2006 PGD Annual: Looks Like the Entries are being judged now

[Eric]

I am the only one without any comments.
Is this ok or is there something missing?

oops, must have missed the click on "update"...

I recon not having comments is a good thing Smile
If you have comments it meens something is wrong.

Comments in Stage 6 were for nitpicking/bugs/annoyances, to keep them out of the "final" game comments, so no comments = no bugs...'till I enter something in there

Eric also mentions very small issues like a missing sound on something or a little flicker on screen when objects collide.

I usually list all the things that draw my attention, up to the point when the text becomes too long (which can mean many small things, or something that takes more words to explain), so as not end up with comments length too strikingly long between entries. Not a perfect way to balance things by far... but food for thought for next challenge's approach to commenting

I know its only 2.5 points, but I'd like to ask why we didn't get the points for the ending sequence, since you get Level Complete messages and when you get to the end of the third level you get a Game Complete message.
Just curious?

The readme didn't mention it, and since not much was moving anymore, I assumed it was more a last demo than anything else, and my exploration was limited to covering up all I could of the map and I missed the exit (didn't search for one) (btw, the level designer as such an habit of hiding stuff behind buildings, that it becomes the #1 spot to look when searching for items )

>As for the load times... the problem is that it loads the entire media >collection for the whole game in a single hit

There may be some extra processing involved in there, as there isn't that much media (compared to other tile-based 2D engines).

[Eric]

With regards to Eric's note about being able to 'break away' from the conversation at the start of each level - that was intentional, so you don't have to sit through it each time your restart a level if you don't want to. But why would you not want to?

That wasn't clear, as it felt kind of a "cheat" way to get away, with your view direction still locked and a certain difficulty to move... fast forwading when hitting ESC would have felt more "natural".

[Eric]

Here's a quick roundup of entry issues specific to my HTPC system

Specs: Sempron 2600+, 512 MB RAM, GeForce 6100 (64MB shared) 1360x768 (16/9 LCD TV), Realtek AC97 audio hooked to 5.1 hifi amplifier.

16/9 ratio and resolution support was spotty to say the least, so assume "unsupported" and playtesting at 1024x768x32bits unless mentionned otherwise.

Entries by team number order:

Verne-X: Sounds was very "cracky" and full of noise. Framerate ok.

Blocked: Weird flickering box around the mouse cursor (driver issue?). Framerate ok except when fighting bosses.

SCAG: Framerate choppy on all big explosions, ok the rest of the time. Mouse cursor remained visible. Some "dark areas" (after the city) looked a lot brighter than on my PC (could see what was there!).

TortureTank: Tried adjusting res in the .ini, but setting ignored by startup menu. Framerate around 20 FPS. Tank movement were.. sliding, more snowboard-like than tank-like (physics effect linked to low framerate?).

Draconia: Framerate ok. Big screen made more noticeable a bug with some bonus and dead enemies which is that they don't "stay put" on the ground, but are oscillating up/down by one pixel.

ROTR: Splash screen graphic quite washed out. Framerate was good, better than on my main dual-core GF6800XT machine, and without slowdowns (multithreading issues?).

EarthUnderFire: 16/9 full resolution support Framerate ok. Only glitch was the text font, which isn't scaled with resolution and was quite small.

VillageDefense: Wouldn't start because of missing OpenAL (could be worth it distributing the software version as fallback, for drivers that don't provide it).

Castle: Framerate slow, ran out of memory (and swapped memory), some textures missing (like the one for the huge wall in 1st level). No sound.

TANX: Main menu music crackled then became silent. Ingame music and sound FX were there, but at a low volume. Framerate below 30 FPS, hard to aim (in mission 1, I ran out of ammo in the first "pen", and got stuck in there, collapsed wall blocks wouldn't allow to get out).

ArcticMacrob: Framerate ok, sound ok. Background plane a little washed out, no problems with other elements.

[michalis]

Castle: Framerate slow, ran out of memory (and swapped memory), some textures missing (like the one for the huge wall in 1st level). No sound.

Low framerate and missing textures may be the result of large memory use (although missing textures shouldn't happen ever, so this may indicate problem in OpenGL driver). Do you have latest drivers from nvidia.com installed ? I understand that on your other system with GeForce, framerate was good ?

