Ns Is A New Mod, But...
DjArcas
Join Date: 2002-11-11 Member: 8187Members
Join Date: 2002-11-11 Member: 8187Members
<div class="IPBDescription">r_speeds and w_polys and frame rate,ohmy</div> Curious... I know the limit for software rendering is 800 wpolys, and most mapping guides recommend you don't really exceed 400 for MP maps - however, NS is a nice new mod, requiring some 200 megs of downloading, and I would have *thought* we could get away with a hell of a lot higher nowadays.
Are these figures realistic for today's machines?
Is there some sort of enormous performance hit in the Q2 engine once we hit these numbers?
Or are there still P2/133 owners out there with 4 meg voodoo cards playing this mod?
After seeing Doom 3's 150,000 polys/frame, 400 seems limited :-)
Are these figures realistic for today's machines?
Is there some sort of enormous performance hit in the Q2 engine once we hit these numbers?
Or are there still P2/133 owners out there with 4 meg voodoo cards playing this mod?
After seeing Doom 3's 150,000 polys/frame, 400 seems limited :-)
Comments
Yup, judging by the amount of "help, my FPS sucks!" posts in tech support forum..
Thing is, I reckon most of these ain't down to the r-speeds, the maps themselves are ( imo ) well designed and lovely to look at, I think it's the number of models on screen once a base has been constructed etc that are causing a lot of these problems.It all takes a fair bit more power than the original HL game required..even if you take the latest version of CS, that would be almost unplayable on the minimum specs for HL..minimum specs are just that..minimum.
Oddly, I'd thought it would be particle systems etc that would kill my weak PC's framerate, but they seem to make almost no difference..
Doom3? I'd be lucky to get one frame every half hour...:/
There is a definite art in keeping r_speeds down - but keeping e_polys down is just as important - shame... the high detail models that came with blue shift (?) were gorgeous <!--emo&:)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/smile.gif' border='0' valign='absmiddle' alt='smile.gif'><!--endemo-->
Given what I've seen tho, epoly count tends to put wpoly count to shame... and epoly is cpu bound (cept on a t&L card) and wpoly is fill rate bound.
Anyways.
Uh.
Yeah. Damn you and your P2! *shakes fist* <!--emo&::sentry::--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/turret.gif' border='0' valign='absmiddle' alt='turret.gif'><!--endemo-->
Its sad but true, the HL Engine (based on the Q2 engine) just can't handle more than 800 wpolys. It just can't. And besides that, as you can see, not everyone has a brand-new computer with a GeForce card. Even my year-old 850MHz machine has a craptacular ATI video card, and hiccups with NS. However, I think including software-mode support to NS, IMO, is unneccessary. <i>Nobody</i> is without a video card that won't run HL these days, and bringing NS to spec with software-mode might do more harm than good.
But to keep your maps friendly low poly counts give your map a better chance of getting in rotations, no one will want to play the "laggy" map. Also too many textures in one map and HL tends to slow down a bit, I forget where it starts to go or if it even an issue in NS.
I knew that, but someone else said Quake2 and it stuck in my head. Yeah, the HL engine is a heavily modified Quake engine. I knew that.
Really.
But its too late now, now I look like a n00b <!--emo&:(--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/sad.gif' border='0' valign='absmiddle' alt='sad.gif'><!--endemo-->
Now lets hope they don't try to make another best seller and just try to make another good game... then we'll all be set.
To say that the HL engine simply doesn't like wpolys of over 800 is a bit of an exaggeration. If you are running in software mode, the engine stops drawing any more polygons after 800, but in OpenGL mode you can go as high as you like. This doesn't mean you can make things as detailed as you like, though. The engine is still very dated and not optimised for current technology, so there is still a cut-off point where it will run slowly no matter what your system is...but this is more like around 1500-2500 wpolys. However, with respect to NS, wpolys should be kept below 800 so software users don't suffer (assuming they ever get to play the game), and because of the intense amount of epolys flying about.
im pretty sure doom3 counts their polys a bit differently...