Well, running it if it is optimized properly should run as good as a small properly optimized mission (though load time would be longer).Originally Posted by jaxa
Vis portals segment the missions into smaller pieces so you are usually rendering an area around the player, and parts of other areas that are visible through the visportals.
So in a massive mission you are still just rendering a small area around the player, not the whole mission at one.
So missions large or small can have the same performance.
Building it though, at least as much time as any other massive mission
Radiant is still an editor, it takes time to build missions, but I think people will be able to turn out missions faster and easier once they get the tools down though. It just takes that first step...
That depends on the actual layout of the mission and how well it can be portalized. Drams Mission had areas where my old machine really choked on, but in other areas the scene complexity was much lower so the framerate was good again there. The size of the mission is pretty huge, so that is not really the issue, it's mostly scene complexity that matters.
@TDM Team: Guys, I have a one question about Parallax mapping: how difficult to implement it into TDM? I've heard that there are about three instructions should be added into a shader's code, but, alas, I'm not a graphics programmer...
It can be done, but with everything else that's already going on in TDM, it's quite a large performance hit for very little pay off. One of our members brought it to our attention a year or two ago.
It isn't something we'll be supporting officially. We don't want the mod to be so weighed down by graphic enhancements that it shuts out the core fan base.
Last edited by New Horizon; 1st Nov 2009 at 09:29.
is there a way to alter or remover the menu delay ?
New Horizon: Yes, I understand your care about those taffers who cannot afford themself a more-less power hardware. But, AFAIK, a parallax mapping is not so difficult thing for most modern graphics cards. Something like GeForce 8800/Radeon 3850, I think, will be able to handle such an eye-candy feature. Those graphics cards are two-three years old and cheap enough these days.
I cant afford one.New Horizon: Yes, I understand your care about those taffers who cannot afford themself a more-less power hardware. But, AFAIK, a parallax mapping is not so difficult thing for most modern graphics cards. Something like GeForce 8800/Radeon 3850, I think, will be able to handle such an eye-candy feature. Those graphics cards are two-three years old and cheap enough these days
Does that mean you will buy us some since they are so cheap ?
As I said, "with everything else that's already going on in TDM, it's quite a large performance hit for very little pay off".New Horizon: Yes, I understand your care about those taffers who cannot afford themself a more-less power hardware. But, AFAIK, a parallax mapping is not so difficult thing for most modern graphics cards. Something like GeForce 8800/Radeon 3850, I think, will be able to handle such an eye-candy feature. Those graphics cards are two-three years old and cheap enough these days
To elaborate, if you dropped parallax enhancement into Vanilla Doom 3 you probably wouldn't notice much of a difference in performance, if you put the same enhancement into TDM you would notice because we have to deal with AI, sound prop, tracking objectives, stim-response pings, lightgem calculations, ambient lighting...yadda, yadda, yadda.
In any case, maybe it's something that could be looked at in the future, but for now I don't think it will be making it into the mod in an official capacity. It might not even be something that would be compatible with our current interaction shader ambient lighting enhancements. Eye candy is a low priority matter right now.
I'm on an 8600 and can't really drop enough for a new card either. And considering some people are complaining about $10 for Doom3...New Horizon: Yes, I understand your care about those taffers who cannot afford themself a more-less power hardware. But, AFAIK, a parallax mapping is not so difficult thing for most modern graphics cards. Something like GeForce 8800/Radeon 3850, I think, will be able to handle such an eye-candy feature. Those graphics cards are two-three years old and cheap enough these days
Thelvyn: I don't mean that I'd buy anybody some modern graphics hardware
New Horizon: Parallax mapping is a graphics feature that runs on GPU (I mean it's a pixel shader), so it cannot slow down tasks that runs on CPU
Schwaa2: Don't worry
It's all related though. If your cpu and gpu still have to communicate, and if the cpu is already underpowered then you're going to see a hit if it can't handled extra communications from the gpu.New Horizon: Parallax mapping is a graphics feature that runs on GPU (I mean it's a pixel shader), so it cannot slow down tasks that runs on CPU
That's my understanding of it anyway. I've tried paralax on my system and it definitely hurt performance.
Parallax mapping shouldn't even give you a hiccup on a modern (Geforce 8x +) card. I remember trying to D3 parallax mod back in the day on my Radeon 9800 Pro, and it slowed things down considerably. But now, on my Geforce 8800GTS? It doesn't even bat an eye.
lol Yes, I know. The majority of our target audience may not have that kind of power for another year or two though. That being the case, it can easily await Doom 3 going open source so the renderer can be better optimized anyway.
That's called sarcasm.Thelvyn: I don't mean that I'd buy anybody some modern graphics hardware
New Horizon: Parallax mapping is a graphics feature that runs on GPU (I mean it's a pixel shader), so it cannot slow down tasks that runs on CPU
Schwaa2: Don't worry
I happen to have a 8600gt and I see a lot of slowdowns. If you add more stress to the GPU I will see more slowdowns.
