a little while I piss down my own leg. I paid for the right to do so, but not on this forum, so I'll stop. Sorry for being a dick towards certain game publishers.

[enderandrew]

MetHy, on 30 October 2018 - 08:10 AM, said:

Actually when testing early releases with the Steam overlay turned on, I could lose up to 10 FPS in some parts. Turning it off was part of the "Performance tips" post.

I haven't tested with the overlay on in a long time so I'm not sure if it's still the case.

The overlay isn't Steamworks itself or the "DRM" of Steam. The overlay does mess with some games for some reason.

[Forge]

enderandrew, on 30 October 2018 - 12:52 PM, said:

The overlay isn't Steamworks itself or the "DRM" of Steam. The overlay does mess with some games for some reason.

For me it's not just the overlay, steam has to be running in order to launch the game - that still takes up some memory. It has a bigger footprint than my anti-virus and the bare-bones Nvidia services combined.

[Plokite_Wolf]

enderandrew, on 30 October 2018 - 07:44 AM, said:

I hate actual draconian DRM, but Steamworks itself has never once been shown to affect performance and barely counts as DRM.

The odd thing is that GOG is pushing GOG Galaxy heavily these days. Running GOG games through Galaxy with Galaxy features really defeats the whole argument of avoiding Steam. You need to log in and authenticate online and you have something interacting with your games to add online features/functionality. Except Steam has more/better features than GOG Galaxy.

Galaxy is still optional. As for online features, well, you can thank the industry's general laziness/aversion to implementing LAN functionality, so GOG had to implement something to stay somewhat competitive. For singleplayer-only players, which are in the majority in GOG's userbase, that's no big deal as long as those offline installers are a thing.

[TerminX]

I understand your grievances and you make a lot of valid points, it's just that shitting on 3DR for it doesn't really help us address the issue. I give them hell about it enough behind closed doors as it is.

[Zaxx]

Forge, on 30 October 2018 - 12:44 PM, said:

^presume nothing, and don't speak on my behalf.

My assumption may have been wrong but I definitely did not speak on your behalf.

As for my assumption really, what else should have I assumed from stuff like this:

Quote

The drm-free version of Ion Maiden, I can't get past level 5 or 6 in QotH because of lag.
The beta3 on steam - I played a couple levels past the one that says something about shotguns, and it barely hitched.

But really I guess I assumed you were talking about this mostly because the DRM-free version lagging behind in updates is the only thing I find to be a real issue, the rest I couldn't care less about.

I mean stuff like seeing Voidpoint barely being mentioned sucks but at least it's perfectly understandable: 3DR is being used as a brand now and if you release a new game under the Build engine then it's absolutely your priority to push that brand as hard as you can. That's what drives up the sales, that's why even a 90 minute preview campaign that was never meant to be released as early access does a better job at early access than basically feature complete retro shooters like DUSK or Amid Evil do. So you know, I'm not a giant fan of 3Danish Realms either but from a business perspective pushing the 3DR brand instead of anything else IS the right decision. Honestly what boggles my mind is seeing this constant complaining about 3DR's incompetence while in reality 3DR's involvement is what gives the project the visibility it deserves. Sure, Fred can write terrible posts about the old school designs of Bombshell and seems like trailers that do not even have a fucking Voidpoint logo can get through the cracks but ultimately 3DR is doing the job they should (publishing the game and giving it as much visibility as possible) and they are doing that job competently.

As for 3DR not caring about the 3DR forums: again, it sucks but come on, dude, if you want to reach out you have Discord, Steam and apparently Duke4.net too so saying stuff like "you got my money and now you don't give a shit" is a bigger pile of horseshit than the entirety of DNF is. The 3DR forums were awesome, hell, they have a place in gaming history but nowadays there are 5 people posting there... on a crowded day. The 3DR store should be shipshape, on that one I agree but complaining about the forums? Really?

[Forge]

Zaxx, on 30 October 2018 - 02:23 PM, said:

As for my assumption really, what else should have I assumed

But really I guess I assumed

there were two separate discussions going on. one about performance, one about customer relations. You bundled them.

the example you used is out of context - you omitted the part where I said if the performance increase in the beta makes it to the final release, then drm-free will do better on my older comp.

so I actually support getting the drm-free version for people with lower-end comps, or people who don't want to run additional programs to play the game.

TerminX, on 30 October 2018 - 02:18 PM, said:

I understand your grievances and you make a lot of valid points, it's just that shitting on 3DR for it doesn't really help us address the issue. I give them hell about it enough behind closed doors as it is.

You're right. I shouldn't be bringing a negative vibe into a thread about a good game. I got too bitter about it. More than is called for. Thanks for reeling me in.

[Hank]

TerminX, on 30 October 2018 - 02:18 PM, said:

I give them hell about it enough behind closed doors as it is.

A favor then, behind sealed doors.
At this moment there are two legit customers, at 3D Realms' forum, with questions regarding the Founders Edition. And those boxes weren't exactly cheap. Pretty please, with sugar on top - Someone please answer them.

[Zaxx]

Forge, on 30 October 2018 - 02:36 PM, said:

so I actually support getting the drm-free version for people with lower-end comps, or people who don't want to run additional programs to play the game.

