Just been doing a play through some maps with the DirectQ beta, and some changes will be coming through for the next one. It's too early to say if this will be a full release, a beta 2 or a release candidate, but overall things are seeming quite solid enough.
Those changes I mentioned are exceptions to the "quite solid enough" rule. Some brief discussion of them.
The MDL lighting model needs some more tweaking. I've double-checked a few things with it, and while I'm certain that I've got the basic formula right for software Quake MDL lighting, I'm a little out in the overall scaling. Some MDLs are coming out too dark, some have unwanted shading in places, and so on. The fact that software Quake uses an inverse scale makes things a little trickier to match up right.
There are some places on hardware T&L kit where performance drops off. I'm suspecting that this may be on account of my vertex buffer caching (which is not used with software T&L) having too wide a spread between vertexes that have been cached and vertexes that are newly added; especially as disabling the cache prevents it. Doing so causes performance to drop a little, so I might need to investigate other areas for improvement there. One of them might involve caching an entire PVS but that would break integration of brush models with the main render. That may still be viable however; there's plenty of room for experimentation here.
I'm not 100% happy with particles; I think as the code evolved it got a little messy. If I could up the hardware minimum to ps3.0 I could resolve this, but doing so would exclude parts like the Intel 915 and 945, which I don't want to do. I might just leave it as is and come back to it later.
I don't think that sprite batching turned out as effective as it could be. With hindsight I could probably amalgamate most of the draw routines for this into one of the other quad-drawing routines; the 2D GUI stuff looks appropriate.
I'm interested especially in any reports of weird lockups and suchlike. I've got some stuff running on a second thread in this one, and it seems stable enough to me, but it's the first time I've ever released any multithreaded code so naturally I have a few small nagging concerns.
On balance though I actually am quite happy with it overall. The cleanup of the renderer was long overdue and it's been designed as a solid baseline to move forward from, rather than just getting the job done in a quick and dirty fashion.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
DirectQ Update - 24th February 2011
Posted by
mhquake
at
10:27 PM
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I've posted some feedback yesterday, but that seems to have been lost somehow..
Anyways here it is again:
First of all, this thing rocks! \o/
However, from this screenshot a few things are immediatly obvious (albeit somewhat hard to see):
- ViewModels and FOV > 90
- The background image on the SP-scoreboard (nice!) appears to suffer from the old off-by-half-a-pixel problem. Either that or its a result of linear texture filtering..
- If you look closely you will also notice that the outer edge of that background image is slightly more translucent then the middle part..
A few other things I noticed:
- My mouse sensitivity appeared to be much lower compared to 1.8.666b (without changing any values)
Easy enough to adjust the value but I figured I'd mention it anyways..
Mouse input felt amazingly smooth though :D
- Love the new console behaviour and longer chat messages (the fading effect is pretty cool too ;))
- It does allow you to type in much longer messages than it can actually send however (when connected to a proquake server), so that leaves the user kinda guessing when to stop typing and hit enter..
Here are the big ones tho (for me at least):
- The dreaded shakiness when looking down is back..
This leaves DQ1.8.7 pretty much useless for MultiPlayer as is, but I'm sure you can fix it (crosses fingers)
IIRC, you fixed that last time by using a newer version of the proquake code.. (probably 3.50)
- NO MORE ALT-TAB CRASHES!!!! (so far) :D
All in all this release feels a lot more solid then 1.8.666b but I hope you can iron out these minor issues!
Performance wise, well, steady 250 fps on OMDM1 with r_novis 1 and 1600x1200x32 16xAA 16xAF on a NVidiaGTX285
(1.8.666b drops to 140 in certain spots)
Great job on this one (I like the .MDL shading too!)
Looking forward to the next beta ;)
Try fov_compatible 0 and see what it does. :)
I'll probably change or remove that background image. The outer edges seem to be a bug in the original images. Yes, it's linear filtering combined with a zoomed-in 2D GUI.
Mouse: Are you using fullpitch? I never really tested that. I think I did some stuff with sensitivity too, but these changes date back to last year.
Need to check the messaging code; there are a few different places this is controlled from and the max values may be out of sync a little.
Nope, no full pitch, both client and server [off]
Ah yes, fov_compatible 0 fixes the viewmodel with fov > 90
Here's a beer! :D
Btw, any chance of adding ( ) around the playername when he's typing in messagemode2? (say_team)
No biggy, just a little more convenient and consistent with other clients..
love it :-)
i'm getting round 800fps on the running demos with geforce 460m :-D
but if i load a map it drops back to 71. :/ and some strange shuttering going on.
fog is really nice. gl_fogsky seems dead.
noticed some light flickering on secret doors that where ok before.
water alpha is not working here. only smear. neither worked in previous versions!
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