Hi all. As version 1.6 has been released, I thought I would do a quick video to show it off. All at lowest settings bar, the terrain shader.

I see you like to jump dvader m8 .. how high was that jump over the building hehe.. cool vid

Just thought I'd play Earlier on I was stomping about like the Hulk on the get to the river demo You can jump really high now if you set the jump speed higher. I had the original Crysis in mind with the jump height here. Also a test to see how much I could put into a scene and keep speed at least semi smooth.

oh no's dvader m8!!! no dvader pic no more for forums man?, now I have to get used to the new pic lol.. and a mod aswell now congrats btw though I think I will miss the old pic I guess you had to change it so lee could have his the same right?!. pity really but understandable lol why not be the emperor instead ;p....hehe

Thanks. I didn't have to, but since I'm a mod now best not to confuse people. Chose this one for now, but may alter it later. It is odd, had that pic as my avatar for many years.

Great video! I especially like the 'six clicks later...' as a testimonial for how easy it is to radically change the visuals of your level. I am also glad you like the super jump feature. I will be putting this and other attributes in as script commands so you will be able to control the jump height in real-time. Great for short-term power-ups or reducing jump height when fatigued.

Sounds great Lee, just what I asked for! Now we need AI that is friendly or at least non aggressive too! Oh and a bit more speed would be nice Am I right in thinking that the current beta has no longer got quad support in? I would imagine large scenes would gain a lot of speed when this is back in..

Yes QUAD was removed because I saw zero performance gain when used on the test levels I was using, and it eats some extra memory. I am sure there are some scenarios where they would give extra performance but for now we have bigger ideas for performance. One such idea has just reached a cool milestone, our software occluder, which can detect when an object is behind another and hide it. It's still a prototype, but it's very cool to see in action, and running on the CPU means absolutely NO GPU stalling

We will have to see how the occlusion goes then, hopefully will add in a boost for more complex scenes. Still, I would imagine some way of using quads in the very far distance, especially with hundreds and hundreds of trees could be useful. Especially if you could replace hundreds of tiny trees with a billboard instead (rather than individual ones per tree). Still not sure how that would look in motion, but for the very far distance I think it may look ok. Of course it may not be feasible. I know using Dark Imposters I got great speed with lots of objects which would normally cause DB issues. Not that I used it much, AGK came out not long after!



I also notice even a bare scene uses a lot of draw calls, which increase as you add even the same entity. As you can see from the pic, you get 3 new draw calls per object which makes sense. One Diffuse, one specular and one normal. But, as it is the same entity, using the same images, surely this should not be the case? I would have thought you only need one copy of each image in memory to texture the mesh when it is repeated. This has been brought up before by myself and others and seems odd to me from my own experience coding. Not that I am particularly good at it

Actually the extra draw calls are related to the back-end pipelines such as shadow casting, as they require extra draws due to the cascade system

Ah, fair enough I noticed on further playing it was semi random after I went past 3 trees just luck of the draw it added 3 for the second tree by the looks.