Fps

#1 Are you talking about a single 30k polygon model?
The games you mentioned do not actually use that high polygon count for a single model at all they use normal maps. from what i can gather individual objects are around 5k with high poly normal map. Erik Madison posted a real good resource but its in the private section.
so check out for an intro
unrealtechnology.com/html/technology/ue30.shtml
www.monitorstudios.com/bcloward/tutorials_normal_maps1.html

Also nVidia has released melody which will generate normal maps as well as a low poly mesh from a high poly one.

#2 No mate

The scene was comprised of 30, 170poly trees, approx 20, 90poly rocks.

So basically a scene that comes to 40k's worth of polys but that contains loads of small low poly objects

Not one high poly model as u thought

Steve

#3 Ah... I was afraid of that after reading your post again..


I did a little test and put up ~40k in a scene. 20 copies of a 2k player model, And still get over 50fps. So i would assume its the models themselves. (1.8G processor fx5900xt stock)

I see its trees.. are they the generic Torque trees? do they have transpearancy? that would really kill the frame rate as those trees are not optimized for large numbers of em. There is a tree pack that corrects the issues.

#4 Yes transprency - why does this kill FPS????? All games use transparency for tree and foilage reps


If i cannot get higher than 40k's worth of polys, i cant use torque as i first thought.....

#5 @Stevie: The issue is not the number of polys, it's the fact (most likely) that the objects you are using are not optimized for that type of performance.

Also, based on your other messages, you've been working on script implementation of moving trees. I would suggest that you don't really have just a rendering based FPS loss, but a general processing performance loss as well due to completely unoptimized script based animation.

Animation and presentation of LOTS of trees is a highly specialized area of both modelling and rendering--that's why products like speedTree can sell for $6k and have plenty of customers...

It's also why Ben Garney is working on an optimized solution for having large forests in his Tree Pack (which is not currently available, I'm sure he's been tied up in many other things over the last couple of months).

#6 I havent implemented any animations of any sorts yet mate. Just the bare basic trees, made with a program called Treemagic. The trees i have made are no more than 200 polys but look really good - and have 5 plains with the leaf transparencies on for each tree.

When u say optimise. How could these be optimised - they are only 200 polys each anyway?????

#7 Also this does not make sense. Most objects to some degree use transparency - whether a building, plant object, foilage, characters, windows etc etc - so there must be a work around

#8 30,00 polyies ARE YOU NUTS, shoot for 3,000
ps did you add LOD

if you ask "what is LOD" you need to stop, and read the documents carefully, not to mention spend some time researching game development.

#9 What do u mean - am i nuts

#10 3000 - i would like to see u make half decent trees in a farcryish styleised game with a max tree poly count of 3000......

I totally optimised my trees at the design level to be 200 each - and the quality of them is outstanding if i say it myself

#11 Well, most implementations use some form of LOD (Level of Detail) model creation so that (basically) the farther away a model is from the viewpoint, the less detail it is given.

I'm not familiar at all with Treemagic (sounds interesting though, I may check it out!) but you also may be having problems with the textures it generated (TGE has some requirements as to texture size, etc.), possibly the collision boxes (although I honestly have no idea if this would affect your performance at this point), or some other art pipeline into TGE issue.

All I can say is that I'm testing something relatively similar myself (kinda--I have 300+ 400-800 poly models all animated and performing major combat attacks across the internet via a dedicated server), and while I got a pretty nasty FPS hit on my Win98 box (1.5g cpu, 384m memory, GeForce 5600 Ultra 128m video card), my WinXP box (3.2G/1G mem, Geforce 6800 Ultra/256m) did just fine.

Meaning that it's not TGE that's really the issue, but something somewhere in the art pipeline or import into TGE.

#12 @Anthony:

Quote:30,00 polyies ARE YOU NUTS, shoot for 3,000

He meant 30k polys total scene count, not per tree!

#13 DOH, still use the replicator for now untill the forest pack is advailable and I would shoot for 50-100 polyies, I mean is it just a tree

#14 Stephen can i send u my tree for u to look at

Each tree has three levels of detail. The first 200 polys when the player is right in front of the camea, then one that just displays the trunk model and the leafs - with no branch detail. Then in the distance at the moment i just have the leafs which equate to no more than 30 polys per tree. I am going to replace these with a billboard when i make them later.

As to Treemagick - check out www.aliencodec.com

How do i post a screenie here?? I dont have a website to upload my file

Cheers

STeve

#15 @Anthony - no - itsd not just a tree!!! (well it is!) but i dont think 200 polys each is too much - surely. For me graphical content in a game is very very important and making the player believe he is there. Farcry totally inspires me - and i know i will never ever make a clone of farcry graphically, but my scene i reckon is coming close...... i wish i could show u a screenie - but dont have a website to upload my picture. I need to be using these simple trees, and whilst they do have LODSs - remember that anything outside the camera's close eye drops the tree down to under 80 polys anyway.

This is interestin...... i just took the trees out and guess what..//...

FPS still stays at around 20


I am using the foilage rep, with a max poly count of 10,000 - but this is starting to get silly..... I thought my game could be realised in this product.

#16 Unfortunately, I'm not an artist, nor do I know diddly about how best to set up that type of thing, so sending me the model isn't going to help at all.

I would suggest you take a look at the Artists forums, and also do some searches in the forums for how others do both tree creation, and how to make sure your objects are organized well for performance in TGE.

#17 Even if the shape replicator gave beetter performance i couldnt use it - cos my objects are very specifically placed - i.e. a certain palm tree all around the shore outline, then other stuff etc - so using random option is not an option.....

very frustrating.

#18 Justy remeber it is a game, if the FPS drops, you have to ask youself is it that important to the whole experiance. I mean do you climb the tree? burn them? or are then just ambient fodder. If so, then you better find a more resonable solution.

#19 @Stevie: Your ultimate decision is definitely your own, but TGE is MORE than capable of doing just about anything--especially since with a license you have the source code, and can therefore implement any rendering algorithms you want!

I agree with Anthony in a big way about you needing to do a lot more fundamental research and learning about TGE itself before you dive in and decide TGE is/isn't for you.

Based on what you said above, you've obviously done something elsewhere that is nailing your performance. There are tools and techniques to find out what, including:

--source versioning management (what have you changed recently? can you take it out automatically?)
--profiling: TGE has a built in profiler if you spend the time to learn how to use it
--search the forums, tutorials, and other areas of the internet to see how others do similar things, and adapt their techniques to your goal
--I would especially suggest you take a look at the tutorials/techniques for making objects themselves.
--finally, it very well could be a driver issue. TGE uses OpenGL, and many video cards do a somewhat poor job of keeping their drivers aligned properly for OpenGL calls. I went back and looked at your video card, and the Nvidia drivers for the 5700 literally SUCK when it comes to OpenGL. My brother has the same card, and with the drivers he currently has, he gets 1-2 FPS on ANY OpenGL application that does more than display text.

Edit: I know that there are 5700 drivers out there that work well with TGE, some folks have said they do fine--I actually asked a couple of weeks ago myself which specific driver version works well with TGE, but haven't seen a response yet, so if you find one that handles your performance problems, let us know!

#20 Maybe I missed it. Are you using LOD. Also what size are your textures. ie. 512 X 512? Maybe dropping that would help out.