Why does a flat terrain so costly, it really should be addressed, I am at 150fps with the terrain on, when I turn it off I get 300+ fps, when I turn off sky there is a 3fps difference, just something that should be addressed I believe. Seem's unacceptable for the terrain to be so costly. The good thing is that the interior level I am making I can turn it off and get a crazy boost in fps. So just wondering what is at play to be that big of a difference.

Lee knows the terrain uses a lot of resources and drops the fps at the moment. It will be sorted eventually, performance is playable in V1.009. There were other bits that they wanted to get into V1.10 which became higher priority.

Contrary to the company line, performance is not the current focus. The rush to go to Stem before the software is ready, knowing that there are similar softwares which are much more advanced and stable already there, will have a cost. I just hope it's not too great?

can you please give examples?

I was wondering the same.. I mean I check out Steam's apps now and then and I can't think of anything like Reloaded there at all. I do not consider Cryoengine and that ilk comparable. The price difference is massive, and they are more of a professional game making tool. Being beyond most peoples reach in many ways. I've seen an RTS maker, which looks okay I suppose, but nothing like Reloaded.
I think Reloaded will do fairly well, if the real frustrating bugs are sorted. People who compare it to pro games dev software are just being silly. It's like comparing a entry level sports car compared to an F1 car really. Both are great at what they do, but one is aimed at the average person, the other is at the cutting edge. Perhaps not the best analogy, but you get my point.
Of course, if it does do well on Steam, more money may well speed up future additions and improvements.

For a single hobbyist, with limited scripting skills, wanting to make a complete game, Classic and Reloaded are still the best (by complete game, I don't mean commercial quality - a single hobbyist will struggle to achieve that in any engine). Reloaded still needs more work, but if TGC make the right decisions, Reloaded could become a serious contender.
I also think that the multiplayer could be a surprise hit. To knock out a level and play some games with your mates could be a blast. Or, if you don't have any mates, to play against other Reloaded users could be equally entertaining. There are some very skilled level designers here, and we could get some very good maps.

Like it or not - fair or not, Reloaded will be compared to Cry (You can get 10 months of Cryengine for the cost of a Reloaded gold pledge), etc. It's just the nature of things. People will come into the Reloaded world thinking they will be able to get the same quality of whatever engine they have ever seen but just expecting it will be easier to use. This will probably never change just because the software is essentially aimed at beginners/users without coding or art skills who shouldn't exactly be expected to know better. After all, "Create high quality First Person Shooter Games on your PC. Easy to use with amazing end game results."

In terms of actual game development utilities there isn't too much and several are specific to one genre or another.

The field opens up quite a bit if you account for moddable/editable games with multiplayer and sharing capabilities. Really not the same thing but they become relevant when considering that 80-90% of FPSC users use the software for fun/hobby with no intention of making a commercial game.

It will. That is inevitable really. However, Reloaded's ease of use will hold peoples attention. People may wish it could run like the big boys, but in the end many who perhaps try Unity, Cryoengine, Unreal etc will return because they find them too complex. If they don't, good luck to them. All the engines you mention are already there. If there are people who want to make games on Steam, they may well have tried them already.

Reloaded will be new, and easy to use in comparison. Probably cheap, although I have no idea how they will structure the price. I'm not sure it will ever tempt existing Unity or other engine users in reality, but it may get people who hadn't thought of using them to give it a go. I'm not sure it has to compete with them really. Obviously I'd prefer it if it did, but we have to be realistic. The other engines probably employ more artists alone than TGC does in total.

Modding, sure that's a thing as well. I don't think it appeals to everyone though, and again, generally requires some work to understand each game you would be modding. I'm no expert on that front, as generally I have no interest in it. Again, I don't think many would want to go that deeply into it.

It has it's issues, speed is better but still in need of a good boost to get really crowed areas. AI is still a bit lackluster, but again improving a little at a time. The editor also, still needs improving for me, the in game editing is okay, but not really great overall. I hardly use it in honesty, as it is just too limited. There's also a few annoying bugs still in the mix. But really, it's looking pretty good to me at the moment even so. Hopefully, those bugs will be gone along with some potential new stuff on the next release, or the Steam release, whichever comes first. The character creator is in the Steam launch I believe? For multi-player reasons.

We do need more FPS. Terrain does eat more than it should. Let's hope TGC manage it.

I really hope those on Steam dont have a computer specs like mine.... because Reloaded is still suffering from major FPS issues on a fully detailed map. We need to get those bilboard trees in action and more optimization on everything as a whole as we go forward.



It wouldn't hurt to also give more options for the build games for optimization... shadow quality control, texture quality control, LOD ranging, Actor Fade distance, Water quality, Veg quality and veg load in distance.... i could go on.



Bad idea going ahead with Steam with the current unavoidable performance issues. A lot of users on Steam don't understand the concept of beta.



Hopefully TGC will provide the Steam audience promises such as performance boosts, indoor scenes.... etc written where they can see before they buy the product. The worst that could happen is the product gets littered with those big red thumbs down lol

One could argue that neither does TGC, seeing as Reloaded should still be considered alpha at this stage and representing the software as beta only invites more disappointment.. I will say that over the last couple years the Steam community has become increasingly accustomed to "early access" equating to "broken as [expletive deleted]".

Nonetheless, a review status of "mixed" or worse can be very difficult to recover from no matter what improvements made after launch. First impressions very much matter on Steam and a big part of that is having something really special that people are willing to overlook the interim issues for. So yeah, I certainly agree with those who see rushing to Steam as risky.

You also have to concider that FPSC didn't exactly receive positive reviews hence making a good first impression with reloaded will be crucial!

I must admit to knowing little of Steam however I would agree that Reloaded is far from what one would call a Beta, more an early WIP/alpha a few if any features are what I personally would look at as being anywhere near complete and all things partially developed only whilst other things are added in the same vein. I would not know if any of the features will ever be further developed and to what extent as that's not a reality until it happens. Major features of terrain, water and AI just to pick the obvious out.

What some might call more advanced features which should appear in any modern game engine such as environmental effects, particles, particle weapons and so on are not even in the pipeline as far as I am aware. Then there's probably tens or hundreds of other things missing from a complete all round game maker engine. By and large one may say its easy to use but its not that so - without many skills and additional resources an end user may need to actually do more than the basic out of the box stuff with without relying on them having such resources and skills or more importantly relying on others or TGC to provide such support. This is compounded currently by so much inflexibity with so much hard coded stuff and no indication that an end user particularly without a high degree of knowledge, expertise or skills would or will ever be able to gain more of much needed flexibility.....

At the end of the day if things are hard coded and limited/restricted by that theirs not much an end user can do about it. One can only call to use internal stuff or extend if the engine internally will allow that.....

One can only call upon functions and so on that the engine supports internally and provided for therein and the engine is closed which in and of itself is not a bad thing but limitations and restrictions are if the engine don't provide for much user flexibility.....

Simple examples might be : I don't want enemies corpses removed on death thank you. I don't want to have need to stop and press a key to pick up a weapon or any other collectible item or necessarily open a door. I want to be able to give any weapon of choice to any enemy type and not restricted to a pistol and don't want these things and more to be hard coded and fixed removing the creative game making choice. I don't want all characters in the game to necessarily have all animations in the animation set if the character does not have need for them and so ideally there should be a choice to drop animations and or load them as necessary for the character at run time and so on....Some of these things may be ready possible that I am unaware of or maybe added during later development, or they may not. At the moment many things included in what we have to date are hard coded that don't need to be from an end user game maker perspective, notwithstanding what is yet to come and may be added.

Beta Reloaded maybe and it could be Beta for many years to come yet depending upon what you call Beta and what you call not Beta....

All seems to be under development and partially developed throughout and none either complete or anywhere near like being so and none of sufficient game making quality where improvement could potentially/possibly be made to best advantage for end user benefit in making better games.

