Hi all. Here is a video of the City Pack in action. So if you are umming and ahhing on whether to get it or not then you can get a look here. I do a few tests for speed on it, and also show off a bit of my latest scripting explorations. It's not ready, but it is almost done (I think). Keep watching to see what I have been playing with!

I think the new city pack is a bargain at it's current discount price, certainly a great starting point for your next GTA beater

Keen to see that script

good script, was tempted to try doing that myself but figured i'd wait for more input checks, nice to see it working though
already have the city pack and agree for the price you might as well

Nice work on this

best s4real

@DVader ..
Damn you ....Because of your video I had to buy the city pack !!
The Mrs will kill me for spending more this month

Very nice! I own the city pack also and now will have to start playing with it after seeing what you have done here.

Thanks, DVader! Great video as always, and while I was already sold on the city pack, it was great seeing it in use. I'm buying it this evening. Also, your "full body awareness" script is awesome even though it just needs a little work! I didn't even know the Lua commands were up to that ability yet. Again, great work!

@DVader..

Love the body effect !!!
Incredible which brings a thought to mind.....If you can do that.....Would it be possible to make a third person character instead of a gun ?

In other words....Where the Gun model would be.....Replace it with a c

Hi all. Glad you liked the video! My original city was far nicer looking as I had tweaked it a whole lot more, but as FPS had dropped to less than 20 in places I decided to start over again in Super Flat mode to help get a bit more performance to play with. Later on if I decide to try to finish the map, I may add a few objects to help make the city look less flat and hence a bit more authentic. Still for a fairly quick (when playing with levels, testing and re testing, much time can pass by) level it's looking ok and keeps speed up beyond the odd issue I mention at the start. Hopefully with the new update performance should go up much further still.



Just to keep Lee on the ball however, a comment made on Youtube via Google to me (roughly, I can't be bothered to go find the exact message).



"It looks like a game from the 90's. It's only running at 60 FPS? Imagine how badly it will run with AI going."



So beyond the actual community here, it's not impressing everyone quite so easily. Or at least the trolls out there. (Edit ) Well, after actually reading the full message I would retract the troll statement. I leave it in, because I don't believe it's fair to edit messages after the fact. It was a negative message for FPS Reloaded, but only an opinion after all.



As far as adapting this script to a 3rd person camera view. As far as I can see it is not possible. Faking a body is possible because it is mostly offscreen. Attempting to put it in front of the player would work, BUT, as you have no control of the camera, your character would rotate around you in a most unsatisfactory way. Obviously in 3rd person, the camera should rotate around the object, not the other way round. So probably not possible.



As I said in the video. I am unsure what I am going to do with the script as yet. I may give it away. Or I may put it for sale. Either way it would be fairly cheap I've spent a fair bit of time on it so far, 3D maths is NOT my strong point lol. Much head scratching and testing to get it as shown. Still potentially a few issues to iron out also. Still, so far it works pretty well



@ synchromesh, glad I helped squeeze another sale out My video has done it's work, lol. Still, at 50% off, if you have any hopes of doing anything with a city setting, crazy to miss out if you can possibly avoid it! Even at full price it is still a good deal to be fair. Anyone saying, bah, compared to GTA 5 it's poor, would be wise to realize, the media in that game very likely cost more than 25 dollars!

Nice video and player body simulation.
I want a ferrari+full control of camera/keyboard.

Does player can go inside of any building?
I wonder why he is not with us, here, in Reloaded.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FT18zzT95lc

3com

Heh, you could replace the body with a Ferrari, however it would still control like a player atm, in future with a few more commands though who knows? I'm already doing well getting it to react without a key check ;p None of the buildings have interiors I'm afraid, so no going in buildings here. Nothing to stop me adding interiors later and teleporting to each interior building of course. Which is what I would do if I were trying to make an actual game of this.

Regarding the vid, yeah theres many things shown in the past we have not yet got our mits on!

He's actually form the community. I can recognize by the repeated request for "3rd party character model"support". Which has been written on youtube, forums and Lee's blog.



Which is an irrelevant quote for the video you posted. I must say I'm quite impressed with your buildings.

dvader m8 nice city .. how you keep fps up like that though I have the pack and didn't get anywhere near that size b4 it crapped out on me. think I had 6 buildings and a small flowers area and park with some extra roads laid out for more city but, like I said fps crapped out .. you using a script to boost fps there or ?

