CPUs and gaming

[demi]

/RANT ON

Finally had to break down and get a new box. Gaming and development needs faster and faster CPUs, GPUs now days but then my machine is not the state of the art latest and greatest but it gets the job done. I had to settle for a 2.4GHz P4 (433 MHz bus) with 1 gig of DDR. My FX5200 video card is a low end POS but again it does the job. I bought Oblivion and like WTH it barley runs with almost all the bells and whistles off.

Makes me wonder if I can even keep up with development of Rieen. By the time I get the land mass done, it will be outdated.

/RANT OFF

[Hinklemister]

I understand your pain. I'm currently in the same situation. Just try to get very compatible hardware so that it will be fairly easy to upgrade in the future.

-Hinklemister

[JavaJones]

That seems like a pretty low end machine. Do they even sell anything like that new anymore? You can get a Sempron 2600 and onboard Geforce 6200 with 512MB's RAM and an 80GB HD (all of which would outperform the machine you describe) for about $400 these days. *shrug*

- Oshyan

[demi]

That seems like a pretty low end machine. Do they even sell anything like that new anymore? You can get a Sempron 2600 and onboard Geforce 6200 with 512MB's RAM and an 80GB HD (all of which would outperform the machine you describe) for about $400 these days. *shrug*

Cheap as I could afford at this time. I have more pressing issues than a computer atm. But hopefully someday I can fork out the dollars for a good system.

[JavaJones]

Fair enough. For the record PCClub.com is a good builder, they ship clean systems with good hardware, and you can get their low end system (which matches or exceeds the specs you mentioned) for about $400. So if anyone is looking for a machine forget Dell and check these guys out. They're actually pretty cool, and they have locations in a number of areas now, so you can actually buy decent computer parts for reasonable prices locally!

- Oshyan

[monks]

Yeah- it's a bit of a pain. Too many upgrades. Like I've said before, I'm going to wait 'til things settle a bit: dualies, Vista:64 bit, etc, etc.

monks

[Aaron]

I'm considering an upgrade myself, but since I very seldom play games, there's really not much need. My venerable Athlon 2600 still does a more than satisfactory job. Indeed, most apps I use aren't sufficiently multi-threaded to benefit from a dual/multi-core system, and very few would benefit from having a 64-bit addressable memory space.

However, Vista will probably be the killing-blow - if I want to run that O/S I'll need an upgrade. I wonder if it will be worth it - what are the advantages again? Eye-candy? A poor clone of the 30+ year-old UNIX security model? Worse support for OpenGL? Does this sound good to anyone?

Cheers,
Aaron.

[JavaJones]

What was originally promised with Vista would actually have been pretty cool. As it stands the removal of the WinFS file system has left me cold as far as interest in the features of it. WinFS seems like it would have been a potentially major step forward. Otherwise everything seems pretty incremental and uninteresting. I have to admit Apple has really pulled off the move to a completely new OS fairly nicely. There were plenty of growing pangs of course, and Windows has always been the more backward compatible OS, so if MS wants to keep that rep (and the customers and development partners it relies on) then it will probably always have to have slow development as far as the core goes, as compared to competitors.

- Oshyan

[monks]

I'm considering an upgrade myself, but since I very seldom play games, there's really not much need.

The only reason why I would upgrade right now, is to allow me to use larger terrains. Oh dear- that's even sadder than upgrading for the latest computer game. What have I become ! When Project Offset is released I will certainly upgrade (maybe Far Cry Instincts too).

Perhaps in a year from now, there'll be enough support of these new standards to pursuade me shell out.

As it stands the removal of the WinFS file system has left me cold

So WinFS has gone? Good grief. Looks like they're relying on the games market to sell it: DirectX 10, etc.

OT: How did you get this shot Aaron- did you use bump mapping here ?

monks

[Aaron]

Hi Monks,

OT: How did you get this shot Aaron- did you use bump mapping here ?

That image was from v2.2, back in October 2004 - long before bump-mapping.

Hmm...is it just me, or does the erosion look better in that build than in the current version? It might be time to re-tweak the erosion parameters (again).

Aaron.

[monks]

Imo that image just looks better all round than almost all of the shots in that gallery. The texture looks more natural, in both the near and the terrain futher away. The erosion is very natural looking: a really professional job.
There is a bit of pixellation on the lower hills- perhaps those areas have been improved upon, or was it a small terrain ?.
If you could dig some info out, I'd be interested to know what settings you had for erosion, the textures, etc.

monks

[Aaron]

Hi Monks,

Imo that image just looks better all round than almost all of the shots in that gallery.

Mmm...I tend to agree. I got a lot of mileage out of that image.

The texture looks more natural, in both the near and the terrain futher away.

I clipped the foreground because it looked horrible.

The erosion is very natural looking...

Yeah, I think that's it - I had a better balance of erosion parameters back in v2.2. I'm re-working the erosion for v2.4, and hopefully I'll get some of that magic back. Here are some preliminary results:



All rendered at 30-100 fps, of course, and no foreground-clipping required

There is a bit of pixellation on the lower hills- perhaps those areas have been improved upon, or was it a small terrain ?.

It was a 1024x1024 map with a 2048x2048 texture, so pixellation is not too surprising.

If you could dig some info out, I'd be interested to know what settings you had for erosion, the textures, etc.

The map is dead, but the settings were (approximately):

Size: 16x16
Sea/Land: 100 (i.e. all land)
Alt. range: 80% (quite steep)
Scale of features: 60%
Erosion: 80%

The rest of the settings were the defaults.

However, I should point out that the current release of L3DT probably can't reproduce the look of that v2.2 map. You may have to wait for v2.4 beta3, due sometime in the next week or two.

Cheers,
Aaron.

[demi]

I came to the conclusion that continuing to upgrade OS and hardware is not the answer. I finally have a engine that does what I want it to do and development is going smother now.

Ogre is nice but a pain for terrains, TSE is lacking compared to what Crystalspace can do for HUGE worlds. My FX5200 can do just fine with CS. Well I was upset but over it.

Demi,

[Aaron]

Hi Demi,

Hmmm...I did look at CrystalSpace a few years back. Seeing as I really should be building a new terrain renderer in 2007, I guess I should give CS another look. TSE is sort of out of the running as a general renderer due to the requirements on heightfield size (square, power of two), and in any case, I'd prefer to use an open-source library so that others can work on it also. Ogre was looking pretty good, but you say it's a pain with large maps? Could you elaborate?

Best regards,
Aaron.

[demi]

Yeah, CS is really changed over the last several versions. Does some remarkable stuff like texture splatting, LOD management, Per pixel shadering and so on. I have some in game screens that I will post when I get internet back. These worlds are so huge I had to down scale them by a factor of 8.

I don't have much time to reply her but CS is rock solid game engine.

Demi

Oh I want to add here that CS uses PNG files to dynamicly build terrains on the fly so defined world files just have pointers to sectors like a moasic. With the Alpha, Normals and splattering on the simple TX, it really shines.