Why not perspective projection?

[Guest Glen Coe]

@Wytter: What do you mean by "submit to berlios.de"? Check In the Sources? Or give someone the sources for testing?

 

@Leeloo: No doubt.

 

Glen Coe.

[mikeman]

The problem with that is that it requires people to buy new computers. I don't think EL should be the game that makes hardware vendors earn more money, Doom3 and every new version of Windows are already bad enough at forcing upgrades, that they get accused of having a secret agreement about wasting ressources just to make people buy new hardware.

 

About Doom3, definately not. It really does push the system to its limits. Anyway, I think comparing EL and Doom3 graphic-wise, or saying things like "EL shouldn't be the game that causes people to upgrade" is a little out of place for now. EL is *really* far from reaching the system to its limits(or even utilizing most of the resources). Since EL has so much room for optimizations, I don't see the reason why we shouldn't talk about all kinds of graphics features that should be added.

 

I've looked most of the graphics code, and it pretty much uses brute-force approaches for most features. It runs well, but is far from even a moderate optimization. Which is understandable, because of course the main concern is gameplay, and the general idea for graphics seems to be that if it works and runs in playable framerates, then it's ok. But this seems to be changing a bit, already Entropy has started an attempt to change the map format to a more efficient one.

Another example is shadowmapping, which is an up-to-date feature that is implemented currently in the game. The vast majority of the objects are static, and I think that the code does nothing to take advantage of that. We could design a system that caches shadowmaps, and updates them only if necessary, and not every frame.

Edited January 29, 2005 by mikeman

[crusadingknight]

@Wytter: What do you mean by "submit to berlios.de"? Check In the Sources? Or give someone the sources for testing?

 

@Leeloo: No doubt.

 

Glen Coe.

It means to submit the patch to the patches section. Erm, VC-6 _does_ have some diff + patch creation method, doesn't it? <_<

[Leeloo]

saying things like "EL shouldn't be the game that causes people to upgrade" is a little out of place for now.

It is not out of place. It may be because the game isn't optimized, but EL really has been the game that forced people to buy a new computer. I'm one of them, and if you look in help me forum, you'll see more that get told to get a new computer. Either they do it, or they give up on playing the game.

 

I definitely look forward to people optimizing the game, when you guys say it can be optimized a lot, I believe you. But I get mad when some people say let's waste some more ressources, because EL runs fast on the most expensive computer you can buy.

[Entropy]

The whole idea is to have "quality settings" in the game. If you have a crappy computer, then set the quality on low. If you have the most 1337 computer, set it on high. Most of the new features we added are not mandatory.

 

Besides, your comuter was old as hell, you needed an update

[Wytter]

@Wytter: What do you mean by "submit to berlios.de"? Check In the Sources? Or give someone the sources for testing?

Submit them to elc on berlios as patches. Read:

 

http://www.eternal-lands.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=10071

 

I don't know how to create diff-files in Windows however :-)

[Leeloo]

The whole idea is to have "quality settings" in the game. If you have a crappy computer, then set the quality on low. If you have the most 1337 computer, set it on high. Most of the new features we added are not mandatory.

 

Besides, your comuter was old as hell, you needed an update

There was never a setting for "more complex maps" And that computer ran everything else fine, for normal work it was even faster than the 2.6 GHz XP machine at work.

[crusadingknight]

I don't know how to create diff-files in Windows however :-)

Personally, I use diff -Naur, just like you.