Nope, just use the flat terrain mode setting in the ini to get a few fps before starting Avoid using too much flora, flowers and such for me at least slow things more than any other type of object. Don't go mad using road segments. If you notice, I have no road segments at all, just the terrain between pavement objects. Again, I am not using the default city floor, as to pave the floor like that takes too many entities, again slowdown is unavoidable with the current performance woes. So I have made larger ones.
Mainly number of entities is key to keeping a level as fast as you can get it. For instance have a fence consisting of 10 objects in a line. If you replaced those 10 with one new item you will get better overall speed, even though poly count is not much lower (if any). Reloaded has 9 fewer items to handle both for collision and AI, not to forget 9 fewer items to cycle through at all. We could do with more fences in this vein to give you a speed boost with long fences.
So basically that is all I have done. Have an experiment. Stick with City Pack buildings and a flat terrain (in the ini not just a flat terrain), don't place any flora as such, and just see how far you can go with the buildings. The background ones look worse, but run faster obviously so up to you to play about with which ones you use the most. Once you have a decent sized area (or if), you can start to add the detail stuff and just try to be as light on flowers and such as you can.

yeah flowers are mostly all animated, wish tgc would double up on the veg and give us all those plants and trees non animated versions of them or something.
thanks for the info, I did mess with the setup.ini file set superflatterrain=0 to =1 that made the editor not work though, as I could not sculpt the terrain at all in either top down or 3d editing mode ..
it was like the circle was above the terrain not flush on it?!.

If you use super flat mode. Your game is just that, flat. The floor is then no longer made of 100000 polys or such, now it is just one. Hence the FPS saving. For hills you would need some objects to help fake them. You cannot sculpt any terrain in super flat mode. For cities in the main this isn't a real issue. Also be careful of FLAT mode, any map made in normal mode will cease to work in it. Mainly the floor is too high and will hide all your objects. You have to be careful to go back and adjust the super flat terrain flag back to 0 when using normal (non flat) maps.

You CAN just hide the terrain on a normal map of course. It will give you as good if not better FPS. However the floor will look worse as removing the terrain seems to remove some of the shadow/light effects as well, and of course you have no floor at all, meaning you will have to cover everywhere with objects to simulate it. F11 then just disable the floor with F3. You will instantly see the FPS boost here.



Edit - just to let everyone know, I have released the script and FPE to get this running in your own creations! Check out the scripts section!

@DVader



Great work on the city pack and thanks for releasing the script. It looks awesome even if it can't be fully implemented just yet.



I also prefer using super flat terrain mode at the moment for performance gains. As more options become ava

@dvader
that's disappointing m8... no sculpting terrain with super flat mode, I wanted water lol but alas that's not possible with it ..

I have posted into the features thread/emailed lee about a water inzone possibility but no real idea if its poss

Cheers Nomad and anyone else I may have missed. Skull Island was a test to see how much I could place down before Reloaded became too slow. It actually ran quite well, but obviously the Island was smaller than I would have liked. Partly to help keep speed, and partly to maintain the illusion of a large ocean. I tried to put it into the video section , but have been having serious problems with that for weeks now.

@ almightyhood. Can't perform miracles here, 1.85 is the slowest reloaded has been for a couple of updates now. So, flat mode was the only option. I tried a similar sized city in normal mode and was down to 18 fps in places. The performance really is Reloaded's worst issue at the moment. Put it this way, go load up GTA San Andreas, or watch a vid if you don't have it. The map in that game is huge. Does it have any issue with performance? No. Obviously it is looking dated and old these days even with mods. Yet it holds up to running a massive map you can travel around without loading, and more importantly, without slowdown. Not an empty map either, a map with cars and civilians doing their thing etc. Considering how old this game is, Reloaded has some work to do.

Here's the Skull Island vid, as I can't seem to get any videos up on the official video section.

I know m8 lol performance has taken some hits and things work 1 beta only to be removed and/or changed in another such is the way of dev mode though I guess.

Yes, things go up and down with each release. We have to expect that sort of thing while the main engine is being developed. It's interesting however to see on my original FPS Stress test video using the original beta, that speed has not changed so much over the longterm. I have actually looked back at that and thought speed looks better when the level is maxed out then than now! Especially as I have a much newer video card since then, going from 260 to 660. Even with the much better card Reloaded seems to be running not all that much better when things get busy (when things first start and you have very few objects it runs better, but again not by as much as you would imagine.)
So, are Reloaded's speed issues actually based so heavily on the GPU or CPU? I am guessing the latter, as Lee seems to get better FPS in his tests than I ever get with my mine. If it were a GPU bottleneck my 660 should kill a 9800. So then you look at what difference the core I7 would make compared to a Q6600. I know the I7 is vastly faster than a Q6600, possibly up to 10 times faster from some of the benchmarks I have seen! Newer memory for the I7 may well be a fair bit nippier than my aging memory also. That would certainly help speed things up!
I think we would all see a bigger fps increase in general if multi core was supported properly. Even I7 users who probably aren't suffering too much with AI slowdown and such would still benefit, as now all 4 cores would be supported, not to mention mullti threading would make that effectively 8. We can perhaps hope that may actually happen soon, as baking has been made to use all your cores. Or not, it may be a far simpler process using all the cores to work on a joint maths project, rather than handling different things in game. Still getting the engine to utilize the hardware more effectively has got to be more effective than tweaking shaders surely? Optimization is good and needed of course, but actually gaining speed from using the unused hardware should be far more effective than any optimization. At least you would imagine so.
Anyway, those are my thoughts on current speed issues. Certainly some things may need to be handled differently, such as terrain, a big fps killer from the start. But getting multicore support should help even more overall in a large game scenario.
Here's the original Stress test i did all those months ago. I sometimes watch it again, when answering comments and am often surprised at how well it did run originally, considering all the tweaks and changes that have been made since.

@DVader i agree 101% here i don't believe its down to the cpu as i have an i7 and get lower fps also a very high end card and i almost get the same fps on my laptop as i do on my desktop it is strange but i did report to lee there was a loss of over 100fp

Yes, I can attest to that from experience so far. Although, my brothers machine has run all my demos way better than mine. He has a Nvidia 580 card and I7, with I think 16GB of ram. Where I am struggling to get 25 fps, his will normally get 60 still, perhaps dipping a little in places. He has both a faster video card and CPU, so it is hard to say which one makes the most difference. Normally you would say the video card, in the case of 99% of games out there CPU is a small factor in speed, but with Reloaded? Who knows? I am going from past DB experience. DB hogged the CPU really badly compared to other languages I have used, although it was never great with shaders either, so again hardly conclusive evidence Oh and he has an SSD drive which also makes a good difference to the loading times at least.

I wonder who here has the best spec system? Does anyone here own Dual Titans or a similar AMD rig? Do you get better performance? I saw a video ages ago that ran super smooth for Reloaded, to the point where I though, this isn't Reloaded! Still the assets were out of the desert pack, so I am guessing it was Reloaded, just running better than I have seen.

Of course you shouldn't need a rig that powerful to run it, I doubt theres many games out there that do, unless you have 3 monitors hooked up or 4k or such.

I was wondering the same thing i posted my rig in off topic just to sort of see what other people were using as i was seeing older computers getting almost the same fps as me if not more at times and that just baffles me as i have dual R9 cards an i7 and 32gb and of mem and a ssd of-course the memory is over the top and reloaded can only use 3-4gb but i use cinema 4d and it speeds up rendering a massive amount but i feel lee could look into this.



Edit i also remember trying a map you made and i was getting almost the same fps as you.

It is odd that high spec machines like yours don't show significant speed increases. Fair enough, even some commercial games don't support dual video cards properly, but even a single R9 is probably far faster than my 660 in all areas. It could well be that Reloaded works better on Nvidia cards than ATI, given that it is developed with a 9800 as it's test card atm. Perhaps many of the extra speed boosts on later cards need DX11+ to take advantage of them. While DX 9 is the largest user base possible, it does limit several new techniques. DX11 support is not really an option at this point, it is too far down the road to change, and I suppose the team is just not large enough to support both being available at this point. Later down the line (much later) I imagine. You never know, we may see support for Linux via Valve before, or indeed instead of DX11 support in future, given it being launched on Steam sometime soon. Converting over to Steam's new OS may be far easier a job than moving to DX11, but of course would have a smaller market. Not sure I would want to install a new OS here though.

Let's hope 1.9 is as good as it's being portrayed to be. The forums have been real quiet of late. Very likely because of no update for such a long time. Obviously Gold pledger's are probably getting restless by now. Though, when you consider how much time goes into wrapping up each update, I can understand TGC taking more time to get it right, and less on making beta tests and a new release. I can only surmise that it is in such a state of flux, that producing a new version would be very unstable at present.

How long can we wait? Is it likely to be a month from now? Two? Both sound a fair way off, but I would imagine one month is probably the soonest we are like to see a new release. If the blog is anything to go by, perhaps 2 weeks if everything goes really well with no show stoppers taking days to fix.

No pressure Lee, but 1.9 needs to be good We want many smiles on everyones faces when they get stuck in, not frowns and scowls!

according to the pledge page, November is the month for 09, but no solid date of when in November.. could be the beginning could be the end or somewhere inbetween? . either way yes its a long ways off and HAS to put a lot of smiles on a lot of faces indeed.

The next update sounds good so far from all accounts, but we will have to see how things go. I keep myself busy making objects for it and generally playing about, as I have done since launch. Of course I would like to be able to start making a proper game as such, but really we still need more features for this. So until then we can only play and fiddle with ideas, rather than start a full fledged game. At least until we can be sure our levels will transfer with no real issues with updates, or if the current update is good enough to work with for the game with no updates needed.

I'm still confident that given a bit more time we will have a much faster, more robust engine. My Skull Island demo shows Reloaded is close to achieving really great results! We just need it to be a fair bit larger and maintain a good frame rate

My plate is almost exclusively visuals and performance this week, so I am hoping to make some in-roads providing the universe does not distract me too much. Already having a hoot tracking down slow code with Intel VTune, and some of it dates back to the early days of Dark Basic Pro so pretty fundamental stuff being changed here. It also means plenty of testing will be required to ensure I have not broken anything in the pursuit of speed. The issue of better machines not running much faster than older ones might be due to the fact the engine is primarily single-threaded for the actual game play and modern silicon tend to keep the Ghz rate the same and increase cores/reduce power usage. I am trimming the fat now with my single thread solution, but the next batch of improvements will happen when I start looking at good candidates for n-core engine features such as the AI, script logic, sound, e.t.c. All that said, I am reasonably confident I can deliver you a noticeable speed increase in the next build

Sounds good, we all need a bit/lot more speed Things definitely sound like things are shaping up at the moment though!