Dave, you are looking at aspects which would normally in any ways not be created with primitives or in a engine editor from that matter any ways.

I am referring to for example, TGC city pack, with primitives you can pretty much create 99% of the buildings in that pack. The new escape demo, more than 80% of the content in there could have been created using primitives. Very large majority of entities in the store could have been made out of primitives, if the system allowed concave corners and boolean operations, ect

So yes, there will be a relative large impact in store assets over all as well as a major shift in what content will be available, the shift will be more towards items that can't be created with the use of primitives. You might be looking at it from a different angle, than I do.

You know me I wrote a long post an deleted it as I thought it unfair Reloaded being a WIP/Beta as it were. I will try and make a short post.

A lot of valid points and I agree with everyone as each has preferences and opinions which differ.

More items such as Primitives internally that speed up and aid easier development and or deployment I have always supported.

Hardware/OS you have to have a cut off point somewhere agreed : Though not necessary as being largely a PC product a guide might be to follow Microsofts support policy could be a general indicator for Reloaded. i.e. When Microsoft (and others) drop support for an operating system and hardware then its time to think about dropping the support in Reloaded whilst at the same time looking to embracing whats new and not getting left too far behind which is inevitable as things are moving on now leave alone where we will be when Reloaded is mature and stable.

Appealing to as many users as possible is perhaps still the best option and only option for Reloaded I think.

Finally I agree fully with SC last post and think that not loosing track of what you have currently at any stage and making sure the core items of Quality, Stability and Performance and each feature is maintained adequately which does not seem to be going to be easy at any time is paramount. Nothing worse than loosing control of those things at any stage for game makers at the moment and game players later on.

At the moment Reloaded seems to have a lot of things on its plate which could do with some loving care and attention.

The rest I think we have to still have much patience and see what TGC do with it. I again applaud them for listening to users feedback even if it means trying to please everyone all of the time which is not either easy or likely to be successful. Can't fault them for trying to do the best they can with that.

Anyone want the long version let me know!

@Uman
Wrong time of day, I prefer your posts in the morning,....erm for obvious reason

Lucky it was his short version then...... I think TGC would have had to switch to their backup server if he had posted his "Long Version "

Completely agree. I would very much like to see Reloaded as a forward leaning product. Something Classic was very much not. This is the primary reason I get so fired up about Reloaded keeping its feet in yesteryear.



I want Reloaded to have a long and bright future ahead of it. I know it's possible because of seeing how far Classic progressed under mod development. By the end it had just about everything I would have wanted to see in FPSC but the underlying foundation was just too weak to handle all the new features. When we see poor performance in Reloaded running on strong hardware, we can't help but to question if history is repeating itself.





I tend to agree with the sentiment, but I feel like Reloaded's path is sort of malleable and it's better to air concerns earlier rather than later as there are less things to code around or to break.



So yeah..



I'd like to see it.







The things I'd argue to be most important are the underlying systems major components (and backend things which have already been touched on). Lighting is still a huge issue and although it's clearly a WIP, it affects any kind of game in any genre a person would want to make. If you guys nail lighting then you've nailed the key to photorealism. After all, photo literally means light. I think the baked ambient occlusion is a step in the right direction but there needs to be so much improvement on the quality of light sources and dynamic shadowing because that's what will make scenes look great during actual gameplay. Baking is OK for some aspects but for the most part it only looks good in static screen shots. Ideally, I'd love to see time of day introduced as it promotes prolonged gameplay in limited play/load area.



Another major component example would be physics. There needs to be a very good, very solid system in place so that we can roll a ball or barrel, not have stuff floating in air, be able to adjust gravity and buoyancy, etc. Non-character soft bodies are also a must. This stuff, like dynamic lighting, doesn't make marketing screenshots any better but it makes the gameplay so much richer in any game or genre.



I could go on with more examples but everyone should understand the gist of what I'm getting at.



I understand that these things as we see them today are baby steps in a larger WIP but I hope they are given attention sooner than later because of the overhead associated with them and the systems and assets to come that will be dependent on them.

Thats right and by the looks of it, we still use bullet2, the move to bullet3 should have been made (even if its not totally done yet, it would prove to be right)


am totally with EAI in this, its a bone breaking limitation
no matter what game you design you have to think about ways to overcome the limits of the direct x format.
Am waiting to see what new functions come with the character editor and multiplayer so i can test a idea, that would lead to multiple different hand models/character models that all would consist of the very same model/file = resource saving (in theory it should not cause fps drops).

Those points are only from an artistic point.

One last thing, i really would wish to see shaders expanded, it cant be that we still dont get any new stuff, i wrote to lee
asking him to at least include a vignette shader and with it the option to turn on/off shaders by trigger zones (like in classic).
It wouldnt even cause fps drops and would improve visuals and give us the chance to develope and test/run our own fullscreen shaders.

I am Flattered.

