[Micky C]

The preview is a fair amount better in terms of performance than what it was initially. There is probably still room for improvement. You can't switch off palette emulation because it offers the most accurate / best looking experience, and there's no performance gain anymore from switching it off.

[Wild Dog]

 Micky C, on 21 June 2018 - 04:13 PM, said:

The preview is a fair amount better in terms of performance than what it was initially. There is probably still room for improvement. You can't switch off palette emulation because it offers the most accurate / best looking experience, and there's no performance gain anymore from switching it off.

That's good to now. I been playing a bit more and it extreme fps drops only happen in the outdoor areas.

[MusicallyInspired]

 Micky C, on 21 June 2018 - 04:13 PM, said:

The preview is a fair amount better in terms of performance than what it was initially. There is probably still room for improvement. You can't switch off palette emulation because it offers the most accurate / best looking experience, and there's no performance gain anymore from switching it off.

Really? I noticed when you could turn it off that it revealed more shades of colours used in the textures that get omitted in palette emulation. But it does indeed look better with it activated.

[NightFright]

Are there any screenshots with this turned on and off? I'd like to see the difference, if possible.

[MusicallyInspired]

I still have a version where it's disable-able. I'll take screenshots after I get home from work. Unless someone else does first.

[MusicallyInspired]

I had some time before work. (left palette emulation enabled, right disabled)

[Mark]

Left/right?

2nd and 4th pic look better to me. Wider range of colors. If thats disabled I prefer that.

[Phredreeke]

Open console (shift+the key above tab, the character on it varies between different language keyboards but what matters is the position not what character is on it), enter r_texfilter 2 (or 1 if you for some reason prefer blurry textures) and now you can turn off palette emulation (it looks pretty dull without it, I can see why they disabled the option) and change anisotropy settings (which to my layman understanding only makes sense if you have texture filtering on anyway)

[Forge]

 Mark., on 22 June 2018 - 05:27 AM, said:

Left/right?

2nd and 4th pic look better to me. Wider range of colors. If thats disabled I prefer that.

seems to be more 'definition' in the textures as well.
It's pretty easy to see in the large grey and brown wall panels on either side of the opening in the 1st and 2nd screenshot. The first looks all blurred out, while the second has more prominent streaks.

[MusicallyInspired]

Ah. On my monitor they're side by side. The 1st and 3rd are enabled. The colours are more vibrant with it active, though, but I guess that's not easy to tell in these darker gray areas. I didn't have much time before work. I'll take better screenshots in more colourful areas. They are more drab and diluted when disabled. I wish we could have the best of both worlds.

[MusicallyInspired]

Still not a good comparison. The difference is mostly in the shading. There's more contrast I guess. You can really see the dilution in the menu text. 1 & 3 enabled, 2 & 4 disabled:

[oasiz]

Without emulation you get old lazy palette swaps from early GL days. Emulation simply emulates how it would look on classic (proper look).
While some things might look better/different, some can be very off. We use quite a bit of transparent blending in places and those will look more or less quite bad.
Most recent versions made the option obsolete, the choice only existed due to performance reasons.

Usually the saturation is way toned down from vibrant hues with tge option on.

[Honza]

I had recently chance to play the preview beta from start to finish - let me share some thoughts:

Design of levels, enemies, weapons and items:
* Levels are generally interesting - reminds me of DN3D though it seems "too empty" compared to say games like SiN, Unreal or Quake 2.
* Enemies were probably the biggest disappointment - the way they shoot their guns and look is too simple, it felt like I was fighting two enemies the whole time - the guys in coats and the spiders. Compare it with the clearly distinctive enemies DN3D or SiN had. The boss felt like last minute decision "we need a boss" - who do we assign for this job? Oh here comes Joe let's put him in charge...
* Weapons - good job, even the basic pistol is very strong and decent, the guns are powerful, and have the right kick. The ball grenade was amazing. I didn't like the looks of the shotgun - like the pump action ones the most.
* Items - they really could use quite some improvement, ie. every time I picked up ammo for pistol I felt I'm picking up a keycard.

