Bare bones "fly-through" mod to show engine speed ?

phoenixbbsphoenixbbs Join Date: 2003-02-10 Member: 13379Members, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Subnautica Playtester
in Modding
There are still many users complaining that the game doesn't run as well as the Source engine, but as we all know, the engine itself is very good.

Does anyone know how hard it would be to produce a "mod" that will load the maps, and allow the user to do a "fly-through", without any game code dragging the performance down ?

I know the existing "spectate" mode is generally a lot quicker at moving than playing "in-game", but the Insight mod added a lot more code that might slow the performance overall.

I suppose as an "add-on" to that, a map that has a series of linked rooms that could show incremental levels of detail and effects would give an idea of just how well the engine performs across the range of features.
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Comments

  • hozzhozz Join Date: 2012-11-20 Member: 172660Members
    edited May 2013
    Just remove all the script code except the things you need (maybe map loading, camera controls, things like this).

    But this mod would probably be pointless. If you have more fps then , you know what we already know: mostly the LUA side of the game limits performance.
    If you don't have more fps then, it gets complicated with so many pc configurations, settings, and what not.

    Not sure exactly what this mod should accomplish.
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  • phoenixbbsphoenixbbs Join Date: 2003-02-10 Member: 13379Members, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Subnautica Playtester
    It would simply be a means of showing the people complaining about how badly the game runs that it's not the engine at fault, which is what they usually claim - nothing more.

    Sadly, I know sweet nothing about modding, so couldn't do it myself :-(
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  • matsomatso Master of Patches Join Date: 2002-11-05 Member: 7000Members, Forum Moderators, NS2 Developer, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver, Squad Five Gold, Reinforced - Shadow, NS2 Community Developer
    Showing the maximum performance of the engine sans Lua is easy - just enter an empty server and run around. You should have r_stats "Waiting for render thread" > 0 consistently.
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  • Chris0132Chris0132 Join Date: 2009-07-25 Member: 68262Members
    edited May 2013
    phoenixbbs wrote: »
    It would simply be a means of showing the people complaining about how badly the game runs that it's not the engine at fault, which is what they usually claim - nothing more.

    Sadly, I know sweet nothing about modding, so couldn't do it myself :-(

    Isn't that kind of a semantics argument though?

    By making the distinction between the rendering engine and the rendering engine plus the game code, you're kind of removing a big chunk of the actual game part of the game engine.

    It's not really a game engine if you can't play any games in it, it's a realtime geometry rendering engine. AKA what spark was before they built a game on it.

    When people blame the engine, what they mean is 'the game runs badly out of the box, not due to unreasonably poor hardware or unreasonably high player counts'.

    Which is true, the game runs badly oftentimes, saying 'if you stripped out all the game code and just rendered the levels it would run fine' is not really very helpful. The rendering engine is designed to have its game code written in Lua, so that Lua is part of the game's engine.

    Saying the C++ bits are fine so we should all be happy doesn't make a lot of sense.
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