What are your specs? I'm asking because the game relies heavily on the CPU even in OpenGL mode so basically any additional application that's using the CPU on the same core will affect the game's performance. When it comes to Steam though the client leaves the CPU alone if you're not doing anything with it, it just takes up 100 megs from your RAM and that shouldn't be a problem at all.

So if you see better performance when the client is not running than my guess is that it has to do with the Steam overlay because the client itself is very light on resources.

[Forge]

overlay is turned off

@idle:

all the steam services take up almost 250,000k memory

all the Nvidia & avira anti-virus services only take up about 110,000k
(nvidia's version of 'overlay' is also shut off)

[Zaxx]

Forge, on 30 October 2018 - 03:04 PM, said:

overlay is turned off
all the steam services take up almost 250,000k memory

What am I not counting then? Isn't it only the client + bootstrapper and the webhelper? I checked before I posted and those only take up 100-120 megs for me, if I log in to friends that jumps with around 40 megs but that's all. And even if it was more it really doesn't matter since IM uses only around 250-300 megs too, that's nothing.

[Forge]

maybe it's because every time I launch steam I get 5 instances of steamwebhelper.exe running.
steam.exe & steamservice.exe use very little memory

[Forge]

I don't know how to turn on the fps monitor (i haven't looked)

there's not a lot of difference between drm update 2 and beta3 as far as the cpu & mem usage demands are, Maybe 10% difference, on average (not counting the spikes). But the drm-update2 barely uses the gpu, where beta3 uses it quite a bit more. About a 30-40% difference.
Drm-update2 just isn't utilizing my hardware, especially my gpu, efficiently.

fx 8320
gtx 650ti 2gb
16 gb ram

running stock / no o/c

[Hank]

Forge, on 30 October 2018 - 07:33 PM, said:

I don't know how to turn on the fps monitor (i haven't looked)

open console [SHIFT + ~] then type r_showfps 2

[Forge]

can't really compare the two QotH modes. They're almost completely different games with different numbers of enemies, the radar, etc.

so I played until the first large open are in the campaign.

drm-update2 fps 130-40
steam-beta3 fps 340-60

framerate limit=none

side note - the drm-free & steam games share the same configuration files under users/*/appdata/roaming/Ion Maiden Preview Campaign.

[gemeaux333]

More voxel examples :

https://twitter.com/...456088382091264

https://twitter.com/...401552187596800

https://twitter.com/...345501081845760

[Micky C]

I wonder who's making them since TX said voxels are a rare skill set as opposed to sprites. I gather they're converting from 3D models, but they'd still need touch-ups.

Also, given that performance is still an issue in some parts of the game, I wonder what effect the new voxels will have on the frame rate.

[Zaxx]

Micky C, on 30 October 2018 - 09:26 PM, said:

Also, given that performance is still an issue in some parts of the game, I wonder what effect the new voxels will have on the frame rate.

I wouldn't worry about performance that much. The engine is not "commercial game ready" yet (I mean if you make a retro game fairly decent performance is not enough, it has to run and render ultra smooth) but they seem to be well aware of that fact and the rendering improvemens TX was talking about seem pretty significant. If EDuke32 wants to go to consoles then it has to be a lot more efficient (and a lot smoother instead of just chugging along like you were hard locked at 60 even when you get 1000 fps) than it is now and that will be felt on the PC side too.

[Mblackwell]

Forge, on 30 October 2018 - 08:52 PM, said:

can't really compare the two QotH modes. They're almost completely different games with different numbers of enemies, the radar, etc.

so I played until the first large open are in the campaign.

drm-update2 fps 130-40
steam-beta3 fps 340-60

framerate limit=none

side note - the drm-free & steam games share the same configuration files under users/*/appdata/roaming/Ion Maiden Preview Campaign.

In update 3 you can get more information using r_showfps 3. But you are correct that over development time the game is being made to take less and less CPU power and put more onto the GPU. EDuke32 (and Polymost... Build in general) is largely CPU bound.

There were also a good amount of optimizations done on the game side (scripts, etc) for update 3. Right now the update is still not ready to go out until a newer version of EDuke32 that fixes some critical issues has been tested thoroughly.

[HulkNukem]

Duke Nukem 1 and 2 style side scroller Ion Maiden/Bombshell companion game coming when?

[Forge]

Mblackwell, on 31 October 2018 - 01:10 PM, said:

In update 3 you can get more information using r_showfps 3. But you are correct that over development time the game is being made to take less and less CPU power and put more onto the GPU. EDuke32 (and Polymost... Build in general) is largely CPU bound.

There were also a good amount of optimizations done on the game side (scripts, etc) for update 3. Right now the update is still not ready to go out until a newer version of EDuke32 that fixes some critical issues has been tested thoroughly.

as for the cpu, is it single-thread or multi? amd fx chips aren't exactly known for their single thread performance. Shifting the demands onto the gpu, even that old gtx 650 ti, is a huge boost on my rig.

Those fps numbers I gave (for both beta-update3 & drm-free update2) were just for running around out in the outdoor section below the street lamp poles. While I was in the garage & indoor sections, I was getting over 1000 fps with beta-update3 (not sustained unless I stopped moving, & I didn't noticing any tearing or anomalies)

[Zaxx]

Forge, on 31 October 2018 - 04:50 PM, said:

as for the cpu, is it single-thread or multi?

If I saw it correctly the game is using two cores but only one is getting maxed out so ultimately single threaded performance will be the limit to your fps.