Hi All,

Here is the recording of the broadcast from today:


And here are the answers I could not reach during the live chat:

Q> Any chance to GGMax supporting some sort of "SendKey" LUA command? IE: I want to be able to take screenshots in game mode, for my savegame menu?
A> There are no plans to change the current save game system, but the idea of grabbing the screen at the moment of the save is a good one, and if enough users push for this feature in the Issues Board, then we can consider it an essential feature of any modern game experience.

Q> Any chance to GGMax having foam in oceans, rivers, etc?
A> We will only be supporting the current ocean system used in the latest version of the Wicked Engine, which although has good waves I do not believe it has foams, and no specific effects for river rendering. This would probably still be the province of special imported objects and animated textures for the time being.

Q> FidelityFX support?
A> There are no plans to support FidelityFX right now, though there may be support down the road if Wicked Engine adds support for features from FidelityFX. Right now we are pretty happy with the UI, visuals and rendering side, the next challenge for us is terrain and game-play!

Thanks everyone for your questions, happy to answers more next Wednesday at 4 PM BST

Q> Will there be any improvements to the post processing/graphics from what has currently been shown?

Q> Will there be a place-able camera prop that will override the default camera position?

Q> Has there been any additions/changes to the LUA functions? If so, where can we find the new documentation?

Thank you and your team for the awesome work.

@ Lee


I already open a feature request in GitHub: https://github.com/TheGameCreators/GameGuruRepo/issues/1249

Thanks for the replies.

22GB !!!!!!!
Wt... it's this insanity !!!

22gb for a software ???
wt...

Yes is very overkill with assets. Maybe there should be an option on whether the end user wants to include all assets.

As stated in the video above its being dealt with with an option to download.
this will be sooner rather than later.
Although funny enough even with the option you will probably grab them anyway

i dont download it, 22gb its exagerated !!
i need just the software, not the 3d assets !

Hopefully that will be sorted soon then as Lee said

yeah

I was about to ask how big it was at this point. Combine GTA with ARK then shall ye? When MAX comes to Steam, they could make these "included" assets appear as FREE DLC. Everyone loves to see the word free, and it would look good on their display page. It would look like a bonus promotion 2 click I suppose.

So- did I understand this correctly? The plan is to require an extra purchase to acquire non-military characters- is it? Civilians are a premium? Shooters are disposable? That fits MY paradigm, but it's also unfortunate news.

COLLISION CALCULATION FREE ZONES [Feature request]
Guys, I have opened a feature request on GitHub about it.
I would like to know what you guys think about it, is it a crazy idea as I think?
If possible, and you like the idea, so, please support the idea there.
Thanks in advance.

https://github.com/TheGameCreators/GameGuruRepo/issues/1253

Being able to pause the download and restart at a later date would be great.

Im still finding major fps loss using some of the new tree selection from the week with video 51 or 50.

just a few trees and i can jump for at least 3 seconds about 55fps loss anyone having issues with certain trees? . Well i. Have about 90 percent of them willows and very bushy trees
Dont have issues with high poly Models
I created and i qCan make a huge level. With jungle trees and kit. But the new trees are seriously eating. My Fps

@3com;
Yes, I can see the value in that. If you lasso a large group of objects and hit "properties"-- then it should show ALL the properties (I guess the main settings like you mention), so your selection in that menu will set all objects that way. BIG time saver for sure. Whereas in GGjr the lasso inhibits this for some reason.

The problem is not all the settings are the same .. some maybe dynamic or have sounds, scripts attached etc
Where is this one set of properties for all going to come from ?

I am only referring to geometry whose only function is to serve as a static object to fill the scene, and the player does not have to interact with the object, since it is difficult for the player to talk to a tree or a rock, ok, there will be occasions in which the player has to interact with a rock (move it and leave an entrance to the open), but it is not usual.
On the other hand, my intention is to be able to switch between collision On and Collision Off, depending on whether the player is within the zone or not, in this way we could gain a bit of performance.

Suppose I have an old map, this map includes a forest, mountains with many trees and a lake, you could say that it is a beautiful landscape, but very expensive in performance; Well, using the traditional method I would have to change the collision of all the trees one by one (we speak of the inexperienced user so we are going to avoid the shortcuts via LUA), applying my idea I could create a zone that surrounds the entire area of ​​interest, converting all objects included within the area (basically trees, rocks, plants)
on objects free of all kinds of calculations, like a dead zone, like a background in a plane, but better, and cheap in performance.

If I want to use the same technique but this time in a forest, I could switch between collionOn and collisionOff depending on whether the player is within the zone.

Like any other zone that detects the player and activates a script, for example, trigger zone.

Not sure why you think it would gain you any performance, it would lessen the memory footprint a bit as the collision shapes would not be stored but they tend to be rather small anyway.

