so I made a quick level using most of the horror pack to show off for tgc.

it has some flaws in design(my level not the pack).. and no enemies but most of the horror pack is in the level for bronze pledgers and others to look at in video.



please enjoy the 5mins video sorry for slow start skip the 1st 45seconds or so for getting past loading.







if you asked me this is well worth the store points, but I hope they add to this later with more props and some characters.

Unfortunately it is trying to charge me for the pack.



EDIT: If this happens to you just log out and back into the store.

any1 else get an error while downloading the horror pack?

it seems while trying to clear the temp files between models it is crashing my reloaded (creates 21 identical errors)



The Game Creators\FPS Creator Reloaded\Files\editors\TEMP\_1_.000 was not found

GoTo, The Game Creators\FPS Creator Reloaded\Files\editors\TEMP and delete the zip file there and try again.

This is fixed in V1.007 but wizard of id's suggestion is a good idea.

The new pack looks pretty nice in this. I've just started playing about with it and like the look of it a lot. Nice video.

thanks dvader m8, sadly its another map I was working on that's now gone.. though at least I got to vid it 1st lol...

Thanks for the vid. I'm not really blown away with the quality though. What are your texture resolution settings in the ini file?



Brian.

no idea, I don't mess with the ini files, I didn't get an option for record/upload quality though either, and I did notice a large blurred patch on the vid outside and around the church near the end... thanks







edit:- this I think is setup ini though not sure tbh as I don't mess with anything much other than the odd fpe and the global.lua



[RELOADED]

vsync=0

superflatterrain=0

riftmode=0

smoothcamerakeys=0

memorydetector=1

occlusionmode=0

hidememorygauge=0

hidelowfpswarning=0

hardwareinfomode=1

fullscreen=0

width=-1

height=-1

depth=32

aspectratio=1

dividetexturesize=2

producelogfiles=1



[GAMEPROFILE]

key1 = 17

key2 = 31

key3 = 30

key4 = 32

key5 = 57

key6 = 46

key7 = 28

key8 = 19

key9 = 16

key10 = 18

key11 = 42

That line right there will kill all detail in your models.



If you started out with the model originally having a 1024px texture map, this will be halved to 512px, then, (if I am correct) halved again to 256px. It'a obviously all in the name of improving performance, but, it will have a huge affect on the overall visual quality of your game.



Simply change



dividetexturesize=2



to



dividetexturesize=0



and the original texture size will remain the same, thus, you will get the quality that the artist intended.



Cheers



Jay.

well like I say I never mess with the setup ini, its at its default settings for reloaded but I will change it sometime later on I guess. thanks

Yea I just checked and both of my computers it is defaulted @ 2.

I would be interested to know what happens to your performance when you make the change to actual texture quality.

My settings are always set to =0 and I am getting soem pretty reasonable frame rates.



I can imagine it would affect the overall performance, but, what's a couple of fps in comparison to serious eye candy!

I don't think it will hurt fps too much depending on quantity of different textures and draw calls, it's more likely to be a saving in memory usage when building

Makes sense. I'll have to do some experimenting when the next beta comes out.



Brian.

My graphics cards go off there head when i do this lol

Setting that to 0, doesn't affect my performance what so ever, it has more to do with the available GPU memory than any thing else.However that said tree's shadows seems to be all over the place now.



Minor glitch, but meh, every thing is considerably more crisp.

Then it was set that way to keep us from reaching the memory limit?

I think that's what I was trying to say in the first place but I am not into nitpicking over semantics. What concerns me a little with this is when it comes to build you may run into the 2GB memory limit unawares using this setting as default in your levels.



You might not be able to build at higher texture resolutions when it runs fine at lower in the editor...surprise.



I would rather see a player change these settings when loading the game to suit their system specs, I am not so sure it helps me with development of a game except to ease the burden on memory when designing, but it's not going to help when building......something like that.



Still, I might be wrong as it could still be storing the full texture resolution in memory and only displaying at a lower, if so then it's not really much of an fps gain (it might on some really low end integrated cards) and nor is it stopping anything reaching a memory limit, so why is it deafult?



I think it is good that they are trying to accommodate lower spec systems but for default then mid range would be best and these systems should handle full texture resolution just fine. It's the shaders that most systems struggle with.



It's not always necessary to use a full res Normal and Specular, in fact most wouldn't notice at all, so might be an idea to reduce these and leave diffuse untouched if it's to save memory or only to gain a few fps on low end systems. In fact I reckon that's a no brainer with adjustable shader settings as it is now.

And that is the point I was trying to make a few weeks back when I moaned about taking performance too far, to the detriment of users that run FPSC just fine at max.Little effort was put into finding out what would happen if users actually push the limits of the software.



Oh boy was I surprised how badly it actually runs with max settings, the grass system is totally flaky, save crashes, and the random crashes.It is rather disappointing that again a narrow point of view was taken again, a drive for performance at only at one end of the spectrum.(Got very little to do with memory limits closely monitored memory usage and a map with over a 1000 entities barely used 1.3gb in test mode.)



Sadly that is not good enough, which is why I constantly remind TGC, it's good and well that you look at the little guys, but seriously pooling all of your priorities at getting the lower end system running, and some what ignoring the people that have higher end systems is a bit of a head scratch-er.



It all good and well that eventually those system requirements will be of little concern in the future, it's the right now guys that you annoying the most.



TGC applied exactly the same approach they did with classic reduce all quality, reluctant to do any high end graphical features, even when applied it simply wasn't there, simply because they were aware of the memory limit, put no real effort in fixing the immediate problem, and sort of hoped there weren't going to be any surprises and boy were they surprised how quickly that memory problem became a major problem.



Sacrificially reducing quality for senseless or pointless gains, I was actually asked to reduce the dividetexturesize to 16 for testing purposes, 16 !!!!



Default dividetexturesize is a bit of a knife in the back, for what it is worth, that is a bridge too far, since I have changed that EVERY thing looks crisp, clean and just looks better, and had no effect on performance.That is also from my view not putting the best foot forward, as artists are not getting visuals across that they envisioned to the end user.



My other problem is why on earth do we need moan all the time to get some done right, it is the same approach every time, couple of users moan, some one takes notice and the problem is addressed till some thing else comes along and the battle cycle starts all over again.It is counter productive to the users and TGC, they have many completed products behind their name, is hardly difficult to envision short comings.



But meh...I have moaned already far too much this week already :p

Heh! I promise you I am going to push Reloaded to it's graphical limit and way beyond for the comp



I am actually surprised at how well it's holding up so far even doing things it's not supposed to at this stage and I have no need to reduce texture resolution for this either



Just an aside but I am using a cheap Acer laptop with integrated intel graphics to develop this and still no issues, when I build and run on the desktops it flies like the wind. Seriously, I am really pushing it and of course it lags on the wee comp but only a little and it's mostly about refresh rates down to a lot of synchronized graphic animations which a dedicated graphics card handles easily.



If you want a comparison I can't really give you one, I don't think the technique I am using has ever been used much before for any commercial games. But when I started I reckoned it would tax any game engine. This will change when I introduce some gameplay and AI but so far it works well.....surprisingly so and I haven't even removed that terrain I don't need yet.

@rolfy : Extra reduction options to reduce/eliminate normal/spec to save GPU memory is a good idea rather than a blanket reduction value. Any idea where this setting might be controlled, perhaps a slider in Test Level so you can fiddle with the various re

I remember being able to put it into the .fpe for individual entity's it was one of those fields that even appeared in the edit menu when you did this, all the same your correct and it was only a select few savvy modelers and users who used it to disable the global setup for texture reduction on their models.



You probably didn't know it but we were sneakily putting it into the fpe so our store models would appear at their best in game for users....Heh!



Personally reducing normal and spec is something I would do myself if I found myself using something as large as 4096x4096 texture as its really a bit of overkill using this resolution for these. I find it better to use a 24bit dds over a 12bit larger texture, it all balances out in the end with file sizes but I feel the higher bit quality is simply better looking than using a larger scale.



Makes a lot of sense and takes advantage of Reloaded's ability to show shaders directly in the editor. Even using a blanket reduction the abilty to change it manually and easily in test level at least enures users know it is not a fixed resolution and handy when testing and such in scene before final build or to simply shave that little off the memory cap that you might need.



On a per entity basis it would work well for those distant entity's that player wont get to and make this easier for users to achieve. Mip mapping which is already handled by the engine? But certainly, disabling normal and spec altogether at distance would do no harm at all.

As a few people mention here the divide texture size is nothing new. It was in Classic and Reloaded from the start as far as I am aware. As to speed gains, no if you have a powerful video card with plenty of memory it doesn't make much difference, but on a lower card it can make a big difference in performance! Even on a fairly good video card it can make a difference when you are on the ragged edge of FPS also.

I agree more needs to be done in the high performance area, but TGC are not EA. They are a small team and can only do so much. Getting lower performance machines to run at a decent rate is definitely a good idea, and was needed for a lot of pledger's to even use the software. At least high end users have the option to try higher settings and reduce as needed. I'm sure advances will come in all settings, they just worked on the ones most needed is all. So even people with low end systems had a fair crack at using it.

Lastly, @ Wizard of ID, 16! Lol that is an extreme amount indeed! Even 8 or 4 is pushing it quality wise, unless the textures are 4096 monsters I suppose. Another performance sweep is probably needed at some point soon to get high settings running at a more acceptable level. The difficulty of course is everyone has their own priorities that they feel Reloaded should be going and TGC can't please everyone all the time. Still, once we have some Lua commands to play with and current bugs are resolved, I'm sure they will put some effort into making it shine on all settings. I feel it is needed before they even think of releasing this on Steam. Gamers can be quite brutal in their views on this, being an indie will only help so far I'm afraid.



@ Almightyhood, yeah, I know what you mean I have lost some great looking maps over this year each update. It sucks and I look forward to when most things are set in stone and levels start to work regardless of updates. Probably awhile yet though

Yes it was in Classic by default and how many users would be asking why some folks games look great and theirs didn't and how to achieve it. With many of them not even asking but simply stomping off and complaining about the quality.



It is necessary sometimes but as I say something which should be more obvious, as Lee points out himself he was not aware of anyone using a feature, reason for this is it wasn't common knowledge and those who didn't have a clue would simply walk away and bad mouth the product based on first impressions.



I don't want to see this happen to Reloaded

@DVader



And there in lies the problem, they were working on performance, regardless if they were working on only one end of the spectrum, both could have been addressed.



I seriously needed to MOAN a lot to get the vegmask corruption error fixed,

@ Rolfy, I agree. I assume they default to a lower settings to help people who don't like to mess with those things just use the product. More in editor options would help here to make it easier to change this.

@ Wizard of ID, continue to moan whenever

Just to give you some idea I have over 2500 entities in my level, and adding more daily. still getting a 44 odd FPS.



Terrain LOD doesn't do much the gains there is meh, were you gain A LOT is with grass quantity and camera view distance, with so many entities and grass every where, at any given time there is only 350K odd polygons being rendered.