Graphics, performance, sounds and music:
* Graphics are way too simple and dated to my taste - what I like is the current eduke32 with HDR - this is perfectly fine for me and happy to live with this engine for another 10-15 years (or really anything on level of Quake 1/2 and above), if you could go with the polymer I would be super excited about graphics. I'm sure a good licensing deal with guys who developed the eduke32 could be made. These kind of graphics in my opinion could be a commercial problem - and this comes from someone who loved DN3D and doesn't mind Quake 1 graphics that are 20+ years old.
* Performance was quite sad - played on Core i7 4x 2.5 GHz, 16 GB RAM with Radeon HD 7770/2GB in 1920x1080 on Windows 7 x64 - it was definitely playable but comparing the looks of the game and the overall performance - really not OK and needs lots of polishing.
* Sounds were really good - I liked the gunshots and the environment sounds (ie. explosions), not much love for the enemies though.
* Music - definitely my cup of tea - thumbs up.

Am I your target audience? Should you care about my opinion? - You tell me.
I loved: DN3D, SiN series, Unreal series.
I liked: Half Life series, Quake 1 & 2, Kingpin, Far Cry 1 & 2. Shadow Warrior 2013. Counter Strike series up to Source. Doom 2. Left 4 Dead series. SWAT 3 & 4. Postal 2.
I kind of enjoyed: Call of Duty 1/2/4, Bulletstorm, Serious Sam, Duke Nukem Forever. Crisis. Hard Reset. Stalker series.
I didn't like: Call of Duty series after MW. Unreal Tournament 3. Doom 3, Quake 4.
I buy mostly the old games I didn't have time to play previously or want to re-play them. I bought about 5 games that are from 2010+ era but I own lots (if not almost all) FPS from 1990s and early 2000s (my steam folder and GOG installations backup is in total about 1 TB).

[Phredreeke]

 Honza, on 30 June 2018 - 08:41 AM, said:

* Graphics are way too simple and dated to my taste - what I like is the current eduke32 with HDR - this is perfectly fine for me and happy to live with this engine for another 10-15 years (or really anything on level of Quake 1/2 and above), if you could go with the polymer I would be super excited about graphics. I'm sure a good licensing deal with guys who developed the eduke32 could be made. These kind of graphics in my opinion could be a commercial problem - and this comes from someone who loved DN3D and doesn't mind Quake 1 graphics that are 20+ years old.

You do realise Ion Maiden and eduke32 have the same developers? As for polymer read on...

 Honza, on 30 June 2018 - 08:41 AM, said:

* Performance was quite sad - played on Core i7 4x 2.5 GHz, 16 GB RAM with Radeon HD 7770/2GB in 1920x1080 on Windows 7 x64 - it was definitely playable but comparing the looks of the game and the overall performance - really not OK and needs lots of polishing.

2.5GHz is pretty low. Build isn't multithreaded BTW, so the extra cores or threads don't add to the game's performance, and AMD GPUs performs poorly in general with OpenGL which both IM and eduke32 uses. With Polymer your performance would be even lower.

[TerminX]

Do you have the current version of the game, Honza? I have no problems maintaining framerate here anymore, at 2560x1440, on an AMD CPU from 2012.

[Forge]

i run a fx 8320 @ 3.2 ghz & a 650ti 2gb, 1920x1080 native
with the last update:
the core game runs fine. Probably not a sky-high framerate, but without any noticeable lag
my comp only bogs down after half a dozen or so queen of the hill levels when there are a lot of enemies on the screen

[TerminX]

 Forge, on 30 June 2018 - 10:35 AM, said:

my comp only bogs down after half a dozen or so queen of the hill levels when there are a lot of enemies on the screen

We have a patch for that coming out soon. I wanted to have it out by the end of this month, but that's today... maybe I should push a beta to Steam so I can say I was still technically correct.