As for "no sound" --- you have to install OpenAL yourself, otherwise no sound will be played. In the future, when real exe installer for Windows will be made, then probably I'll include OpenAL exe installer. And when real packages for Linux will be done, they will depend on OpenAL packages. For now, you have to install OpenAL yourself. This is uncomfortable for user, but this also means that user gets always latest OpenAL bugfixes from Creative, not some outdated OpenAL version included in my game.

[michalis]

Castle: Framerate slow, ran out of memory (and swapped memory), some textures missing (like the one for the huge wall in 1st level). No sound.

Low framerate and missing textures may be the result of large memory use (although missing textures shouldn't happen ever, so this may indicate problem in OpenGL driver).

And one other thing: version 0.6.1 (submitted for PGD last stage) requires almost 500 MB of memory (later version 0.6.3 reduces this to 280 MB, but this doesn't count for the competition...). Under Windows these requirements are slightly lower (because NVidia drivers are better optimized under Windows...). And these numbers may vary depending on your OS/driver version.

The bottom line is: if we're talking about Windows system with 512 MB of memory, then make sure that you're running the game on a "clean" system --- no process running in the background actively holding some part of memory. (Same thing for Linux, actually, but on Linux programs are usually smarter and less demanding, so OS is more likely to swap *other processes* to clean memory for my game).

[michalis]

Some answers for my stage 6 comments:

Dean comment:

Had to chear as I couldn't find the sword on the first level.

Look for the sword item inside the grave (on the cemetary marked with large sword monument). Hint: you will need scroll of flying, so be sure to find it too. (Every other player who tested was able to found this sword, AFAIK )

Eric comments:

More comfortable display frequency setting, and less damage from mini-falls: these are 2 known things, will be fixed.

In windowed mode, the mouse is captured by the game (and the game window can lose focus, meaning it won't respond to keypresses f.i.).

For mouse looking, mouse cursor is hidden and it cannot leave the game window. That's the way mouse look must work. But the cursor is visible (and unlocked) when you enter game menu (Escape key), or switch to other window by alt+tab etc. However, I just saw one problem: when you switch (alt+tab) to other window, but the game window remains visible on the desktop, then the mouse is hidden when you mouse over the game window (even though the other window has focus). OK, it will be fixed. Temporary solution for you is just to exit to game menu before alt+tabbing, or not hovering with mouse cursor over the game window if you don't want to.

Loading times very slow, could be worth distributing/caching in precomputed files whatever is precomputed.

Loading time should be about 1 minute for version 0.6.1, assuming NVidia newest drivers. Be sure to have the required amount of memory, see my earlier post. And this is only for the first "New Game" call --- for subsequent level changing/restarting the game after death, loading times should be < 10 secs (as most things are already kept in memory).

There are not many things that can cached in files (normall vectors are right now computed on the fly, they could be recorded in VRML file --- but when profiling with gprof, it looked like it would save only about 10% of loading time; so no real gain...). Most of the "Loading ..." overhead is related to pushing things into OpenGL display lists, see my posts in "Stage 5 feedback" thread.

At one startup, I got an error about a ModeGL failure because it couldn't operate on a closed window.

There was a bug in 0.6.1 version (fixed in 0.6.3): if a bug occured elsewhere, the proper error message could be "hidden" by error message about "ModeGL cannot be called ...". In other words: something went wrong, but this is not related to ModeGL Can you reproduce this ? By "at startup" do you mean that it occured right after running the game (not e.g. at the loading of "New Game") ?

[McCLaw]

[quote="Eric"]Here's a quick roundup of entry issues specific to my HTPC system

Specs: Sempron 2600+, 512 MB RAM, GeForce 6100 (64MB shared) 1360x768 (16/9 LCD TV), Realtek AC97 audio hooked to 5.1 hifi amplifier.

TortureTank: Tried adjusting res in the .ini, but setting ignored by startup menu. Framerate around 20 FPS. Tank movement were.. sliding, more snowboard-like than tank-like (physics effect ]

20 FPS :shock: :shock: :shock: I wonder if its not the shared memory of the GFX card.

I generally get 150 to 400 FPS on my GF 5600 128Mg running dual screens

What did you adjust the rez in the ini to?

[Eric]

Do you have latest drivers from nvidia.com installed ?

No, it has the drivers that worked well with the TV & DVD player, which is not the latest - it's an HTPC 1st after all - as the latest drivers had a glitch when coming out of hibernation.

I understand that on your other system with GeForce, framerate was good ?

