bassoferrol on 8/1/2015 at 02:40
Thief2 recommended requirements:
400 Mhz processor
64 MB RAM
3D accelerator with 16 MB VRAM
8X CD-ROM Drive
870 MB uncompressed hard drive space
EAX 2.0 or A3D 2.0 compliant audio card
Note: 3D accelerated video card required. It may be necessary to update your hardware
drivers before playing.
Devorgilla on 8/1/2015 at 05:14
First of all I don't have the first clue on how to design a mission (even though I opened Dromed and played with it a bit) so I'm going to plead total ignorance when I ask this question: since the NewDark engine is being pushed to it's limits is there another engine that will allow the FM developer's to push the envelope while maintaining the spirit of the Thief series? Yeah, I know, "boo, what does she know by asking a silly question like that" but I need to be enlightened.
Mofleaker on 8/1/2015 at 05:37
Quote Posted by Devorgilla
. . . since the NewDark engine is being pushed to it's limits is there another engine that will allow the FM developer's to push the envelope while maintaining the spirit of the Thief series?
Well, there is the Dark Mod. But who says NewDark is finished development?
Xorak on 8/1/2015 at 09:52
The lag does mainly come from the newer objects, so FM authors should try and be a little more judicious in their use of them.
nicked on 8/1/2015 at 10:39
I clawed back a lot of performance in Death's Turbid Veil patched version, by switching all the textures to dds format. Before that I had no idea it could make such a difference, but some people reported an improvement of 10-15 fps in the outdoor areas.
cavador_8 on 8/1/2015 at 13:28
Quote:
I clawed back a lot of performance in Death's Turbid Veil patched version
Most of the fps lag I was getting in Death's Turbid Veil was inside the mansion, especially around the windows. I would have been much happier with just plain stock windows or whatever it takes to keep the fps at 60. The mansion in Death's Turbid Veil is beautiful but any mission that constantly causes my fps to drop like that gets deleted from my system.
nicked on 8/1/2015 at 13:31
Yeah, it's a perfectly valid complaint. I set out to make a system-stretching powerhouse mission and succeeded. Unfortunately that alienates some players. Next mission I make will almost certainly be much less resource-intensive because I'll have a different end goal in mind.
baeuchlein on 8/1/2015 at 14:00
As I already stated in the thread for "KoI: Bad Venture" ((
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=144837&p=2275007&viewfull=1#post2275007) click here), it could be interesting to find out why some computers will run "KoI" or "Death's Turbid Veil" smoothly, while others will stutter on
one of these two missions, but not
both. If the exact reason would be found, maybe authors could only
slightly reduce their missions' visuals in order to improve FPS a lot. Pushing the graphics towards the limits found in this approach could be quite satisfactory for authors and players alike.
nbohr1more on 8/1/2015 at 15:48
Quote Posted by Mofleaker
Well, there is the Dark Mod. But who says NewDark is finished development?
I like your way of thinking :thumb:
That said, The Dark Mod isn't free of performance woes, though we have a little more wiggle room to do creative optimization
whilst NewDark's optimization options are mostly automated. If you are lucky and someone like Bikerdude comes along with
some strange gift with TDM map optimization then missions can run quite well but not every mapper is that good at it and we
have seen some fairly poor performance on some missions that shouldn't perform that bad. We also have some pretty steep
performance cliffs for large outdoor areas but our LOD system helps a little there and there are some upcoming plans to
continue improving on that front. The big advantages we have are "normal mapping" for faked detail geometry,
dynamic lighting (obviously), and no (hard) upper bound to triangle counts per scene or mesh.
I would love to see a true horse race between the two even if they aren't directly comparable.
Eg; Make a map with exactly the same poly count for brush geometry and model assets in both engines.
In TDM, disable all lights and use just fullbright textures. Then check the FPS. Not a realistic comparison
but we'd get a better idea what dynamic lighting costs compared to older engines since there's so much FUD around that.
I guess we'd probably want to add Source or another more modern engine as a sanity check against the two.
That might also give NewDark developers something to target for upcoming builds.
Yandros on 8/1/2015 at 18:02
Dark has dynamic lights, just not dynamic shadows, which I assume is what you meant. In fact the last release of NewDark added the ability to set a finite radius on dynamic lights, which should theoretically allow their use with less performance hit. Also, the hard upper limit on terrain polys in view was raised by NewDark high enough that most things an author would want to do are now possible (whereas (
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=105498) the old limit of 1024 was hugely restrictive). The comparison "horse race" you suggested would be interesting, though.
We Dark authors are still learning the best ways to reduce fps lag, and as Nick alluded above, using DDS/DXT for large textures is a big key which has only recently come to light with these recent missions. Also as Xorak mentioned, there are certain objects which cause huge fps issues, like the cornstalks used in The Farm. I don't think we yet understand why some objects do that while others (with just as many polys) do not. I suspect that transparency in the textures plays a role, since we've long known that using lots of objects such as Daraan's detailed trees can cause problems.