These days though I am always around and about most of the time I am not so active and comment very little. I tend to think I am done and dusted and there are many esteemed users with such knowledge and good sense that my rantings are not needed. However cant help but chip in occasionally, sorry.


We really need to have default indoor support to see how the lighting pans out - out of the box across a variety of environments though we can get a feel for what we have in the Great outdoors of what we have. Personally I feel that currently we have shadows much like we have terrain, water, AI and everything else but it all falls short of what I again personally think it should be and that includes the General and overall environment visual quality. We still have things like very repetitive tiling and jaggies on terrain and entities and textures and so on out of the box. All I presume to save on Memory Performance. Anti Aliasing for example had been better. Then we have the terrain sliders that hide or display detail when hiding the detail is not really an option - we don't want to hide detail and quality - again forced on us in order to save mem and fps for those who have low end systems or even perhaps high end ones? Enough of that as there's so much more and I must keep this short but general point made. Back On Lighting topic - most indie game engines I have ever used have decent lighting unless they are so low end they are off the scale. Not sure why we needed or need fancy named lighting techniques - technologies and names mean little to end users - they just want decent basic lighting to start and some light variation types. Currently Reloaded lighting/shadows to me are not really anything to shout about - they look very basic, hard and my shadows on terrain at least are still full of light poly lines at distance and dark poly lines in the light areas. One could say well it don't matter no one really looks at the distance. I do - and it look s awful and my eye cant fail to be drawn to bad things whereas we take the good things for granted and quite rightly so. Bad and or poorly implemented things kill anything good dead. Again enough said. Collision mentioned is a fine example. Your game can be as good as any ever made but if poor collision kills the gameplay and player when he falls through the terrain, rocks or gets stuck in ploygons and cant get out or similar then your users wont remember how great the rest of your game was but the bad things they will remember. Better physics features to allow more gameplay scenarios and so on I guess will come as they are added if the engine can sustain them.

Reloaded is a great tool and like classic a great concept for people who want to make a game of sorts, no question about that but it potentially could have been more and or even less so have to be grateful for what it is.





As to my earlier aforementioned longer post. Well some of the above and more may have been referred to which is why I deleted it as it would still be an open half written book.....

In all honesty - its all been said before, many, many times over dozens of years by all of us and many more wide ranging indie engine users and we all continually repeat ourselves endlessly in a never ending attempt and plea to influence the outcome of the dream of being a game maker....

Truth is as said as far as developing a Game is concerned, developing the engine part may be rocket science for TGC and I am sure it is - but for end user game makers and end game players leaving aside the obvious skills, effort and so on required to actually use your tools and turn your ideas into reality which in itself is something needing approaching Rocket Scientist effort and skills too...

The actual understanding of whats needed by indie game makers from an engine itself is not anything like Rocket Science at all. We all know what is needed and that includes TGC unless they are immune and can't see the trees for the wood....which is unlikely to be the case though other things have a say in how Reloaded is shaped I am sure. i.e. its not what you want but what you can have. This even though they ask for feedback, listen and do what they can to accommodate it. I presume if they could do it any other way they would.

At the end of the day sometime down the road in hindsight we may know if things done were a good or bad idea at which time it may be too late to change any outcome or you will all be celebrating.

At the risk of repeating the same thing "Again" things have been said "Early On" and "Concerns Aird" and endlessly for decades so the knowledge of what indies need is well documented and known by them having lived it and experienced the trials and tribulations of indie game making for a very long time.

I've gotta give this all a rest.

And by the way no this was not the earlier long post at all but a separate short long one.

Have fun.

rf045VYP3z4

@Errant AI - I don't know if you've seen this demo created with Unreal engine 4, but it illustrates what you're saying about photorealism (I'm not suggesting that Lee and his team of two should be able to achieve this sort of lighting quality with Reloaded, but it shows what a difference good lighting makes to a scene).

My translator google is fuming.

Reloaded has to be primarily stable and properly manage the RAM memory.
XP users are an important part of the cake, so it is difficult to TGC demand to give up that part of the pie.

TGC should be clear what kind of video card support, and create an options window that allows the user to configure their own video card. Thus Reloaded not have to look whats video card the user wants to use.

The water and soil must be configurable in size and where I want to land or not.

Mountains have of being sculpted both vertically and horizontally.

And obviously repair any errors that have the current version.

and so on ...

3com

If you are thinking of using Reloaded for that kind of production in a commercial environment that's what is expected and there are many products that can do that far better than Reloaded but by and large they cost a lot more than Reloaded does.

In a commercial environment you either can or cant do it - Your cost is of no concern to the end user of your product - the end user cost is what they are concerned with and whatever that is they always expect top quality for what they pay as if you cant supply it someone else can.

The market for developers that can produce that kind of production and similar or other types of content and other environmental rendering is also as with most things saturated so if you want to compete then again you do need the very highest of quality in creative content development and rendering output.

