Adventure Pack...
by C. N. · in Torque Game Builder · 09/12/2006 (8:48 pm) · 8 replies
Sup all,
I just watched the movie for the Adventure Pack. It looks really good but I can't help noticing that the demo game looked quite slow and choppy. Did anyone else notice this, too? Or is it just because of the way they recorded it?
I'd love to pick it up and probably will if someone can tell me that it doesn't run as sluggish as the demo movie made it look.
Also, it's curious that the system requirements posted for the Adventure Pack are higher than alot of current 3D games like WoW, Guild Wars, etc... any idea why? It just seems a little odd to me.
Thanks.
I just watched the movie for the Adventure Pack. It looks really good but I can't help noticing that the demo game looked quite slow and choppy. Did anyone else notice this, too? Or is it just because of the way they recorded it?
I'd love to pick it up and probably will if someone can tell me that it doesn't run as sluggish as the demo movie made it look.
Also, it's curious that the system requirements posted for the Adventure Pack are higher than alot of current 3D games like WoW, Guild Wars, etc... any idea why? It just seems a little odd to me.
Thanks.
#2
09/13/2006 (12:23 pm)
Well, honestly the adv. pack is on my working machines very choppy. I tried the demo and I get tearing effects on my 3.0 Ghz PC with 2 GB RAM and Radeon x800. Same on my macbook. Iam not sure why but I hope that they will optimize the pack soon. 
#3
Wow. I seem to be getting a better response from my 1.2g Vaio with crap intel graphics and 512m of ram. As well as my mini. I expect better performance on my G5, but still.
Strange. I see performance issues (most notably scrolling with multiple animated objects on-screen), but nothing on the magnitude that you're seeing. And I'm using lower-end hardware.
09/13/2006 (1:26 pm)
AndreWow. I seem to be getting a better response from my 1.2g Vaio with crap intel graphics and 512m of ram. As well as my mini. I expect better performance on my G5, but still.
Strange. I see performance issues (most notably scrolling with multiple animated objects on-screen), but nothing on the magnitude that you're seeing. And I'm using lower-end hardware.
#4
09/13/2006 (1:28 pm)
Works fine on my pc 2ghz amd64, 1.5gb and a geforce 7800gt . I thought video was well put together. But thats my opinion. 
#5
@David - Scrolling with multiple animated objects you say? I'm thinking that maybe there is some texture thrashing going on. Especially on a laptop which i assume has very little video memory... i'm guessing 64MB of shared memory?
For the 1.1 release we have, with some help/education from Melv, improved the performance some in the collision side of things. If the new packing routines end up in TGB 1.1.2 we'll be doing some reorganizing of the assets to take advantage of the new features. This should reduce memory used at runtime which in turn will reduce any texture thrashing.
09/13/2006 (2:05 pm)
@Andre - That's really interesting. I suspect it's more an issue in TGB itself with your hardware setup than something in the AdvKit. If you could please run the demo, drop down the debug banner (enter... TOGGLEDEBUGBANNER ... in the console), and take a screenshot for me. If you can send me the screenshot and the console.log file from the run (for both your systems if possible) i'll take a look at it ASAP.@David - Scrolling with multiple animated objects you say? I'm thinking that maybe there is some texture thrashing going on. Especially on a laptop which i assume has very little video memory... i'm guessing 64MB of shared memory?
For the 1.1 release we have, with some help/education from Melv, improved the performance some in the collision side of things. If the new packing routines end up in TGB 1.1.2 we'll be doing some reorganizing of the assets to take advantage of the new features. This should reduce memory used at runtime which in turn will reduce any texture thrashing.
#6
09/13/2006 (2:35 pm)
Yup. I assumed that was the issue. It has 128m shared. I see similar behavior on my mini, though I honestly cannot recall if I am using a debug or retail build. Most likely debug.
#7
09/14/2006 (1:30 am)
@Tom: Ah, thanks! I won't hold your video capture skills against you, lol. ;)
#8
09/14/2006 (1:34 am)
Ill do the debugthing tonight. Currently iam out of town. Thanks for the support.
Associate Tom Spilman
Sickhead Games
It's mostly my bad video capture skills... i swear i'll never get good at that.
On my home box, a P4 2.8GHz with a GF 6600, i get over 60fps. On my work machine it's a little over 100fps.
The requirements are the "Recommended" developer requirements from the TGB product page. I should update that with more specific information for development vs. games made with the kit (assuming no more art than what the kit provides).
One big issue with TGB at the moment is the memory usage and packing of image maps. The advkit has a good amount of tiles and sprites. Since TGB doesn't combine sprite sheets are runtime, you must combine them at design time. This implies you know what art will be used in what combination for each level. With something like the advkit, where we're not designing one specific game, we don't know what sprites you may or may not use and in what combination. Even then you may use different combinations of sprites in different levels. The end result is that no matter what you do you'll have sprites loaded into memory that are not used in your particular level.
So we abandoned the idea of optimizing for one specific usage and instead grouped things logically and into as few sheets as possible. Then several days of dumping the packed textures and adjusting our sheets followed.
We're hoping to see image packing become more configurable and dynamic in a future TGB release. Melv has already outlined some ideas he has. The plan is to update the kit at that time to take advantage of the new packing features.