Azaran on 19/12/2014 at 23:13
Quote Posted by bjack
I leave you with these questions... Why can my Athlon 64 3500 single core 2 GB system with a Nvidia 610 2 GB graphics card play The Dark Mod just fine, but not some of the new FMs without terrible slow downs?
Why does a very simple looking corn field, or some swirling fog cost so many CPU/GPU cycles?
Why can I play a game like Microsoft's Fable with AI that have flowing hair and moving mouths, synchronized to their speech? A game that has much more dense forests, moving lush trees, wing blown grasses, moving water, etc. than any T2 FM? Why do other much more graphically intensive and animated games play just fine, while some new T2 FMs that still look like 1999 play as if I am running on a 386 with 2 MB of memory?
Yeah I never understood that. Some new T2 FM's have a bit of chop on my 16GB machine (not the end of the world, it goes down to maybe 25 fps); but playing Skyrim (an engine that has maybe 6 times the minimum requirements of Dark) with graphics maxed out, on top of a mountaintop, looking over the whole landscape, and it runs like butter...:confused:
I say it depends. I like nice graphics, but gameplay is more important to me. The gameplay can make the graphics irrelevant if it's good enough. After all, Thief 1 has horrible graphics by today's standards, and I still consider it to be the greatest game ever made. And I still feel the same even after playing games and missions with much beter graphics
downwinder on 20/12/2014 at 01:08
ok i have rethought the issues i have,and its 2 things ,graphics that cause lag in a missions and also missions where graphics take precedence over game play
sorry if i offended anyone
yes thief 3 was fun,but the slowdown and crippling movement did not help game at all,the only thing that saved thief 3 was the story and gameplay,i am willing to bet if thief 3 was redone with thief 2 old school style it would have been a better game,my example is t2x in my view was amazing and made thief 3 look like dookie as far as enjoyment.
i would rather see cam vaders brought back to missions then over done graphics
bedwine on 20/12/2014 at 01:50
I look at graphics like over produced television shows. A good drama series or mystery series starts out well and moving along. Then in step the producers to make it "better". Rarely works and almost always degrades the show. The original gameplay of Thief and Thief 2 is what has made such as strong following that has lasted 15 years and even obtaining new followers when they discover what the original gameplay has to offer. I thought thief 3 was playable but its focus was on a graphics priority. Do they even make games with an editor any more? The success of the original DOOM with an editor is what started it all. The game might have failed without it. A first person shooter that one could learn to build and entire level in one day. (2 dimensions). The game was actually made by two guys working in a home garage. Another that had potential was "HARD WAR" that was under produced. Had huge potential as a space trading shooter with an editor. It was up for sale. Microsoft was thinking about picking it up but didn't. One of the reasons I am having difficulty getting in to DROMED is the small sized editor on my screen. Hell with game graphics. Improve the game editor for some of us poor sited dummies. Then again it needs new blood in game players. I am guessing most young game players don't even know there were once games that came with "editors". Big business may make less money but they can get a huge following. Maybe someday the execs will start looking long term.
After saying all that I have to admit that I like the new graphics. The question is it worth it? If there were a stronger following or if it brought new interest in our world of Thief followers I would say yes. Barring that I would say no. I would say Thief is a strategy first person semi shooter. The emphasis on navigating in the environment in FP perspective. Not shooting. Should be simple enough. Hasn't been anything close to it in 15 years.
trix on 20/12/2014 at 11:17
Quote Posted by Random_Taffer
I thought it was a weird choice since it's winter time and the corn would probably all be chopped down and harvested. But then I also didn't get very far and the place looks abandoned- so maybe there's a story explanation to that.
There's an explanation. Of course. A book.
Quote:
Those corn models seem to cause framerate issues in general. They were causing frame rate issues in the mission
When we started testing, the corn models were the same as provided by Renzatic (with huge object textures). They were modified for that mission by the author. They have much smaller mipmaps now. That saves about 4-5 fps.