[Forge]

 TerminX, on 30 June 2018 - 10:39 AM, said:

We have a patch for that coming out soon. I wanted to have it out by the end of this month, but that's today... maybe I should push a beta to Steam so I can say I was still technically correct.

If you push it now, I might see it at 3dr in time for my birthday on the 19th

[Honza]

 Phredreeke, on 30 June 2018 - 09:12 AM, said:

You do realise Ion Maiden and eduke32 have the same developers? As for polymer read on...



2.5GHz is pretty low. Build isn't multithreaded BTW, so the extra cores or threads don't add to the game's performance, and AMD GPUs performs poorly in general with OpenGL which both IM and eduke32 uses. With Polymer your performance would be even lower.

No I didn't know that, to be quite honest the fact that the polymer was missing is really sad, actually I don't quite get it why it would be missing in the first place. Eduke32 with polymer in place had little issues on that PC - at least the build we tried like a year ago.

 TerminX, on 30 June 2018 - 09:54 AM, said:

Do you have the current version of the game, Honza? I have no problems maintaining framerate here anymore, at 2560x1440, on an AMD CPU from 2012.

Not entirely sure - I wasn't playing it on my PC.

But like I said - the performance is probably the least of my concerns.

[Perro Seco]

 Honza, on 30 June 2018 - 08:41 AM, said:

Levels are generally interesting - reminds me of DN3D though it seems "too empty"

What do you mean with "empty"? Because I found them ultradetailed, which I think gives them more replay value.

And...

 Honza, on 30 June 2018 - 08:41 AM, said:

Graphics are way too simple and dated to my taste

I think that's the intention.

[Phredreeke]

There's a ridiculous amount of secrets found in the game, if you think levels are empty you haven't been looking hard enough

[MrFlibble]

 Perro Seco, on 01 July 2018 - 04:32 AM, said:

What do you mean with "empty"? Because I found them ultradetailed, which I think gives them more replay value.

I understood this that the enemies are not very densely packed compared to Duke3D and other titles from the 90s, which is the impression that I also got from playing. I think this might be because Ion Maiden's environments are larger and more spacious - indeed such large spaces would probably not be possible to accomplish in the 90s due to hardware performance limitations.

I'm thinking that maybe some kind of "persistent world" would be in order to compensate for the large areas. Kind of like in Hexen you get basic grunts teleporting in from time to time.

[Forge]

 MrFlibble, on 01 July 2018 - 08:49 AM, said:

I understood this that the enemies are not very densely packed compared to Duke3D and other titles from the 90s, which is the impression that I also got from playing. I think this might be because Ion Maiden's environments are larger and more spacious - indeed such large spaces would probably not be possible to accomplish in the 90s due to hardware performance limitations.

^this

look at the games he's using for comparison. A good portion of those games are corridors and smallish rooms. It's easier to give the impression of a detailed environment, when the environment is compact. When those games did have large open areas, they were pretty barren.

[Jimmy]

Freeway is a good example of this.

[Micky C]

 Honza, on 01 July 2018 - 01:35 AM, said:

No I didn't know that, to be quite honest the fact that the polymer was missing is really sad, actually I don't quite get it why it would be missing in the first place. Eduke32 with polymer in place had little issues on that PC - at least the build we tried like a year ago.




Not entirely sure - I wasn't playing it on my PC.

But like I said - the performance is probably the least of my concerns.

You're only getting good performance with polymer and the HRP in Duke 3D because the levels are quite small, both as a whole, and with regards to individual areas. If you tried applying polymer to the large environments of IM, your graphics card would melt. This is no accident; getting good performance was a critical priority of the original game. I gather the philosophy for IM was more "build something cool, the engine should be able to handle it these days", which is quite fair, because the kinds of open, interconnected areas you're seeing are at odds with the level design performance optimisation tactics employed in the past.