Not much different to game making really if you want high quality you need not only the skill but excellent tools that can give the desired result. Unlikely you as a developer can render a scene - that's down to the capabilities of the tool that renders so its out of your hands.

Whatever no amount of skill will make up for a tool that is limited by internal design. We cant do what the machine/technology can when its better than we at certain things - and perhaps vice versa too but you get the point.

Wow! Gtox I like this.
Nowaday it looks like all should be dirty, grunged, old.
Perhaps some day we take the ide tha exists another world out of dirty/grunged entities, out there.

3com

Agreed. The thing I find alarming is the apparent memory saving techniques (jagged shadows, repetitive tiles, poorly compressed shadow maps, etc.) are being seen so early on in development. This would be acceptable for a low setting but these are essentially the default settings. That makes me suspect that there needs to be a fundamental shift somewhere but I'm not knowledgeable enough about engineering to say where.



It makes me wonder how stuff like this is even possible...



The crazy thing is that this runs over 115FPS in clear weather and 90+ FPS in the rain on my PC. And yes, you can walk around and there is collision. Granted, it makes my video card want to catch fire but so does Reloaded in a blank map if vsync is disabled.



Realistically though, I think Reloaded users should expect to be able to make environmental scenes that look as good as say Rust or The Forest. Both of which are indie games using Unity (See also The Long Dark. Different art style but just as good looking).



@Gtox - I believe I've seen that before and yeah it's sick. Definitely an extreme example but a nice one indeed (even the realtime Unity browser on their webpage is quite nice sans the weird planar fog effect). I'd love to see the same scene without the material shaders and high res textures just to appreciate the lighting without distraction. I think the pitfall that some fall into is that when they think of photorealism the think that means high resolution photo-based textures and high-poly models yet neglect the subtle but cumulative importance of light. It's crazy to think that we're on the verge of seeing real-time radiosity and such in games. The Nvidia Maxwell tech demos of real-time voxel-based lighting blew me away.

I am not a game or rendering engineer either so can't comment with any standing.

I presume that complex and high quality Games and other 3D worlds and renderings require a lot of math and efficient data management and processing power pipelines without bottlenecks too interrupting the data streams. Its down to a lot of math being handled efficiently and that needs well designed, efficient and powerful software systems and benefiting to the maximum degree by utilising any available hardware resources to max advantage and potential in support of the software efficiencies in place.

I guess that numerous other clever or efficient optimisation techniques are also called into play like instancing and removing anything out of camera view. e.g. anything behind the player and so on and not having the engine calculate it. Redrawn as necessary but you need fast engine for that too if you don't want everything popping up I assume and such techniques also require processing power so I suppose it has to be all very efficiently done.

Reloaded example :

Might be just me but when I have a terrain with bespoke building entities in it and I go inside the building my fps drops by half when I cant see anything outside of the building visually. Reloaded apparently can. Something is not very efficient about that and Lee did say there was a reason which eludes me as it means nothing to me. All I know is my fps is halved and that's what matters to game players. OK if you have an all indoor game and can turn off the terrain altogether if that makes any difference anyway but not very helpful if you have combined indoor outdoor environments - unless we could have terrain and perhaps water plane turn off and on automatically when they come into player view and we cant have that as far as I am aware myself at least out of the box.

Whatever Yes I would like to fill a terrain with rocks and pebbles spayed over the entire area but not going to happen. By the time I get a scattering of trees - there's no room for any rocks or I cant have an enemy too

Base line is Reloaded is not comparable or in the same league as some things you might refer to - not yet at least.

that's just some1 walking around with a video camera though right??

After seeing all the tech demos, here are some I test for study purpose....

(Sorry for german links )

Pictures:

http://www.chip.de/bildergalerie/Unreal-Engine-4-Beeindruckende-Bilder-Galerie_70025618.html



Download:

http://www.chip.de/downloads/c1_downloads_auswahl_70026004.html?t=1422917776&v=3600&s=ad209d076a9b47b8ab72b8c84b694e28



Enought offtopic!



What did you expect from an engine which is written of three/most of the time one coder in a programming language which is older than some guys in this forum.

This is the ide lee working in:

http://www.thegamecreators.com/?m=view_product&id=2000&page=system

And there are a lot of cool plugins for it, which lee not use. Dark Imposters, Dark Occulusion, (optional) dark Clouds

http://www.thegamecreators.com/?m=view_product&id=2000&page=packs

I see it fails, but I can´t see the reason why. The end of support for XP or a high end graphic card will not be the solution.



It is late here, so this is the end for now...

I do a lot of modding for Skyrim (used to mod for Fallout) and I came to realize there are many many things Bethesda does in order to make sure their games work fluently without FPS issues. So much we can learn from their open engine the Creation Kit. There are no secrets, its all pretty straight forward and logical.