I have some reservations concerning the direction Reloaded is taking.



Back at the beginning of the project we had the alley scene which showcased parallax mapping and improved weapon models and animations etc.



Once Lee added real time dynamic lighting and shadows, instance stamping (for segment optimization) and occlusion culling we essentially had a version of FPSC that could render a 500x500x20 scene with excellent visuals and performance.



For me the new terrain system is biting off more than FPSC can chew. Its clear that on older or even mid range video cards its not possible to render a huge terrain with lots of polygons and the large shader required for 3 terrain texture stages, bump maps, specular maps and foliage.



The amount of work being put in just to get this running with acceptable performance is huge and switching all of the sliders to low or off will only allow games which cannot begin to compete with anything modern.



Personally I would prefer to drop the terrain system and go back to having 500x500x20 segments which can be rendered with parallax maps and real time dynamic lighting / shadows with excellent performance.



If we could get Reloaded to a similar level as Half Life 2 or Doom 3 which both excelled without having huge terrains to deal with it would still be a competitive engine to make good games with. Having terrain for the sake of it doesn't make sense if the engine is not well equipped for this.



Using segments really wasn't all that bad and people were still able to make graphically impressive games even in FPSC classic. It just feels like we have a 'landscape creator' at the moment and the screenshots look great but it will be months before anyone can start thinking about making a game at this rate.



If we take the best elements of Reloaded now like the new physics, lighting, shadows, occlusion, post processing, AI etc and go back to instance stamped segments with parallax maps, I think this will give a much faster and impressive engine that can actually make games people will want to play.



At the very least there should be an option to start a new map without any terrain and to use segments with a parallax shader instead for people that want to really focus on 60fps game play instead of 'look at my huge terrain'.



If you want to carry on down this huge world path then be prepared to compete with other engines and games that do huge worlds really well. I think we need to ask ourselves if we are picking a fight we can actually win here or if we are better off cutting our cloth to something which is really going to deliver and be competitive in its own right.

Accurate and True on all counts.



What you do about it is not for me to say and I don't know the answer anyway.



Point being that removing anything or reducing the quality of everything is not the answer as everyone apparently aspires to seeing Reloaded being an engine of quality competing within reason at a level with other modern day engines and capable of delivering games of the same expectation. Large open worlds and Terrain are a pre-requisite for many game types and other forms of 3D world environments today so nothing wrong with having and expecting that as it provides more potential users with needed features.



Its a bit in between a rock and a hard place as it always has been.



Personally not having very good response from this latest Beta in terms of fps when trying to boost quality or add any level of content and consequently having to reduce the quality and fidelity of the screen rendering and display quality I find that unacceptable to me and for any game I would expect game players to accept. I have now turned up the quality settings to improve visual quality so I can live with looking at it as opposed to low quality where I cant because its so poor and decade old legacy quality, but of course then have unacceptable fps which is below what is needed to develop with or play with and would indeed reduce dramatically further if developing a level further with more complexity and adding further content which needs to be quite considerable proportionately than currently is the case.



Clearly its not going to happen at the moment for me as the rock and the hard place surrounds me.



Only option I can see for the developer user and game player is to go buy a top spec hardware system if indeed that will do the trick. I am not going to do so in an attempt to find out in event that it does not.



Thus personally I am at a stop.

I do think the outside world is far to big for my needs, but others might have different views on this. I would like to be able to make 60fps to lol but at present im enjoying 25fps which is a huge improvement on the 5fps I started with on 1st release, of course this is at lowest settings mostly, and I pump the settings up to max just for testing it out which sits me at around 10-12fps normally on an empty random map.

as I will mainly do pvp games with this software the map size could well be sized down for me or at least have that option, waiting on the room blobs to come in as a feature will be nice for indoor pvp games but I want a mix of both worlds for my game idea.

im not familiar with fpsc classic or x9/10 or games making with it so cant say to much on the parallax mapping, but I did see some nice looking games made with them so maybe its not such a bad idea going to that sort of thing again?. all I can do is wait and see what lee makes of it and hope it holds up for what I want it for. time will tell, how much time I cant say or even guess at...

