[Mblackwell]

I'm already faking a lot of stuff, but it's not practical to fake SSAO, or Screen Space Reflections for that matter (I've tried but the result is always a bit janky).

In general if you pay attention a lot of modern games use the same tricks I use all over the place when they can get away with it since they are fast and practical. A fast approximation that gets the job done is better than something accurate that kills perf. Just a word to the wise for people that are excited - don't go crazy!

[Tea Monster]

Nice to see some progress.

One thing that would be good would be some easier way to use models as level geometry. I'm thinking of cave tunnels, bridges, multi-story buildings, etc. Specifically so that you can block them out for players. Buildings you can walk around in, caves you can walk through that are round, etc.

Oh, and some kind of particle system would be great. Sparks, billboards for smoke and fire, etc.

Oh, and 'next gen' is now last gen. Currently, 'next-gen' is PBR - "Dat Metallness!"

[Person of Color]

Mblackwell, on 20 November 2015 - 11:35 PM, said:

Uh, I'm running a scene with lights right now that's 400fps just to be sure and my GTX 970 SSC (so overclocked) is maintaining 60C with the fan only at 450rpm, and a quick test at 700fps and I only needed 650rpm to maintain that temp.

So if your card is so loud and so hot that it crashes when under load then either you're giving it a ridiculous load and should cap fps (which is possible in EDuke32 for all renderers), or the card has a serious flaw.

Uhh, no, it's not loud, and it's not hot. It's the Asus DirectCU model...I'd never get a reference R9 290. You may as well buy a dustbuster and jam it in your case.

But Duke Nukem Forever 2013 causes it to shit itself. Nothing else. A game with historically terrible OpenGL support.

Nevander, on 21 November 2015 - 01:02 AM, said:

Huh. I'm on an R9 270X and I get those issues exactly like you did on that card. Did AMD change something drastically between these two cards?

Between the 6970 and the 270X, yes. The 6970 is VLIW4 architecture based and the 270X is a 7870 - those are GCN 1.0 based. My 290 is GCN 1.1.

icecoldduke, on 22 November 2015 - 03:38 PM, said:

For the best performance with any game, you really should be using NVIDIA hardware. It is worth the extra $100-$150.

I disagree. I've built and upgraded countless systems over the past 15 years and Nvidia has really lost their luster.

Quote

Polymer wouldn't cause over-heating. In polymer the GPU is starved for work during low FPS cases, if the GPU isn't overloaded then it wouldn't be causing your heating issues.

Whelp, nothing else causes problems.

Plagman, on 22 November 2015 - 11:48 PM, said:

To the people that think it's cool too and just wish it was better than it is currently, I say: so do I, and I also hope it'll eventually come to happen, be it through me or someone else. To the people that, in addition to the above, act like spoiled toddlers and throw tantrums at the very same persons that helped them get that far to begin with: go choke on a whole bucket of shit.

Look man, I appreciate your work, and I know you aren't able to work on it anymore. That's why I've always asked someone to step up and fix it. Anything else has been trolling - like the time I said Nvidia gave you a $20 gift certificate to Applebees to make it only run on their hardware.

Here's the bottom line: No one mods this game compared to Doom. You and I both know that plenty of people in the retro game community have crappy hardware - We need to run well on everything, especially Intel.

We need new blood to survive, and many of the people here suspect that Randy has AIDS.

Sorry if I pissed you off. I'm also fully aware that Polymer was invented at a time when ATI was absolutely terrible, especially with OpenGL.

MusicallyInspired, on 23 November 2015 - 08:52 AM, said:

Maybe if everyone was a little more supportive of polymer and plagman's efforts instead of complaining about it all the time, he might have actually had some inspiration and motivation to work on it. As it stands, there's a reason why it seems like everyone has an anti-polymer attitude because all we ever hear are negative things about the crap job the devs are doing. I wouldn't want to work on it either with that aura of ungratefulness. Remember when there was a bug report system and all our issues were being sort of resolved? We've gone from that to nothing probably because of all the hatred.

I'll say it again, I love polymer and play Duke exclusively with it for the most part. I had more problems than anybody with polymer when I had my older Radeon card, but I still enjoyed it. Now that I run Nvidia, it's even better and I'm saddened that there hasn't been more effort to flesh it out due to the backlash. I certainly appreciate your work, plagman, even if you never touch it again. Thanks for looking specifically into my problems way back then. And thank you, icecoldduke, for attempting to pick up the reigns. I hope you can do great things with it.

I loved it on my Nvidia card too. But I'm not sacrificing that much to run one game. My R9 290 is amazing and more importantly, STABLE. Drivers are just as good as my old 6970. It likes retro titles more, as well, just like the 6970.

[Spiker]

Tea Monster, on 24 November 2015 - 12:20 AM, said:

Oh, and 'next gen' is now last gen. Currently, 'next-gen' is PBR - "Dat Metallness!"

Drools

[MusicallyInspired]

I haven't had trouble with any new games either with my GTX 460.

[Mblackwell]

Just to note: AMD cards are still terrible with OpenGL. They are pretty decent with DirectX however.

[icecoldduke]

Person of Color, on 24 November 2015 - 12:32 AM, said:

But Duke Nukem Forever 2013 causes it to shit itself. Nothing else. A game with historically terrible OpenGL support.

Wasn't DNF using a D3D9 renderer?

[MusicallyInspired]

He's talking about the oldschool mod for EDuke32 based off of material shown in the old DNF trailers that was never used. Duke Nukem Forever 2013. DNF came out in 2011.

[icecoldduke]

MusicallyInspired, on 24 November 2015 - 08:26 AM, said:

He's talking about the oldschool mod for EDuke32 based off of material shown in the old DNF trailers that were never used. Duke Nukem Forever 2013. DNF came out in 2011.