Easy to use is only partially true and its perhaps more complicated than many might wish or might be necessary in some areas perhaps........a matter of opinion.... You can still make a game with it of course and some effort is to be expected and more so the better the facilities and feature set it might offer. The more it does the more work you will have to do true to say.

On topic specifically perhaps there are numerous areas where the Terrain feature could or could have been better implemented or improved. In some ways at the moment it is not as good as it was and in other ways is improved e.g. additional terrain tools.

As said I know little of Steam, know something of MP and know little of how to make a game engine from an engine development point of view, rather just as many others know just a little about using indie engines as a game maker and making a game and even then of a sort. I am no expert.

TGC I guess is doing what they need do during Reloaded development life cycle. Yes its a Beta so again as is always the case we will need to wait and wait longer and see what it eventually becomes.

I have said it before: when I first heard about FPSC Reloaded, I was hoping for something like FPSC Classic, with better scripting. A pretty modest wish and, as far as I am concerned, we have got there. These days I can build an indoors environment in FPSCC, import it into FPSCR and script it in Lua. The only thing I am still missing is scriptable camera control.

On the other hand, TGC have promised a lot more for FPSCR. Outdoors games is the big thing and then many smaller (as far as I am concerned) improvements. In my opinion (and I consider myself a patient guy) they have not yet delivered these things. I will just point out what I consider MAJOR items. Obviously I am stating my opinions, dissenters are welcome.

1. FPS is still substandard for outdoors. I HAVE to say this: It should be trivially easy to improve this by enabling the use of smaller terrains.
2. The Map Editor interface is substandard. No 3d view, no entity properties panel, really tortuous approach to positioning entities.
3. Staying with x models is antiquated and extremely limiting.

As I said, I consider myself patient, but FPSCR has been in production for nearly two years now (?) and I believe (I may be wrong) that the things I pointed out are EASY to fix. Somehow I get the impression TGC are not listening, they have a very specific opinion of how FPSCR must evolve and are very unwilling to revise this.

I will keep looking at FPSCR developments, but I am not holding my breath any longer.

You bring up several good points, Uman.







The end-game for Reloaded is essentially to reach "Perpetual Beta".



For me, that translates to an alpha period which would be where we are now and accompanied by the many hardcoded quick fixes we see throughout. I could add to your list a good number of weapon-related issues such as hardcoded icons and other issues which are less noticable yet still what I would consider to be critical for passing the weapon system off as feature complete. I think it would not be unreasonable to expect that most other sections of what has already been implemented to be equally uncomplete.



I think (and as always this is my personal opinion) a reasonable beta target would after all implemented systems have become as fleshed out as is desired and development has shifted focus to purely bug fixing and performance tuning with no additional features being added until stability and performance goals have been met. The result of this beta period should be a version which is stable and complete enough for users to be able to deploy standalone games which are reasonably fun and work and run well and are able to utilize all systems implemented to date.



What comes next is arguably less clearly defined but I would think that a defined and manageable set of new features could be introduced in an alpha state such as con kit or character creator, for example. Essentially new features though and not so much continuing on old features though some core features such as scripting will obviously have to be continually updated as new features are implemented and their systems exposed to user control.



One way TGC could manage this perpetual beta cycle would be to follow somewhat the development cycle established by Bohemia Interactive with DayZ on Steam (Which has been in early access alpha for a bit over a year now). What they do is have two branches of the software. By default, users access the "stable" branch and have the ability to opt into using the "experimental" branch where new features and assets are first introduced. I could see this method translating to Reloaded development pretty well. Basically have a stable branch build which would be the product of beta phase as explained in the previous paragraph and a more frequently updated experimental branch where new features are being introduced and where performance fluctuation is more acceptable. This would allow essentially having cake and eating it too because it further insulates the product from logical negative review because the experimental branch would have very different expectations from users. Plus, it allows new methods to be tried and new things to be added and presented to a larger field than only the internal test team.



