Fps needs some help with milkshape.

[madness]

will the d3d9 driver improve how many poly's the engine can handle?

[Jay]

simply said, yes. I am not sure how the speeds for different kinds of geometry will be affected, but i think actors will benefit the most, while the gain for level geometry is somewhat limited because the lightmaps result in many small calls to the engine which are not that fast as one big call that renders a big chunk of geometry (as it is possible with actors)

[paradoxnj]

simply said, yes

Actually, the answer to that is......maybe. You can upgrade to DirectX 9, put in hardware transformations and other bells and whistles, but if you do not batch correctly, it will actually be slower than the old driver. The world is what is in view most of the time. If rendering the world is inefficient, then your game will suffer. Rendering actors in bigger batches may help, but not enough to make a huge difference. To make actors more optimal, you have to use instancing (either fixed function or shaders). Using indexed polys would greatly improve FPS also.

What will make this engine faster is not just a conversion to DX9, but to make more efficient batches and offload some work to the GPU. Hardware transformations are a start, but Genesis does UV calculations every frame which is terribly inefficient. Those can be offloaded to the GPU via shaders. It also does a manual Z-Buffer calculation before it passes off to the hardware Z-Buffer. This is unnecessary and should be removed.

Right now Genesis batches consist of one poly. A batch is considered a DrawPrimitive() call. You can make them more efficient by sending triangle lists instead of fans (I believe wxb1 already did this), sorting by texture and calling DP() once for each texture. Another way would be to modify the brush code in the editor to use many polys for one face instead of 2. The GPU prefers 1000 polys at once instead of 1 poly 1000 times. Typically, you don't want to make more than 200 DrawIndexedPrimitive() calls per frame.

Here is what Microsoft recommends for the best Direct3D Performance.

EDIT: Same pretty much goes for OpenGL also....

@madness - Polygon count is not really determined by the driver only. FPS is what matters. The human eye cannot distinguish more than 28 frame per second. As long as your game runs at 30FPS on crappy hardware, you can increase the poly count. Just be choosy as to what you want to add the extra detail to.

[madness]

Is the release for this going to happen any time soon?

[madness]

Modeling a hand, so maybe for first person or maybe for the character.
Thumb was hard as passing kidney stones. not very good.




What do you think?

also, I have smoothing turned on. Will this model be smoothed when it is put into the game?

[MakerOfGames]

The hand looks great so far! Good work!

[madness]

more.





Hold your hand up to this.


test texture.

[Sph!nx]

Nice! I recall you saying that this is your first human character? Nice job m8!

[madness]

Yep, first one!
I won't have a lot of time for it in the next few weeks.
Finals week next week.
Also my home version of milkshape don't work so well. I got it regestered but it won't stay registered.
My computer got a virus this week that I can't get rid of and I have never known how to restart my system. also I have many gigs of information and no place to store it while i fix my problem.

[darksmaster923]

pretty gud! how many polys

[fps]

madness is sick. I took over for an update. last day of regular classes! so excited!

[fps]

also, this is the stats without legs.
Idk, how we are going to cut this thing down to operational limits.

[madness]

Jolly good work chap!

[Sph!nx]

Yup, looking very good!!

[fps]

I took over madnesses model work for the summer. Hopefully I will be able to get it rigged to the far cry skeleton and find an animations set to get this project back on its feet.
I am having trouble getting the head into good shape. due undoubtedly to the extreme high poly count.
hmmmmmm....
I appear to be having image troubles. my milkshape will only render the model in top left viewport and takescreenshot produces a grey square for an image.
anyone got any idea whats up with it?