Hardware

[beni]

I read a short article in the latest issue of the biggest german game magazine and I'd like to share the main points with you:

In the latest GameStar Gunnar Lott, the chief editor writes about the hardware requirements of the newest games. As examples he doesn't look at some hyped games, but at "Dark Messiah" and "Anno 1701".
According to his statistics only 30 to 35 % of all the GameStar readers have a computer on which they can play "Dark Messiah" and only 10 % have hardware powerful enough to make "Anno 1701" decent to look at.
He says that a game should be able to run on a 1 GHz computer looking ok, with a lot of details turned off.
If they took this into consideration, game developers would have access to a lot more people than they have now.
The guys who do it the right way are of course... Blizzard with World of Warcraft. This game even runs on bad PCs and on Linux and Mac computers as well. That's how the game developer make his work accessible to a broad audience.

Well, I don't really care if you're a fan of the magazine or not, but what's for sure is that Gunnar Lott has a point. It might not affect us too much, but we should always keep in mind, that our game should be able to run on slow computers and all the operating systems that exist. But there is no reason not to make it great looking; you just have to be able to turn a lot of effects and details off.

This is only a small reminder to all of us.

[patrick]

I like the GameStar magazine and usually buy it every month (have not yet bought it today )

I agree with your and Gunnars idea. The only way to influence the graphics performance on Orxonox is by selecting:

• different resolutions - this is pretty much standard in many other games and scales quite nicely, but a resolution under 640x480 doesn't make sense
• enable/disable textures - without textures the game runs much faster of course, but this isn't what you meant with "playable" so this option doesn't really count.

There should be more options like:

• texture detail level - We just add different resolutions of each texture to the repository (or the texture loader scales them automatically)
• model details - There would need to be multiple versions of all models. I don't know if this is possible.

All .obj models do actually support LOD (level of detail). By default you can specify 3 different resolutions for all models and the engine will change the model in the game automatically depending on the distance from the camera to the object.

Do you have more ideas about a "scalable performance"?

[hofzge]

I think that Orxonox takes the right way.
It's important that in the future there are people responsible for the different ports of Orxonox on all operating systems.
Im my personal view this has to be one of the next main points to promote Orxonox and to make it something special: How many games are there besides Orxonox that can be played on Windows, all flavours of Linux and Solaris? - None!

[Nowic]

....

There should be more options like:

• texture detail level - We just add different resolutions of each texture to the repository (or the texture loader scales it automatically)
• model details - There would need to be multiple versions of all models. I don't know if this is possible.

All .obj models do actually support LOD (level of detail). By default you can specify 3 different resolutions for all models and the engine will change the model in the game automatically depending on the distance from the camera to the object.

Do you have more ideas about a "scalable performance"?

I don't like LOD... because models "pop" into the next detail level when you walk towards them. This looks quite ugly and of course it's a LOT of extra work for the 3D artists if these models aren't generated automatically.

Texture detail levels are a good idea... this doesn't generate a lot of extra work and should reduce performance problems.

Another idea is disabling or reducing particle effects and the number of light sources.

[bensch]

Texture detail levels are a good idea... this doesn't generate a lot of extra work and should reduce performance problems.

This should be simple, and the texture class can support it (or at least can be made to support it ).
In the GUI there will then be a variable to set this value to low/med/high.
Now the Texture loads [TextureName][_level].[ext], when the texture TextureName.ext is requested.
If the texture with the surname [_level] (as _low, _med, _high) exists, the chosen value is loaded, otherwise the file TextureName.ext is loaded and scaled with a factor 1: for high, 1/2 for medium, 1/4 for low.

This approach makes it easiest for designers to add new textures, and if they supply the _level textures, they are loaded. But in any case, something usefull will be detected.

Another idea is disabling or reducing particle effects and the number of light sources.

Reducing particle effects should be simple, just add a factor in the setEmissionRate function of the emitter.
Light sources do not matter at the moment, and reducing the count could make a level look totally different, vote against it!

[x3n]

scaled with a factor 1: for high, 1/2 for medium, 1/4 for low.

Ow, no scaling please... several textures are properly aligned. Scaling would wreck the whole look of numerous models and maps.

What about something like mipmaps (the engine loads 1/4 of the pixels - each second row/column - and interpolates them) instead?

[Nowic]

AND: Please support graphics cards with no (or limited) shader support.
After chrigi's patch my Geforce3 is now able to load the water level but the water surface is just black. There's no alternative implementation of the water.

[lieni]

Yessss, to make another implementation of the water would be my part Could somebody please donate a few years of extra time for xmas plz?