@Uman







That is exactly where I am with Reloaded. I'm not going to spend hundreds of dollars on a new PC and video card just so I can have terrain and graphics switched on with a frame rate which is o

As far as i read it you can change the size of the terrain so you wont have to use the whole thing. Im pretty sure you gonna be able to disable the terrain and just use the new romm drawing feature (I hope so). Lee said that he wants to get the best performance for the whole terrain at first and then start to look how it works when you use less.



Greetings loler

Large worlds and Terrain is a necessary strength much needed by Reloaded for the success of the product as far as I can see which is why its there.



How the engine handles and delivers that is another matter but does not detract from the necessity.

That was my understanding as well. It's really a sound concept to continue to tweak performance with the full terrain world. Just so at some point we will have the options to reduce it, turn it off, go full indoors, whatever. We just have to wait out the performance work, which I fear in near and end, and then see what gains we can make by adjusting the world to suit.



I'm very curious to see the "room" system and how it plays out. I've always thought that the "segment" thing was very restrictive.

Here is a simple formula that works in all endeavors in life. Stop adjusting for the past and you will find your path to the future. I do understand what it feels to be using older processing equipment - my newest rig is running Vista Ultimate with a mediocre GPU. However, as we all know in the world of computing, there is no preservation of days gone past that any programmer, who hopes are to endure, could ever wish to support a family with. How many people do we really suppose, for example, still try to get by on a Windows 98 system? I would never dare ask my favorite developers to give up a potentially dividable profit on the whimsy that there is some kind of a market for computers whose rapidly increasing break down moments have their only hope in scavenged parts being sold on e-bay. I'm not trying to be harsh, believe me, I often do purchase scavenged parts. The fact remains, however, that this product in question is a game CREATOR - and the market for games is always extending into the advanced programming that tests the limit of the latest and greatest processing, which in turn, game players are obviously demanding. That being said, how remarkably fortunate it is that for those of us with limited resources, a developer can be found who inspires his team to remember that not all players have such lavish computing components and is quite aptly and generously orchestrating this programming of an application that compromises without sacrifice. For the day will come when we all advance in our computing resources and because of this, we will be thankful even more so then that Lee Bamber would not only dream, but also dream big. Beta is always a test of the optimist/pessimist responses in all of us - hopefully we will remain inspired and share in the vision of a productive tool that we will all benefit from immensely - and really, before we even realize it!

Alright, I'll give my input. I half agree with Nomad. We need this terrain to basically get this engine off it's feet, but with that, there should be a system to start a map with terrain, or segments (or this new room blob thing), or both. I can run Crysis 2 on 60 frames constantly on high settings (not ultra) but I get about 30-40 frames on a map on FPSCR with some fences on high settings. Obviously the optimization is horrible, and honestly the fact that the editor is top down and we can't rotate it, makes FPSCR (at this time) that special cousin with down syndrome to other terrain editors. I mean, we can't even make indoor environments yet! Even if we could, since it would be ontop of already rendered terrain, would the fps be even remotely stable!?!?!?

I have said something like this before way back when beta 3 came out. I said that the terrain was nice but unless you doing jungle games too much time was going in to it to get the terrain to give enough speed. I took a blank flat level in beta 3 and got 35fps then I went over the edge off the level it jumped to 207 fps. I also asked this if I had to get a new video card to run reload. how many games do you think you or I will sell if the off the shelf computers won't run it, or I tell them they have to buy a 100.00 card to play my $10-20 game? Sometimes being on the leading edge can come back to bite you I think fps 10 was one. The other thing is it's like they are putting the cart before the horse more worried about put in a button for the store in beta 3 rather then getting it to work and be finished first.Because lets face it right now all we have is a demo nothing more. Maybe he should have waited to come out with the beta's till some of this stuff was fixed. Because I can see that sooner or later people will start to loss interest. It happened to another engine I bought and at the end it took so long with rag doll this and rag doll that they never recovered from it and it became a free engine

EVERYBODY HAVE A MERRY CHRISTMAS

When i first got into realoded i alowed at least a year for it to develope into a real game development tool that everybody can use.Remember that we are into the very early stages of development here,that is what we bought into .



