Singularity FPS beta 2 now available

#1 Ouch, 0-3 FPS.

Pentium 4 w/HT 3.31GHz
2048MB Dual Channel DDR400
Radeon X1600PRO 512MB

Hope your target audience is everyone with Core 2 Duos, dual 8800s or better.

#2 You know, I would definitely expect better than that on those specs. In fact, my neighbors machine with inferior specs gets about 7-10 fps at worst.

The target is indeed coreduo, but I would expect it to be playable on your machine. Even decently so, for a an early beta.

Thanks for posting your specs tho. I don't know. I'll just have to keep looking.

#3 Man that's really odd, it's bugging me. I went and checked and my neighbor's box is a P4 3 Ghz with a 128 meg PCI (not pciExpress!) video card. My Athlon 2700+ with a 512mb AGP card bottoms out at about 15 fps. Maybe a driver update would help?

#4 All I know is you have a lot of action going on, along with MANY high poly objects, with a HUGE view distance. It's a recipe for terrible framerate. Could've been background programs I was running at the time. I'll try again sometime, but this type of game really isn't designed to accomodate 95% of computers.

#5 I was getting around 50-70 fps

8600 GTS
2.6Ghz Core 2

Chris should be getting around the same fps, so there is definitely something funny going on.

#6 @Chris: you are absolutely correct--I'm pushing the limits, and it is definitely aimed at hi spec gamers--like me--who are fanatical about performance. Not designed for casual gamers, to be sure.

That being said, I don't see a point in making it more intense than necessary, and I've put quite a lot of work into making it more playable (frankly even for high spec machines).

Is your machine a laptop, by any chance? I don't guess so from your video card...weird.

My buddy with a Pentium D just called and he says it's smooth, so that's the first non-coreduo I've heard of where it's really smooth.

#7 Think you can get a mac version goin?

#8 Definitely part of my game plan (as it were). Linux, too. That's one of the things I like about TGE the most.

Alas, I am Mac-less. If you have a TGE license I'd gladly send you my source to do a Mac build.

#9 55 FPS now, when I tested it again, must've been some other issue at the time.

#10 Woot! Thanks for trying again :-)

#11 No offense, but I'd just like to say I thought the game looked really cool in the screen shots, but when I got playing it I felt like smashing my head on a rock. I have a 6600gt with pci express and an amd athalon single core. My framerate was around 33fps. The framerate wasn't the concern, it was the movement of the vehicles, the fact that you can't aim while inside them, and the fact that once you get wings you spend most of your time trying to correct the orientation of your car, because it keeps flipping upside down.

Also, I hate how you can't get out of a vehicle.

In the last 30 seconds of my last time ever playing this game I figured out how to get cars to fly, and I zoomed as fast as I could at a wall expecting to crash into it but instead traveled straight through into the blue, somewhat cloudy, skies.

Good job though, even though I really hate this game there are aspects of it which are cool, and I'm sure somebody out there will enjoy it.

#12 @Dumbledore: none taken--I need constructive criticism, which I think you've given. I will try to answer some of your points though:

Movement of vehicles: Try ctrl-k, keyboard steering. A lot of people seem to like that better. (it is in the onscreen help). Perhaps I should default to this.

Flipping upside down: I totally freaking agree. When I can find a developer to work with, I want to change the physics for cars so that they can't flip upside down, a la Mario Kart. Also, I'd like to be able to steer a bit when in the air. I am thinking in my next release I'm going to have the guns mounted on turrets, where you hold your right mouse button down to aim while driving. But I'm really not sure if it's necessary or not--I need some gameplay testing to find out.

In the meantime, planning your jump will minimize getting flipped upside down.

Getting out of the vehicle: ctrl-x, also in the HUD help. :-)

And yes, there are vehicle collision issues, as in all more or less stock Torque games :-(. Very High speed will definitely enhance that. It's a lot better than it used to be, thanks to the GG community...

Personally, I suspect the game will be a lot more fun if I could just get a good game going with several players.

p.s. I actually really appreciate that you bothered to post your frustrations. I need to know this stuff. Frustration != fun.