I realize the beta/alpha argument is mostly semantics but I really do feel it's an important distinction when attempting to manage expectations. I have a lot of time on Steam and hundreds of hours logged on early access titles like DayZ, Space Engineers, H1Z1, Unturned, etc. None of them have claimed to be beta and though they are in various stages of alpha, they still receive good support from their respective communities who accept the software for what it is. There is no false expectation. On the other hand, I've played a few "beta" games this last year as well and for the most part they have been exactly the same as the retail/gold version. These days, beta seems to mean demo/hype build as much as anything. So, not only as someone familiar with traditional development cycles but as an everyday gamer, I have two very different expectations when it comes to software labeled as alpha or beta.



edit: I crossposted with kehagiat and have also strayed completely off-topic

I've been playing around with using a custom terrain and turning off Reloaded terrain completely, although this cause a world of other issues, I've actually had fairly good results with a low poly terrain model.



Has anyone else tried this?

This is a clear indication that something is severely lacking from Reloaded if the legacy product must still be used to hack together an interior scene. The process you described is certainly not something anyone should be expected to have to do.

@xCept


Totally agree. And let me become more specific: what is missing is the FPSCC editor, which should be incorporated in FPSCR. In fact, if just a LITTLE fu

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tgc/fps-creator-reloaded/description
just read this and you know where we are now. Nowhere ....

Hi all,

Thanks for the comments on this thread. It is very helpful and gives us a good idea of the direction you'd like us to be heading. We are aware of the FPS issues, and know that more work needs to be done. A long way to go, but we will get there.

We do think that multi-player will be a massive hit, it's a lot of fun and performance is great in our internal tests with users in several countries.

Reloaded will be released as Early Access on Steam, and it will be made clear that it is still very much under development. We've a long list of planned features and improvements and will continue to support it as our flag shop product.

Users don't need to use the classic version to create indoor scene as entities can be used very effectively to make these and the AI's are very suited to navigating them since V1.9. The fact that users have be using classic shows how talented some of you are.

Keep the comments coming and I will monitor this thread closely to make sure we're listening.

SC

\r\n\r\nYes and it works well, particularly since you can now scale entity\'s in any axis to get variety. The other advantage is not having spend a lot of time sculpting it all. If the terrain models are kept below 10,000 faces you should have no issue,s, personally I keep them under 5,000 so they lightmap ok. The entire terrain scenes below are modeled, there is no default used in any of it....

Build a stand alone playable level in an hour...
Build a multiplayer level and play with your mates on steam in an hour or so....

I think Reloaded will get great feedback on steam once people build a quick level....Try it......then build a multiplayer and play with mates..... I think they will be amazed at the ease of use and posts of " This is Amazing " on steam will be the first response....That was mine on v1004

However ... Then users will start getting confident very fast and start picking things up and this is where I think damage limitation could be a good idea..
assuming the baking process is now stable with the included Reloaded models I would think twice about supplying the 400 legacy pack and the FPS Classic packs that were supplied with our pledge packs.

I think keeping to what is supplied and working will help alleviate any problems that arise from other model packs so at least it can be said that the supplied models work fine but baking is still W.I.P for external models...

I don't know what the Steam pack will be but if new users get a stable supplied product then they may grasp the fact a little easier that imports to reloaded could have technical problems whilst in early access....Even any store items...Like I said ..Damage limitation

Just my thoughts

Having the ability to determine the resolution and size of the terrain has been missing since the beginning. This really should have been added by now.

I think there is still a lot of work to be done on occlusion culling and its a bit strange when Lee added static batching it didn't seem to have any improvement on performance. Its clear that performance will be an ongoing battle throughout the life of Reloaded.

welcome back nomad, i think


awesome idea, they should do this, 2 options and then their choice, the fact they have a choice will settle some, and experimental will sooth the impatient ones and curious ones, and a more stable one for them who moan it does not work. pledgees win, tgc win, less moans and more thumbs up. and as errant says more testers, make sure on steam there is an errors and bugds board and show the newest bugs and what are being fixed etc, a more logical and ordered manner with 2 folders fixed bugs and to be fixed. this way the list of fixed will get larger, and the new or present ones will be forever controlled rather than 18 pages of bug reports. obviously needs a caretaker for that job