Fair enough : ).

[Tea Monster]

And wasn't the DNF 2013 mod all sprite-based?
And wasn't it explicitly stated in the read-me of the mod that "Polymer and the HRP are definitely NOT supported and are thus disabled"?
And dosen't the whole mod come in about 55mb, which should handily fit entirely in the VRAM of your card?

So why don't you tell us again how Polymer China-Syndromed your video card?

[Hendricks266]

DNF 2013 will draw a Village People poster in the center of the screen if you try and run Polymer, rendering it unplayable.

[MusicallyInspired]

Hendricks266, on 24 November 2015 - 11:39 AM, said:

DNF 2013 will draw a Village People poster in the center of the screen if you try and run Polymer, rendering it unplayable.

[Duke of Hazzard]

Tea Monster, on 24 November 2015 - 09:52 AM, said:

And wasn't the DNF 2013 mod all sprite-based?
And wasn't it explicitly stated in the read-me of the mod that "Polymer and the HRP are definitely NOT supported and are thus disabled"?
And dosen't the whole mod come in about 55mb, which should handily fit entirely in the VRAM of your card?

So why don't you tell us again how Polymer China-Syndromed your video card?

I don't understand how someone would try to run the HRP with DNF2013. I remember it had some new enemies.

[Mark]

You can run the HRP but turn off models so you have hires textures but can still see 2d sprite enemies. Still not recommended though.

[Person of Color]

MusicallyInspired, on 24 November 2015 - 05:42 AM, said:

I haven't had trouble with any new games either with my GTX 460.

Fermi was such a great architecture. I wish Nvidia would release something that well rounded again.

I *LOVED* my 460!

Tea Monster, on 24 November 2015 - 09:52 AM, said:

And wasn't the DNF 2013 mod all sprite-based?
And wasn't it explicitly stated in the read-me of the mod that "Polymer and the HRP are definitely NOT supported and are thus disabled"?
And dosen't the whole mod come in about 55mb, which should handily fit entirely in the VRAM of your card?

So why don't you tell us again how Polymer China-Syndromed your video card?

I didn't RTFM.

And it's not about VRAM usage, it's about runaway framerates.

[Mblackwell]

As far as efficiency Maxwell is pretty much it. Kepler was really meh. Maxwell has a better perf to watt ratio and is much more efficient/faster at a number of tasks include tessellation. It OCs really well, and the architecture allows a lot of weird chip setups.

It will be interesting to see what happens with Pascal, and even more interesting when there's another big industry wide node shrink.

[Player Lin]

Person of Color, on 24 November 2015 - 10:27 PM, said:

I didn't RTFM.

I don't want to irritate you but...It really a bad habit, please...read the DAMNED manual/readme before use something!

[Tea Monster]

I think I still have the skins for the Cycloid and Duke in PSD format, I can take the AO layer off and re-export the diffuse.

[Duke of Hazzard]

Mblackwell, on 24 November 2015 - 11:34 PM, said:

As far as efficiency Maxwell is pretty much it. Kepler was really meh. Maxwell has a better perf to watt ratio and is much more efficient/faster at a number of tasks include tessellation. It OCs really well, and the architecture allows a lot of weird chip setups.

It will be interesting to see what happens with Pascal, and even more interesting when there's another big industry wide node shrink.

The biggest reason why I moved to Nvidia. On stock cooler my 6970 sounded like a jet and it also wasted electricity like crazy.

Not to mention the latest Radeons are just beefed up/rebranded variants of the previous series.

I've built a small PC for the living room but my timing was bad, I went with a GTX 750 Ti and a week later Nvidia rolls out the GTX 950 which is much better.

[Person of Color]

The 6970 used less power than the GTX 570. A lot less. If your cooler sounded like a jet engine you should have bought a better card.

[Tea Monster]

So, Is some kind of PBR a possibility or is that just rediculous?

Also, particles?

[icecoldduke]

Tea Monster, on 02 December 2015 - 11:46 PM, said:

So, Is some kind of PBR a possibility or is that just rediculous?

Also, particles?

I would like to get some kind of screen space particle implementation in, but I do have a lot of work a head of me so I can't promise anything. I do plan on "PolymerNG" requiring a high end card, I can't make any promises on PBR as of yet. Right now I'm just getting the new renderer on it's feet.

What I need though is some content guys that would be able to work with me to make content for the new renderer. Anyone who is interested please PM me.

[Mblackwell]

Changing to a pbr pipeline would make old content look like garbage, unfortunately.

[Spiker]

It's a never-ending project after all. Life is about constant improvement.

[Mblackwell]

But old mods won't exactly be updated

[Mark]

darn it, PBR, here I go to Google again

[icecoldduke]

Mblackwell, on 03 December 2015 - 11:11 AM, said:

But old mods won't exactly be updated

New mods will get made .

[Hendricks266]

icecoldduke, on 03 December 2015 - 01:58 PM, said:

New mods will get made .

Gonna have to downvote you for this one

What's the point of the a source port if it breaks backward-compatibility?

EDIT: I'm reacting here to the almost nose-thumby shoulder-shruggy subtext of this post.

[Mark]

Many times I wondered if backwards compatibility could be holding back progress towards next-gen capability and I would support a split to 2 versions of the port if it comes down to that. But realistically I know we probably don't have enough people with the drive and talent to support both. That darn real life stuff gets in the way. So I will happily take what I can get with what we have. ( and occasionally pester for more )

[Danukem]

I don't see why pbr would have any effect on classic shading, since that isn't real lighting anyway. I'm assuming that no matter what changes with the renderer, it will be able to handle sector, wall and sprite shading just fine (as both polymost and polymer do). What pbr might break (which I think is what Mblackwell was alluding to) is the lighting in Polymer lit maps.