Dave

If you look up at the sky and get 150+ FPS then get 30-40 FPS when looking at an empty terrain this is a serious problem. How on earth does anyone expect to fill these landscapes with all the content required to make a proper game.



I don't think open worlds are required to make Reloaded a success and unless there is a major breakthrough in performance which does not require people to switch off all the graphics, this is not viable.



If Lee adds an option to start a new map without terrain and use segments instead that will be good as we should be able to benefit from all the new features in Reloaded without being forced down the huge terrain route.



Perhaps its too early to judge the terrain system and performance but given we are 4 BETA's in and the only real option to get performance is to slash the visuals I think its important to start considering the alternatives carefully.



We will see what the new room creation system brings to the table and if this really does offer a better solution to segments. We also need some options to reduce the terrain size significantly and ensure a flat terrain is properly optimized.

--- Hope This Gets Read: ---



Once we get the "Room Blob tool" there needs to be two other options in the editor added. One to toggle on/off the terrain plain and one to toggle on/off water. Many editors have this. Its so that you can create ne

Agree Teabone



There must be options to switch off the terrain and water.



If room blobs are going to completely replace segments then this is a make or break feature for me as its going to fundamentally change FPSC and the way we use it.



For example, segments are not just used for buildings, they are used for walls, floors and ceilings throughout the environment including slopes and curved walls etc. The new room creation tool will need to deal with all of those things if its going to be a replacement.



If you look back to a blog post Lee made in May, he had the new segment instance stamp system working in the FPSC map editor and was able to fill the entire 500x500x20 grid with segments without going beyond 1GB of memory. He also had this running at 500 FPS in other tests.



http://fpscreloaded.blogspot.com/2013/05/friday-map-editor-fun.html



I would much rather be able to fill the entire editor grid with segments and have excellent performance than struggling to get 30 FPS and running out of memory with only a terrain and a handful of entities on there.

It is still beta and things are being worked on. Not having outdoor terrain was a major issue with the original fps creator and is definitely needed in Reloaded. I agree there is a way to go performance wise, but am confident it will get a lot better.



Personally the original video for FPS Reloaded did not inspire me at all, looking way too much like the original. I'm pretty sure someone could mimic that demo fairly easy in the original FPSC. I have no doubt there will be many options to hide terrain and so forth, we just have to be patient. As I said at the start it is still a beta, people tend to forget that. No one should be trying to make a game at the moment, as much as they would like to!

@DVader



The problem at the moment is we are waiting until Reloaded can handle these huge terrains which may be a very long time and possibly won't ever happen. As you have said in some other posts in doing so Reloaded is competing with the likes of C

I'm disappointed in the communities voting of the Character Creation tool:



" Highlighted as your number one need, Character Creator is being planned for. We’re in the hunt for a top Character Artist to help us develop this module. "



We can't even build a room yet and your asking for a feature that will not benefit the actual game play. I'm starting to lose hope.



In the attachment was my original wishlist (though im not really too thrilled about multiplayer or 3rd person).



EDIT:There are quite a few items on here that Lee has recently added to Reloaded.



http://fpscreloaded.blogspot.ca/2013/12/saturday-christmas-holiday-2.html?showComment=1388311818814#c8403162613543967022

Teabone, not to fear! You're onto it with your concerns, but this has been addressed. Here's part of a response from Lee in this thread:

I know how you feel. It raises some crusial questions, and suddenly the timeline for be able to create a decent game seems even further away.

But if that extra coder instead was working on the core as Lee does, then we would have a nice product much faster.

I think it´s totally wrong to even spend a daime on a bling-bling Character Editor at this stage when so much else is more vital.

