Month: April 2016

8952: 1st half of update landed

Posted onAuthorMenne Kamminga3 Comments

Hi!

Engine update 8952 is up.

This is the 1st released version with:

  • New OpenGL  renderer backend! (speeeed) :)
  • Speedy particles (100.000 should not be a problem now…)
  • New models in new format (some animation still need tweaking/fixes)
  • Network protocol updates, errors with out of sync moves are prevented now.

I am still working out some kinks, so it is not 100% ready yet, more updates to follow!

Known issues:

  • Some video cards (pre-2010 computers…) may require a driver update to keep working… no new hardware needs to be bought though! :)
  • A lot of the new promised speed seems lost for the windows version: reason: something weird is happening in the GUI code. (Working on it!)
  • Not all models have been converted, the engine is complaining about that on the console.
  • Some animations have been incorrectly converted/named: will fix!
  • You may get “Division by zero” crashes. this is due to some LGS script dividing by zero!

In case you were wondering…

Posted onAuthorMenne Kamminga1 Comment

The 13 MB update is a preparation for what is coming… but it is not yet the new update i am working on!

Just in case you were wondering what is taking so long: converting 83 models takes time… Why convert? Check out these screenshots:

shot88 shot89

  • The 1st screenie… the engine is rendering @ 200 FPS… stable too… judging from the graph… this is new models… thought up in 2004. Implemented by myself in 2015
  • The 2nd screenie… the engine is rendering @ 120 FPS… also pretty stable… but every onscreen model takes a couple of milliseconds to render…. This is the old model format… thought up in 1998…

 

For 4 player games.. the difference is even bigger!

 

So… be patient… speed is coming! :D

Mother of all updates! :)

Posted onAuthorMenne Kamminga4 Comments

Hi folks!

All these sleepless nights caring for my little boy bring a lot of ideas.

I have been working on the next update of the game engine:

These are things i have done so far:

  • The renderer is now completely OpenGL “Core profile”, no more deprecated (old) functionality! (And perhaps in future: android support?)
  • Fixed a lot of stutters in the rendering, game feels a lot smoother now.
  • Many more frames per second…
  • Lower cost to do particles…. 2000 particles were a lot for the previous version…. tested to 100.000 particles with the next! :D
  • New network protocol features to make network play smoother.

This is what i am still working on:

  • discovered that the old models (MDL) render very very slow… more then 50% of CPU is wasted on this: so i am converting old models to new models.
  • Tuning and testing of all the new code… it’s a big update… so a lot of testing!

 

Greetz,

 

Menne