Also, polymer is an unfinished renderer, and doesn't even support some basic features like the skybox IM uses. Keep in mind that the devs are putting in a lot of work to make the game run faster. It's come a long way so far, and it should become faster still before the final game comes out.

[MrFlibble]

 Jimmy, on 01 July 2018 - 01:21 PM, said:

Freeway is a good example of this.

I've always had the impression that the outdoor areas in Episode 3 feel somewhat cramped, e.g. L.A. Rumble and Bank Roll. Very certainly this is related to performance optimisation. In a way, E1L1 and E1L2 are better at pretending to be real streets (at least, for me), even though they're similarly limited.

Personally I'd love more outdoor levels in the style of LameDuke (e.g. E1M6, E2M4 and E4M1). It's a pity this kind of design approach was limited by performance considerations, at least Shadow Warrior and its add-ons addressed this to some extent (BTW, am I the only one who feels that some city level stuff in Twin Dragon was inspired by LameDuke?).

[NNC]

 Perro Seco, on 01 July 2018 - 04:32 AM, said:

What do you mean with "empty"? Because I found them ultradetailed, which I think gives them more replay value.

And...
I think that's the intention.

I actually think they are overdetailed a bit, well, the first level at least, the second is just right. I'm not sure what the guy misses here.

[NNC]

 MrFlibble, on 02 July 2018 - 01:20 AM, said:

I've always had the impression that the outdoor areas in Episode 3 feel somewhat cramped, e.g. L.A. Rumble and Bank Roll. Very certainly this is related to performance optimisation. In a way, E1L1 and E1L2 are better at pretending to be real streets (at least, for me), even though they're similarly limited.

Personally I'd love more outdoor levels in the style of LameDuke (e.g. E1M6, E2M4 and E4M1). It's a pity this kind of design approach was limited by performance considerations, at least Shadow Warrior and its add-ons addressed this to some extent (BTW, am I the only one who feels that some city level stuff in Twin Dragon was inspired by LameDuke?).

No, this is because Blum was a better leveldesigner than Levelord. Hollywood Holocaust, Red Light District, Freeway, Duke Burger and Going Postal (not to mention modern maps like Golden Carnage or even High Times) gave the impression of a real place with proper scale and a feel for the actual theme. Levelord's maps gave the impression they are played in the Universal Backlot. LA Rumble is actually an exception, I always thought that map is easily the most appropriate level for an episode named "Shrapnel City" from the bunch that were shipped. His glued maps in The Birth actually suffered from the same problem. Not to mention his latest levels. It's not related to performance.

[NNC]

Can you guys disclose some information about some mapping ideas from the final version? What kind of places will Shelly visit or such... Washington cities only, or other cities, rural areas, snowy locations, forests, castles etc. One preview pic showed a forest type area with some building entrance. Another showed a mine part as I guessed.

[Fox]

 Nancsi, on 04 July 2018 - 01:39 AM, said:

No, this is because Blum was a better leveldesigner than Levelord. Hollywood Holocaust, Red Light District, Freeway, Duke Burger and Going Postal (not to mention modern maps like Golden Carnage or even High Times) gave the impression of a real place with proper scale and a feel for the actual theme. Levelord's maps gave the impression they are played in the Universal Backlot. LA Rumble is actually an exception, I always thought that map is easily the most appropriate level for an episode named "Shrapnel City" from the bunch that were shipped. His glued maps in The Birth actually suffered from the same problem. Not to mention his latest levels. It's not related to performance.

Most of Levelord maps used to have big open areas that were cut during development.

 Nancsi, on 04 July 2018 - 06:48 AM, said:

Can you guys disclose some information about some mapping ideas from the final version? What kind of places will Shelly visit or such... Washington cities only, or other cities, rural areas, snowy locations, forests, castles etc. One preview pic showed a forest type area with some building entrance. Another showed a mine part as I guessed.

Washington Foreskins stadium