Check the Tab menu Physics slider, if that isn't showing any appreciable activity in test game then you probably wouldn't gain much in the way of performance.

I have no idea about how GGMax is going to work in this sense, but I am almost certain that each existing entity on the map is subject to different calculations, they must exist, otherwise, why does the performance drops when I place a lot of trees in a landscape? and immediately the fps count decreases instantly and considerably?

It is not because there are a lot of things to take into account and a lot of calculations to do, not only in relation to the collision.
Well, this type of thing would not be taken into account for objects locked within the area of the zone. (I repeat: trees, stones, rocks, inert things).

Now that perhaps navmesh is coming ignore how GGMax is going to deal with.

Are they animated trees?

Collision detection in Bullet is intelligently handled, it is only doing the math for objects that are likely to actually have collisions occurring, i.e. static trees can't collide with each other or any other static entity so collision detection will only be active between them and dynamic entities.

As I said though if it is an issue it will show up on the Physics slider on the Tab menu.

No, they most likely could no; remember this is not an issue I'm having, but just a feature request for GGMax.

Here are 300+ trees plus the player marker.
14-19 fps
1100-1270 draw calls, and so on.



I'm going to do the same but this time all the trees being dynamic, back when done.

Edit: I must add all the trees are static trees.

I wouldn't bother trying to do any performance related tweaking in Max atm.

If you see a major FPS hit of any kind just report it to GitHub so they are made aware of the problem.

Just for the sake of testing.

here the same but all the trees being dynamic.



The same fps as the static ones, same draw calls, definitely the GGMax values are not determinants atm.

Anyway, I have discovered that we are able to change static mode for all the entities being selected, at once.

Yes trees pack a performance hit depending what is in the level.
The problem could be helped a lot if they were sharing textures.

At the moment you have a bunch of trees, plants, and bushes, that use a bunch of textures. But most of those textures are identical.

For example, can't member exactly, but there is something like 19 trees and vines referencing 19 sets of textures, but the textures are the same. So that bunch of trees and vines could all be using 1 texture.

Optimization needs to be looked at there it would seam.

OldFlak....

Ok lets get back to this last update. i have tested some of the Characters and i dont think this is going to go down nicely. hope this will be fixed.


And also i don't know if i have missed it, but i hope there is going to be at the end at least more character faces to choose from when the character editor is finished.
At this point there is already a lot of things to add to ones character when you build them so if there can be more faces to choose from at the end it would be fantastic.

Nice find
Definitely worth posting this on Github

Ok just reported on GitHub
Character possible bug #1264

@3com. The speed issue is caused by draw calls I would imagine. 1100 is quite a few unless you have a pretty beefy GPU. In classic on my system, 600 is about max I can stretch to before drops in speed will definitely occur. In classic, CPU is probably more important as well than the GPU beyond a certain point. I've seen machines with slower GPU but faster single core performance CPU that easily outperform my setup.

@ DVader
Keep in mind that in the video map there are only trees and the player, if this is supposedly a game then there will be many more entities consuming resources.

However I have no problem with it, I am not designing any forest full of trees, at least not now.

I have only made a feature request that, consists of creating an area without calculations, and that all the trees within this area are free of all types of calculations, or keep only the minimum calculations for these entities, in this way perhaps we would gain something in performance.
And have the option of being able to choose (via LUA) between "inside and outside" of the "zone without calculations", according to the need of the game.

Your tests demonstrated that static and dynamic made no difference to your FPS. I was just saying what I think is the main culprit of slow speed in your test examples.
Not sure what calculations you can avoid other than collision. Everything else will need to operate as normal, they have to be lit and rendered. Shadows already have a distance value to avoid being drawn too far from the player. Maybe if GG/max could reduce the texture sizes used when at a distance it would improve things. Collision would probably help as well (it would in GG anyway), especially when a level is full of hundreds or thousands of trees. Instances wouldn't hurt for trees of same type either. Wicked may already be doing some of this stuff anyway, I have no idea.

Your idea sounds much like Unreals method of having zones that give higher priority in them for lighting quality, dynamic reflections and such but in reverse (areas that have low settings). I have mentioned before that that sort of thing may be useful in Max, so the entire map isn't at full quality lighting, just the bits you want.

I haven't really stress tested max for months now. I haven't heard many complain about it's speed as yet. It seems fine to me at the minute. Just waiting to see how it runs with a terrain; a tiled scrolling huge terrain was promised. Once that is in, we will see just how much speed we have when we also fill it with objects.

That's a good point.

I have mentioned a few times that just a few of the pbr trees given create huge lag i have very high poly dungeons that dont lag even with many of them i have created jungles using the jungle set

But i placed a few about 5 or 6 of the new pbr trees on and i lose 55fps mainly the bushy ones.. Only they have caused lag nothing else has. This has been placed on the bugs as i think there is something wrong with them or how ggm handles them