#13 Btw how did you like the planes?

#14 2.07 ghz, 1.25gb ram
radeon x1950 Pro

I didnt check the framerates but it was creeping. probably 5-6 fps.


Personally I'd take out some of the high poly stuff, maybe replace it with lower poly models or change the map so it looks like a lot of stuff but you can only see parts of some of the objects. Limit the player to certain areas and then have objects in the distance that look detailed but really you only can see one side of them... or something like that. Sorry if this makes no sense but I'm really sleepy. bedtime!

#15 @mb: thanks for the input. Yeah, that machine's a bit light for this game.

Interestingly, my testing showed it was the sheer size of the rooms as much as anything else which uses a lot of resources. Even turning on a fog, while a very interesting effect in the game, didn't really help fps.

It is high poly, however, and that is another big part of why you need a very fast machine.

#16 I'm glad you can take the criticism Lee. You must be the project manager? Very astute to pick up on what I described as frustration != fun.

From a marketing perspective, targeting your game at 5% of the market isn't astute though. Unless its just a free game?

If you'd like I could work on upsiding the vehicles for you.

Also, the number one rule of a user interface is to make frequented activities easily accessible. Why on God's earth would you make a user read an instruction manual to play your game? I personally hit all the commonly used buttons to get an action to happen and if it doesn't happen I assume the game doesn't support that feature. (Plus comes a little frown in most cases.) Later on if the user decides he likes the game, you'd have more advanced features outlined in the instructions.

Ctrl-x to get out of a car? You're telling me all the single buttons are tied up?

#17 I'm not going to bother elaborating on the positives as they aren't as helpful. But your game has potential there are just a lot of poor decisions mounting blinding attacks from atop the good ones.

#18 @dumbledore:

If I couldn't take criticism, then I'd be in the wrong business. You're doing me a favor, believe me. I am indeed the project manager, as well as the designer, artist, scriptor, and everything else--this has been a one man show so far.

5% of the video game market is enough for me. Besides, this is the game I wanted to make. I'm following the lead of our industry leader, idsoftware, in aiming for the high end and using it for all it's worth. After all, by the time the darn thing is done, those machines will be more common.

I agree about interfaces, but that's why I put the unusual stuff on the screen. What would be the "normal" keys for that stuff, btw? Beyond WASD and space for jump I don't know what they would be. I am proud of the cars using the same jump (even without wings).

ctrl-x for exiting a car: well, that's the Torque default is why it is what it is. However, I would want it that way because I'd be irate if I got out of a car accidentally. But, that is why the keys are remappable. I'm certainly not married to it, and your certainly not the first to ask. Bears some thinking about it on my part, though....

I do think a very slight learning curve for the controls is going to be inevitable for this game. I'm open to ideas, however.

As it happens, you're comment was the straw that broke the camel's back on the car steering issue. I'm looking at that stuff right now and I don't see any reason I can't have keyboard steering enabled whenever you get into a car, then turn it off when you exit. People who like using the mouse to steer can still do so (like me). So it's a no brainer.

p.s: that would be delightful if you could help with the car flipping thing. It's one of my very least favorite things about my game right now.

#19 One other thing I noticed was the screen size was set really high. I lowered it to 800x600 see if the fps would improve but it didn't. I went back into the main menu to exit and the exit button was off screen. I had to change the screen size back up to where the default was to exit. Just one more fun thing to work on :)

#20 Yeah, yeah, I did that. I reasoned that if you can't run it at a high res, you probably can't run it well at all, so I might as well set it a little high. The game, and for some reason nobody wants to believe me, is cpu limited. The video card you have does not seem to matter too much, other than memory size. On my machine it runs at the same fps at 1920x1200 as it does at 640x480. I WAS going to default to 1600x1200, but my family and friends talked me out of it.

So anyway...that gui stuff really kicks my butt. I've added it to my list of to-do's, thanks.

I'm actually uploading a new version now that implements the keyboard steering thing, as well as a number of dumb fixes.