Hmm, Playing thru it today in swars, and got this in-game error.

-Movement can be assigned to level targets only (no tanks)

Never appeared untill recently and as far as I know, none of my
tanks are given boid movement properties.

Retried a few times, and it occured when a boid or turret was damaged
and dropped to it's death, but not 100% of the time.

edit:
Also noticed that it occurs playing local solo, connected online, or even
if just bots alone are playing on the server. Both server and clients crash
out.
And yes.. setting them all to no-falling prevents the error, but I still
thought I should tell you. (and turrets look dumb when they float..)

k..Rebuilt with today's update, diddn't check to see if that post above
was looked into..

Diddn't get very far into the first map i tried, really.. i was a bit freaked out.

Let me show you this Tattoine map from Swars, it's full of 15 targets
and about as many large buildings / charactors across the whole map..

Tell me how many you can count from this slightly zoomed out view.

edit huge pic clipped (been repaired - somewhat)

How many do you see close up?

V42 view http://advguild.myftp.org/image/screenshot-1212453980-0.jpg
same view in V41 http://advguild.myftp.org/image/screenshot-1212519190-0.jpg

I see all items if I happen to swing right up to them..

I think the culling may a tad too short. If the land were foggy, I could
see why it may fade out. But for the type of maps in Swars, any culling
of the on-field or surrounding items, make's the whole map lose it's effect.

There is no noticable drop in the players speed on the swars maps, rather
the opposite. While playing on your default maps I commonly get 20-25
fps with water cut to only 'simple'. On nearly every Swars map except 1, I
get 50-65fps. And I've heard the same reports from every player that
has entered it. The only one that lags them, has water on it.

If you still need to have this short of object culling, would it be possible
to add a landscape tag to turn it off per map?

Rev 68. thank-you a ton, i missed my pretty buildings.

What types of maps are you using to test out the map object handling, I
don't remember any default maps besides denali having anything other
than trees?

I'm going to keep hosting the Swars files on this version, so that another
dev may perhaps someday see how your changes actually look.

From what we've got in there so far, I still feel that only the Water is
the hardest on processing. It looks beautifull, don't get me wrong..
But when many players have to turn it off, or decrease it just to play
smooth, it's a bit of a let-down on the hard effort of making it.

I think that's how those shooter games can get so much speed. They
don't always go super on detail, but keep the game-play clean enough
that players aren't stopping long enough to mind.

Since my pc isn't the best, I try to design the maps etc so that it runs fair
for me. That way, anyone with a better pc will see it much smoother.

I love S3d mainly for it's epic history, rebuilt in the way that I always
wished it was. The fact that we can twist it into new and unique forms
is a bonus.

Thanks Thrax,

I've not really got into the testing phase yet but I mostly construct new maps containing many of the items/aspects that I want to test.



That would be great, thanks. It's a shame it is copyrighted I can't really move it into the "offical" release.



Water is next for optimization. Lets see what we can do.



Thanks for your continuing support. I know I am not updating it that fast at the moment. But hopefully the time taken to improve the existing before adding more will be welcomed.

Update it as fast as you like gavin. It will give us time to see the changes. When you update a lot fast we miss some of the finer points.

No.. I don't think Swars would work well as part of a default install.
Both for the rights issue, and that it's worked on and updated too
often(sometimes daily) for a one-shot release.

As for adding more.. not really high-need. Making it stable and smooth
will help more players stay playing than fancy doo-dads.

Even with what we have now, I'm continuously pushing the limits and
discovering new ways to create. Multi-Turn weapons aren't impossible,
and I can already make the target tank do thing's against it's will; such
as teleport away, drive into the ocean, or dance n sing..

What we do need, tho.. is a few more of these dormant dev's to pick
up a copy and play a few rounds.

by dormant dev... do you mean me? or am I just a doorMAT dev?

After several months of market cycles in v41, I've been trying to find
a balance of up's and downs..
But I still can't seem to get it equal on both sides. Either it keeps
climbing over time.. not lowering as much, or dropping faster that
it raises..

I know the current market lowers and raises in only whole's, and I
think that may be why I can't sort it out cleanly.

The biggest factor is how many market-recorded items the mod has;
my default-mod freemarket-none-xx.xml has only 41, Swars has 56,
and merge has over 175..
(I also think there's something funny there.. since there's often a
discrepancy between buyable items, and market-records.)

Since the lowering calculation splits it into a fraction by how many
items match, it may not be registering too small of changes..
Maybe we could try setting the free-market file to save the
values up to 2 decimals.. 0.01 so that it can add up the values
without losing the leftovers. It only shows on the default buy-list in
10's anyway, any market fractions would be masked.

I got a question about the recent water changes.

Is there a visual difference to it now? Mine looks different.

He added a switch for Simple-water Shaders.
Since I really can't tell a visual diference(not an artistic
detail guy..), I went by performance.

Did a test of water combinations on my normal hosting system.

default-mod:
Full + extras 15-20fps
Full+ with s-shader 15-20fps
Simple + extras 15-20fps
Simple+ with s-shader 18-22fps
Full - extras 20-25fps
Simple - extras 25-30fps
No-water 25-30fps

Swars Tattoine 40-45fps

Unless there's a giant smoke-bomb or a hairy dog-fight going on, water
itself is still the largest drain of fps.

Did some testing tonight and its looking good.

Caverns certainly look different.

Example of perspective error in object culling.

Correct-View of Hanger, blasted floor-grid, and Encasing walls.





Few degrees to the side, and Features vanish.

I'm hoping the changes for v42 will fix that, it keeps the fractions in the file (and in memory) and just rounds them for the screen.



Only if you switch on the simple shaders option, other than that can't think of any.



I guess that depends on the system, I find trees to be the worst issue on mine. If you look at your stats for no-water and Tattoine there is still a big difference, must be something else.

StateTimeLogging gives a good impression of where all the time is going.
e.g. StateTimeLogging=100 in the console (logs every 100 frames).



I'll have a look at it, but it will be caused by large objects being used on the maps. The object culling is now linked to the landscape blocks (32x32), when a block is culled the objects are also culled. However objects that span mutliple blocks won't get culled correctly. To be more efficient the large objects could be broken into many smaller ones (when making the map), allowing less to be drawn when needed.