But there are more than 100 of them. So the corn is the fps-killer :cheeky:
But one don't have to look at the corn.
nbohr1more on 21/12/2014 at 20:04
Does NewDark have any "Object LOD" system?
Or is it possible to implement one with scripting and blue-room tricks?
That might help in "cornfield" type scenarios.
Something's definitely fishy about a corn model that lowers NewDark to performance below The Dark Mod or Skyrim though.
How many polys is that thing?
Does the model have some sorta geometry leak (I know we've seen such issues with "internal leaking" in The Dark Mod)?
GUFF on 21/12/2014 at 21:46
It's not the corn field that takes a dump on the framerate for me, but at the very beginning of The Farm the huge open scene. Very few other NewDark missions have areas that do this. It's just that kind of open area wasn't really something the engine was originally designed to handle, I suppose. DarkMod (Doom3 engine) actually has the same kind of problem with large open areas, in that detailed large areas will chug on anything but the fastest machines.
fortuni on 31/12/2014 at 08:46
Now that so many people have played
Keeper of Infinity by Soul Tear, it could be interesting to resurrect this thread and see whether any of the community have changed their opinion with regard to the title question.....Is pushing new dark graphics to its limits worth it?
At the beginning of the thread i argued that yes, we should allow artists with visionary talent to push the boundaries
(
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=144811&p=2272970&viewfull=1#post2272970) i was beta testing KoI at the time, so my consideration to the question was heavily influenced by this extra-ordinary mission and although i accept that Soul Tears mission causes considerable lagging with some people due to his going completely over the top, i still believe that there is a strong argument for allowing (but not necessarily encouraging) visionary artists to push the boundaries of ND graphics, for although ST has received a bit of a kicking for his mission, he has raised the bar and i suspect a number of other authors will be looking at KoI with admiration and are considering how they may be able to emulate some of his spectacular graphics into one of their missions but without causing such lagging....the end result could mean ST's mission may lead the way towards a new generation of Thief mission graphics
Thoughts ?
Judith on 31/12/2014 at 09:56
I'm always for graphic improvements and more up-to-date design. The problem is, you can't really decide for the players what FPS your mission should have. People are surprised that much more demanding games run fine on their PCs while they're experiencing slowdowns with FMs, rightly so. The improvements made with NewDark are impressive in comparison to what Thief 2 was, but there many games that look and run better (MGS: Ground Zeros for example).
Naturally, such comparison is unfair. I'm not a programmer but I understand that NewDark is mostly about using latest DirectX libraries and hardware to do what it does now. It's not like with Activision and Call of Duty, where the whole programming team adapts or rewrites whole portions of code, so the engine could go all the way from Quake 2 offshoot to what we see now in Advanced Warfare (I don't like CoD btw., it's just an example ;) ).
It's not like NewDark was in any way rewritten, right? Isn't it still a technology from DirectX 6 era, using a series of enhancements and hacks? If so, it should be treated that way. It means 1024 textures, tons of foliage, massive transparency and numerous static meshes are not a "normal situation".
Also, modern engines have sets of metrics and performance tools, so LDs can deal with such problems while creating a map. Maybe the cool folks at T2 Editors' Guild could come up with such tools or some kind of Performance Guidelines for NewDark? Maybe it would help to set "average system specs" after a poll among FM players? It would be useful for T3 and DarkMod FMs too.
voodoo47 on 31/12/2014 at 10:56
it's mostly about running nicely on modern hardware, and not having to deal with things that were making Dromeders cry for years anymore. and while it surely is nice to have the limits lifted, if your mission requires "intel Core i5-4570 CPU 3.20 GHz, 8,00 Gb RAM, GeForce GTX 660" then you know for sure that you went too far.
nickie on 31/12/2014 at 12:44
Bad Venture plays very nicely (so far) on my Intel duo 2.4 with 4Gb and Radeon HD 6800.