The most important would be to get a finished core product that we can start using, THEN add the bling bling.

If you got money for extra coders, please make them work with core - nothing else.

Amen to that

yeah the voting thing was abit naff... 1stly it was not really clear what we was actually voting for in terms of order of what was to be done, and I guess some was worried if they didn't vote for something they wanted to see later on at some point in the engines time that it would not be included.. like the exe for sharing your finished game or demo...which to me is a standard and not even needed to be voted on as it was made clear to gold pledgers that you can sell your games. why any1 would want it now when there basically is nothing to play anyways is beyond me. performance stability and ai work should be done long before this and character editor thing. but I guess people are bored with waiting for a great product and just want to get started with a less than reliable 1?!.



2ndly the voting list didn't include a bunch of stuff I would of thought would be on it if it was a order of work to be done list, as some people pointed out. (cant really remember off the top of my head who or what right now lol sorry..)



anyways I agree with you steohl72, if there is money for bling bling now why not get 2 people working on the core ai performance and stability then work on the effects and bling and such later, when you can do it without the constant need for returning to performance which I imagine will be the case a lot of the time if not done 1st?!.



maybe the initial pledgers for the product was lower than tgc hoped or thought? maybe by adding features they can get more pledges and fund this better, I wondered this when they put it on steam so early, do they need the fast cash?, because steam I would of waited for till there was something solid really solid core engine wise, and maybe a few good features like the indoor editor really. then there is the user testimonials being put on the website and asked for in the forums, I read 1 I cant quote exactly but was not really something I agreed with when I read it, something along the lines of "the only thing holding you back is your imagination" which for me was not true, there are no real models to buy yet that are 100% working and the assets in the engine are very limited, then there is the poor performance and very limited amount of work you can do on any 1 map to. so maybe tgc are getting ahead of themselves just to turn a buck on this I don't know but it feels abit like it at the moment, abit like they see it as closer to finished than started the way its being advertised. but then maybe I am alone on this lol either way hope for a lot of the right improvements before the wrong 1s I will...

Personally I've never been sold on the importance of a massive terrain editor, especially given the performance issues endured by adding one. All of the maps in HL2 and many other FPS games (to my knowledge) were developed using Hammer and other tools that had no such capabilities, and I don't think anyone would argue that those maps and games were less than excellent and immersive. Sure, rolling terrains have their purpose, but I feel most game design ambitions can be achieved without one as well by using prebuilt meshes and simple polygon deformation capabilities. If Lee adds the feature he spoke of once allowing multiple exit/entry points in maps, this would make it easier to near-seamlessly load resources to give the appearance of much larger maps, much like Half-Life did.



None of us have many details about the character creator which seemingly came out of nowhere as a suggestion. I guess it could range from very basic (a bank of preset face models, hat models, body models that user can mix together) or very advanced similar to Poser controls where you can adjust specific characteristics of each component to create truly unique characters. But to make the advanced version would require substantial development time I would think.

I have to say I agree with everyone views and points of interest here.



My first time testing reloaded was only recently (beta #4) and below are some points of view that may have been covered before. Also I do fully understand it is early days of the build/beta, however here is something I would like to add.

Apart from I see no real value adding creation features as of yet when the engine itself should have primary focus.

Below are things I would have liked to have seen in the first beta testing.



*Camera in edit mode was fixed for me. I was expecting to have have full 360 degrees control via mouse. (greater map design and entity placement)

*Map area volume has no size options. would have liked to seen a slider or input of measurement.

*Water on/off.

*The zoom out and in is really slow (mainly because of map/world size)

Defy, you can increase zoom speed by holdning down shift-key. That goes for movement as well.

I agree I for one never vote for the Character Creation tool. I feel 3d model software makes it easy enough to make models. but there is no real easy way models characters it will take some work even with such a tool. I think better ideal would be a cheaper 3d modeling tool that could allow you to use bip animation for those who can't afford 3dmax. also there are so many models rig or animated on the internet that the Character Creation tool will have to be very unique in it's own way. meaning not just plan meshes but unique shape and form meshes.



but other things are more important at this time like the LUA Scripting.