Other system has 6800XT with 256MB and 2GB of main RAM, so it's a bit above average specs
The HTPC has a 6100, which is an integrated graphics chipset.

For OpenAL, I personnally am able to fix and find it, but for players and users at large, that may be a tougher proposition (though even personnally, not tracking OpenAL closely means I've no idea if the software OpenAL DLL I found was really a recent one, if you provided one, you would be able to make sure it worked well for all your game's needs).

Most of the "Loading ..." overhead is related to pushing things into OpenGL display lists, see my posts in "Stage 5 feedback" thread.

Ok. As other have pointed, you usually use display lists only for static geometry. For animated geometry, vertices and normals are usually interpolated on the fly and rendered directly, which allows to have many animation frames, skeletal animations, merged animations, etc. even on high polycount models without facing a huge memory consumption.
Display lists are also unlikely to perform very well when used in that fashion, nVidia drivers may not balk too much, but chances are your framerate is lower than what it could be.

Can you reproduce this ? By "at startup" do you mean that it occured right after running the game (not e.g. at the loading of "New Game") ?

Didn't happen again, and when it happened, I had just closed an instance and restarted another, so I'm unsure wether it was an error due to the previous instance not being completely terminated, or to the new instance that was just starting up.

[McCLaw]

Cool Dean has added his scores also

[Huehnerschaender]

The splash screen has a blueish border of 2-3 pixels at the right (most visible on the bottom 2/3, GF6800XT).
When fully zoomed in 1 pixels black gaps can become visible between terrain tiles (when zoomed out, the occurence is only visible around the turning/end road tiles).

These things are related to Antialiased textures. Don't know if it is a bug in Apshyre, but when textures are antialiased, the border pixels get "mixed" with memory "pixels", because they have no neighbour pixel in the texture. I already mentioned this several times on the Asphyre forums, but the only way to provide this yet is to "cut" the border pixels of the textures when displaying, which would manipulate seemless textures in beeing not seemless anymore. So I have to live with it right now (or redesign my textures using only 264x264 used pixels).

Mission briefing background texture is pixellated ('nearest' filtering).

Quick and dirty solution for briefing screen. Just took a texture and stretched it to the background. Initially I had other plans with the briefing screen, but time got too short.

Music volume changes when you click on menu items to start a mission/exit (went very loud once while it was on the hifi chain), when changing the "effects" options, multiple musics start playing at the same time.

I know of the bug with multiple songs beeing played. Changing volume is new to me, but I will investigate it when I go on with Tanx.

You tank can "roll through" choppers that are taking off without bumping (that can't be hit by the ground gun, but not anti-air gun).

I didn't test collision with choppers, because you never know where they come down when destroyed. So I decided not to let them collide with player, otherwise when more than one heli gets down in the same area, they could provide player from going on.

Main menu music crackled then became silent.

Main music became silent? First time I hear of this. Is it just stopping or fading out volume?

Ingame music and sound FX were there, but at a low volume.

Hmmm.... The sound effects are mainly placed in 3D space with camera set as "spectator". So the more you zoom out, the farer away you are from the happenings, so the volume of sound effects gets lower. But the music never should change volume. I recognize very much issues with sound that you mention, others never have seen. Are you sure there is no problem with your sound card/drivers? I use BASS 2.2 in my game. How are other games working using BASS?

Framerate below 30 FPS

Yes, I know that on shared memory video cards, my game gets quite slow in FPS. I have to do some more optimizing on this later on.

hard to aim

?? ^^ You have to use the mouse ^^
just kidding. I know that it is hard to aim air targets. Never heard of hard aiming on ground, though. A little tip: Try disabling the camera rotation on movement in the options, this should help you with better aiming.

in mission 1, I ran out of ammo in the first "pen", and got stuck in there, collapsed wall blocks wouldn't allow to get out

Yes, the wall blocks can prevent you from going on when you run out of ammo. I will make them shootable with machine gun, too.
But for now: You can turn off debris collision in options.

I had to decide between colliding debris and letting the player drive through the blocks. the last looks very unrealistic, so I decided to let them collide with the player, but be able to be destroyed with weapons. For those who don't like this kind of "realism" I implemented the option to turn off the collision with wall blocks. But I will take a look at the "flying velocity of the blocks" and try to calculate them in a way that they can't prevent the player from going on.

Thanks for all the infos, comments and bugs!


btw. Now it is Dean who forgot me with the comments :lol:

Greetings,
Dirk