I for one can not afford a new gpu at this time. Next year sometime yea but not before.
There is a WORLD of difference between a 8600(low end when it came out)
and a 8800gts(High end on arrival).
Comparing them is like having a rabbit and turtle race and calling it competitive.
New Horizon: Ok. BTW, what about some hardware survey like Valve's Steam does? This feature could be integrated into the TDM Launcher/Update, and thus you would know the real situation. Something tells me that most of taffers already have power enough hardware
Thelvyn: Yes, I understand your sarcasm, but I have a habit to answer any question/commentary addressed to me
Last edited by MoroseTroll; 2nd Nov 2009 at 04:24.
I have a 8600gt too and play Dark Mod in 1680x1050 and don't notice any slowdowns. What CPU do you have in your system?
That's actually a very good comparison. We're removing bloom from the menu options on our next release (which won't affect anyone who currently has it on, so don't panic) because it has been responsible for about 25% of all our tech problems. As someone else's mod, it wasn't created by the team and was never meant to be officially supported--just an extra that people could play around with if they wanted. Parallax mapping would be the same story.As for the parallax mapping: this feature could be an option like the bloom, so every user would toggle it on and off at his/her will.
Is there going to be a fix for the inverted sky on ATI cards? It doesn't bother me to the point of not being able to play, but it would be nice to see the sky as it's meant to be.
People have already reported a fix for it; disabling the Catalyst AI apparently fixes the problem (as well as speeding up loading times for some).
Doesn't having catalyst ai on improve the lighting in doom 3 engined games though? Strange and annoying that it would cause bugs. I guess the problem is it does too many things all under one name without anyone knowing exactly what. http://www.driverheaven.net/articles/atiop/
I also play at 1680x1050. I have a Pentium D-805 at stock so 2.66ghz
I get slowdowns in newer Thief2 FM's also like Rose Cottage at some points it is very laggy.
If it will help...New Horizon: Ok. BTW, what about some hardware survey like Valve's Steam does? This feature could be integrated into the TDM Launcher/Update, and thus you would know the real situation. Something tells me that most of taffers already have power enough hardware
Thelvyn: Yes, I understand your sarcasm, but I have a habit to answer any question/commentary addressed to me
ECS 945PL-A
Pentium D-805 2.66Ghz/Stock HSF
EVGA 8600GT 256mb GDDR2(theyre were also DDR2 versions which are slower)
320GB(298 Actual)/640GB(596 Actual) WD, LG 22x DVD Burner all sata2
2gb DDr2/667
I also try to answer every question I wish more people did so. Being ignored is quite irritating.
As long as its an option like bloom that would be nice.
Bloom is being removed from the menu as it was never meant to be officially supported anyway. We didn't create the bloom mod. After our next update, it will only be accessible via console commmands. If we were to integrate the parallax mod, it would probably have to be integrated into our existing interaction shader...otherwise things might not work out quite right. In truth, this would probably end up being more complicated since we have to swap interaction shaders based on user graphic settings of standard or enhanced. There would have to be a doom 3 standard interaction shader and an enhanced shader with these paralax instructions merged into them. Again, this will not be officially supported and would not be a menu option.
For most people, yes; but as I reported earlier in this thread, disabling Catalyst AI actually causes TDM to crash on startup for me. I can only launch it if AI is either set to Standard or Advanced, or if CCC is entirely shut down, and in all those cases I still have an inverted sky. I'll see if there's a newer version of CCC to try in case, although I only installed it about a month or two ago, and had the latest then.
A temporary quick and dirty fix (I think!) for the sky problems is to replace:
"textures/smf/portal_sky"
with say...
"textures/darkmod/nature/skybox/skybox_darkland_NE"
The building skyline is lost and the sky has no dynamic clouds but if the sky is seriously distracting I presume this is preferred. An extra advantage is improved performance.
To do the above, eg, with the training mission:
Open doom3\training_mission\training_mission.pk4 in an unzipper and extract just the maps folder so you now have doom3\training_mission\maps\training_mission.map
Open the map file in a decent plain text editor
Search and replace the above texture.
It should work as is (I'm fairly sure doom uses the extracted map in preference to the one in the pk4) and you still have the original in the pk4 so can delete the extracted map file later if a fix is found.
The fix ought to work because a similar sky is used in Chalice of Kings.
btw for the curious, the NE just means the moon is in the north east. I made this to fit the moonlight direction in St. Lucia.
I have 8800GT. Playing in 1024x768. And Patently Dangerous runs terribly bad. As I said in other thread, I can't imagine playing some bigger TDM mission. I hope it's just something with this FM only.
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote