FPS is still am issue for many. It's slowly being improved with each release, occasionally going backwards a bit with new features on some updates. In it's current state I would imagine we need it to be at
least twice as fast as it is currently, with high settings needing a lot more whoomph. Some people get better performance than others dependent on their PC spec. To get real speed you need a top end card in the 070+ range for Nvidia and similar for ATI, although I can never remember those cards revisions these days. Of course, this shouldn't be the case, and hopefully won't be the case in future. My 660 should be able to cope with highest settings admirably, and at present apart from small scenes, isn't fast enough. Compare it's performance in other games and well, it runs everything at full whack no problems.
As expected, Reloaded is planned for release in September (TGC's favorite release month) to a Steam audience. Unless performance is improved drastically before then, it will be panned, at least as a serious games making platform, and relegated to the kiddie game maker market. From the looks of the demo game, we have some nice new features to play with in 1.08
, but speed really needs to be addressed next. Before being launched onto Steam. Users will forgive lack of things like multiplayer, only one level, limited number of characters, but will not forgive a slow, jerky frame rate when you add a couple of hundred objects into a scene. Also, as much as it has improved, the AI is still in need of more variety, both in it's combat and also for non combat AI, which is non existent at present.
Things can and will improve though I think, just will it be good enough in time for Steam? I wish TGC every success here, I'm just pretty sure on Steam, as it is it will be panned.
For instance, we as interested games makers will always give a product like this more leeway. Particularly if we have had much experience of developing anything ourselves, if only for personal projects. We have an idea how difficult some things can be and are patient, even encouraging to the devs. Most Steam game players though, will not have any real experience in this, and will just expect everything to work as well as other games that they see on Steam. With a FPS product you are competing against some seriously stiff competition! Theres no limit of fast graphically impressive FPS games out there.
Obviously, with clever level design, speed can be kept up higher than if you simply fill a scene with stuff, but even so we don't really have many options to do this at present. Once scripting options are good enough, we may start to see some really impressive stuff being made.
We can only discuss this and hope TGC take note and deliver at some point. Speed, greasy speed and then some. Once we have that, then we can really start having some fun! I find when you start a new project and have loads of speed available it is an absolute joy to play with. But when you have a large level and it is running like it's stuck in glue, takes an age to test and can crash any second, that tends to take all the fun out of it.
SPECS: Q6600 CPU. Nvidia 260GTX. 8 Gig Memory. Win 7.