Lee does need to look into this because it may help the performance and it will give the artists to put their characters to work. then after lua we will need Advanced AI. it only makes more since to do things in this order. because right now reload is nothing but a test dummy.

I remember the days when the original Crysis would not run on ultra on any PC's. It became a benchmark for graphic cards. Now I kill it in quality and FPS. I like the idea of a ground up new engine. I like Lee's bill board approach, for example, and I'm sure there will be other new ideas.



Regards,

I kept stressing the billboard suggestion all 2013 lol



Glad its finally in place

Thanks for your feedback thus far, and it's quite right we have a long way to go before we can start to create full finished games in Reloaded. I firmly believe that starting with terrain was the right way to go and the best place to begin a game engine foundation. Still plenty of optimization work to go in that department so watch this space for more progress. No sense 'switching off terrain' until we have something to replace it with, which is where the 'room blob/construction kit' feature (also being worked on by third party) will come in. Once we have interior structures, we can define a portal system to cull the majority of the outside world to achieve FPS rates you are more familiar with. I am also happy to say goodbye to the segment system as the requirement to fit your imagination around 100x100x100 cubes was getting a little restrictive, despite the incredible creations we saw with FPS Classic.



My road map for early 2014 is still very much on performance, memory usage, stability and core functionality. I want to bring you the option to create both indoor AND OUTDOOR games, underwater and underground games, driving and flying games, and pretty much everything in between. I also want to do this from a single engine to make my life easier, and to make your life easier too as you'll only need to learn one product. The only way to deliver this is to create an underlying technology that is insanely fast in every quarter, and we'll do that a few FPS at a time



Only today I received an email from a Reloaded pledger with a modified terrain shader script that increases their performance by 4-5 fps with almost no visual difference in the HIGHEST shader mode. This improvement is now added as a HIGH setting for the next update. It's little victories like these which will take us from where we are now, to the amazing product we're destined to create. I am very pleased you're along for the ride, and also for your patience as we build this leviathan.



I suppose I could add a mode which replaces the entire terrain with a flat textured sheet while we wait for the Construction Kit module...if you think it's a good idea visit my blog and make your opinions known. If I get more than ten thumbs up I'll sort that out for ya!

To be fair here I think that because there are so many different people that look to use Reloaded in different ways - people who have pledged and have individual aspirations for use of the product having different priorities of what they personally see as most important features, it is and was going to be the case that getting to a stage where all of those people have something of what they look for so they can make a start in making their own production whatever it might be was going to be a long task.



Add to that Reloaded and users look to it to be indeed a better product than has been available in the past then the engine and the building of it would requires more investment in time and resources of various kinds, need to be possibly more complex/advanced and take longer than previous engine developments may have done.



To deliver that there is no magic solution and TGC and Lee seem to have done well to date despite any current issues or difficulties faced which were always likely to become apparent when developing such a complex application/product even if it may have taken longer than one might prefer. That's the nature of attempting a seriously major project which it is.



Anyway I have to give credit to TGC for sticking with the plan and that's the only way to get a result. They cannot magically create all the needed features that people want and have asked for with many individual variations and personal details to suit as many aspirations as so many different users have. It seems that it makes a great deal of sense to follow the current indicated plan to develop the main features to be added in the vote list in tandem with Lee being the lead developer being given free time to concentrate further on the core engine stabilities and efficiencies which will no doubt benefit all users whether they will eventually wish to take advantage of the outdoor/indoor or combined environments in the productions they will develop. The core engine being improved will benefit all without a shadow of a doubt as whatever you use the product for you will always be looking for that extra quality, stability and performance. That will be certain. You cant make that core too good for any user or game player ever, so a benefit you will surely have from that. If you don't get it then you will be asking later why not, where is it, I should have it and Reloaded is no good to me without it. Goes without saying don't it that if you have a game engine then it should be stable, efficient of quality and fast because that's what you want and expect. However to get there it has to be built and that's what TGC are trying to give you. As said many times can't fault them for that. Users wanted something better so TGC are trying to give it to you.



As to the main features yet to come and be added we currently have in the list again due to so many users wanting different things as a priority then they can all be done at once wand it would be foolish to try and do that - too many cooks spoil the broth and seen that all before. Again things tend then to get swept under the carpet and move on an ignore the problems or issues.



I am sure all the features will come and along with improvements to the engine in tandem so steady as you go is good advice.



At the end of the day all of the features will be needed by many before they can make their game as many are relevant to many game types and so on. Thus to some extent they are all a priority and is does not matter which order they come in within reason. I am sure TGC can decide which are the most pressing at any time depending partly on what has to be integrated next to the engine in the core development itself so that it provides full support for any particular feature along a route.



The Character Creator, Room Building System and Save Game and all the other features are important to some but not to others to have in a specific order but by and large you will need them all to best advantage in many users instances.



In the case of the Blob or Room system from what I have seen previously described in some reasonably detail by Lee would be a far better system than the old segment building system, more efficient and should allow users to make much better games than were possible in the past with any TGC products. I don't doubt that.



Given the state of development at this time the current plan seems to be reasonable and the best way forward to me. When that is progressed there are even more features I am sure that I and many others would like added but that's another story.



I understand all concerns as I have them myself and can see everyones point of view but I would not ask or expect TGC to change the aspiration to make Reloaded anything but the best it possibly can be and go for it rather than give me a quick fix for one isolated feature or another which without the whole is of little use. Bugs, issues, stability and performance along the way are an entirely different matter and have to be accommodated for and taken into account and attended to as part of the core development in supporting the whole engine quality, efficiency and stability.



The very worst that can happen is that Reloaded fails and as far as making a game is concerned then you will have lost nothing as you can continue as in the past which is again not much use to you. Looking on the bright side alternatively if successful then you will have tool available to you whereby you can actually successfully make a game of your desires within reason of course, but a game you will be able to make with as little effort and cost as any option you are ever likely to find.



In the current game world that's still not easy to achieve for small indie developers so you may have a one an only best option for a lot of small indie game makers for the first time. Lets hope so.



Given the new year looks like you will all soon have some of the main features you look for coming on stream to look forward to.



Sure you will still have to put some effort in if you want to make a quality game but that is an option for the user to decide given they have a choice which they surely will.



The only major threat to that I can see perhaps is the core engine no matter what hardware you will use as it can never be really too good for what indie users in general need - and rightly so, Lee still gives that some order of priority so as to try and ensure as many users as possible can get the best out of the product and that can only be a good thing in the long term. The better the core and features the more users and the better the games you will see being made. Its the only way as that's a win, win situation and the opposite is a no win for anyone.



Have some "More" faith and hopefully all will pan out as you want if you - Yes "Wait" as always is the case. Unfortunately indies are always waiting but then that's the whole point of supporting and pledging to Reloaded - hopefully one day your wait will be over and you can get on and make that game you always wanted to.



If it never happens then at least all of us pledgers and TGC will have tried and that's must be worth the effort. If not Reloaded then you are likely perhaps to be waiting much longer to make a game with anything else.

FSPC Classic was a disappointment to me personally.



I agree with your approach Lee. Optimizing for the huge maps makes more sense, as it will naturally optimize for smaller scale, as opposed to generating more of a "trial and error" process if you were to try optimizations on smaller maps then test upwards.



I understand the enthusiasm for wanting things *now*, but I think people just need to draw up some patience.

FPSC Classic was a development that aimed to produce a 'V1 box', and then tweak around the edges with small fixes (and sometimes anti-fixes). I want Reloaded to be a continual product that continues to benefit from 100% development focus. We will have a box at some point, but it will only be a 'moment in time' version, before the serious business of making it a world beating piece of kit.