Any model optimizations would probably greatly help the mod out overall. I get a stunning 30 FPS when looking at buildings, not to mention random massive hard drive access (usually isolated events, not constant, but it freezes the whole game when it happens). That frame rate compares to Oblivion in some of the more complex towns, w/o HDR or Bloom, of course, except that Oblivion looks much better and has about a billion more polys and God only knows how much AI processing.
I'm by no means bashing HornyRabbits version. In fact I do think it looks almost as good as the origional. (minus the texturing) And by no means did I ever say that optimization is not needed. I only ment that can not share in your experience of poor FPS, and therefore my opinion "may" be a bit more biased. Hey before I built my new comp. I tried playing Oblivion on a 2.4Ghz processor with 512mb of ram and a 9700 all-in-wonder gpu card. It wasn't fun I'll tell you that :p By all means if you can improve FPS without "seriously" degrading models or graphics. Please do so. The more players, the merrier. PS: By beautiful high-quality models I wasn't reffering to such buildings as the NF barracks. Just where the hell do they sleep in there? The rafters?
Maybe i should have started with barracks and radar, getting this custom turret to work properly ingame is huge learning curve for me. Spend all day to get it to work but no go. All these new thingies called bones and animations are so new to me :eek: Im not giving up tough, i'll keep on hitting my head to virtual tree..
How much detail has been put into the buildings? Because I have the hardest time when in buildings or even looking at a lot of them, my fps ends up dipping down to 10. If there are details that don't terribly matter, they should be removed too. Also, when I set the Model Quality to low, the inside of buildings fail to render. Perhaps if you can setup a low setting for the models as well? I don't run a high performance computer (quite the contrary, on a laptop), so it taxes my computer a lot.
These uneeded polygons are what is causeing horrid lag when near buildings. I'd rather have a coloured box with openings than slow down so much as combat in buildings is impossible, and just normal movement is almost painfully laggy that it takes a minute to get out of the buildings. I'd like to see this fixed before 1.08 is released, Iron sights can wait when someone has pin-pointed the answer to annoyingly slow rendering when near buildings. This is by far the worst quality of Empires that the Developement Team has control over.
go to the graphics options and set the model detail to medium, problem solved. if they made the low detail models roughtly useable the same would apply.
It would be nice if they were to release some of the worst offending models to the community so that we can optimise them to save the dev team the time. I've worked in game development for almost five years now as a modeller and believe me, optimisation is what it is all about. Making fantastic looking models at the lowest possible poly count. I know pretty much every trick in the book on this one. I'm sure there are quite a few modellers capable of doing this work in the community so it's time that we got to make the game better ourselves
Guess i'll have to abandon the idea to remake turret models. Cant even get turrets to work after decompile and compile without making any modifications. I have tried various settings in studiocompiler to decompile and compile, even tried to compile with guistudiomdl but no luck. If anyone has any tips or knowledge please let me know.
I did, and I still get extrem lag. Low doesn't help one bit and I loose the floors. But wouldn't makeing the models all flat surfaces, no details, just litteraly a box with doors, wouldn't that reduce the polygon count from X to...less than a 100? Just a good reskin and they'd look alot like they do now only wouldn't lag like an old person with a walker and make them much more stream-line? I think an example of this in the NF Barraks, it has struts sticking out of the walls on the inside, they can be walked into. With the current polygon count lagging the user, they'll be stuck on those if they hit a wall for a much longer time, remove those and you not only lessen the lag, but also safe guard vs. other lag or the annoying fight with the spawn camper(Circle Strife Bullet Dodgeing Battle, get stuck on the wall = death.).
Bit of update. I didnt manage to get turrets working but have spend all day figuring out how to remodel buildings model and just a minute ago i got decompiled nf_barracks to compile back to hl2 model. There was some syntax errors that decompiler generated wich caused almost me to drop this idea. In the progress i lost my original nf_barracks model, but i believe it was 7100+ polys on LOD 0, a bit of tweaking im now at 6978 so there's much work to do. *edit* Floor alone is made of 120 polygons, looks like im up for lots of connecting and tidius job of uv mapping it all */edit* Also there's 16 textures used on the barracks and im thinking that i'll drop those off too. HornyRabbit signing out.
There you go, last night i got the barracks model ingame. It was a bit of effort as with the decompiled .qc file it wouldnt compile so I had to modify it, this one has fewer LODs than original but i think that main model and 4 LODs should do fine. I've opened the most distant models and just gave them one texture to see how they look so top left looks a "bit" weird. I havent done any mesh modifications yet on the outsides. Only worked with the insides of barracks, there were tons of unnecessary polygons. So far i've gotten polycount on the main model(seen when really close or inside) down to 6140 from starting 7810. Changes havent done almost nothing to how it looks even inside but some things were moved so i could hide few polys behind to be deleted. There's still stuff to do. Interiors textures are misplaced as uv-mapping too a hit from my poly removal frenzy. I got the collision model screwed so its solid with no entry at this point.
Good work rabbit. Remember to remove all the double faces from the model too. I'd be interested in seeing a FPS comparison in game between the original and this model when they are up close and taking up a lot of the screen. Maybe test it with two of each on the map at once.
Well I cant help with double sided faces. They are all one sided in 3ds max but hl2 makes them double sided when using multiple textures on a single model. Im currently at 5312 polygons on closest view, so its about 2500 polygons less than original and im nowhere near completed. I got the hardest part done wich was definitely the interiors. I got some ingame shots of the interiors here There's some stretching on some of the textures but i fixed those afterwards. For comparison shots i'd need to reinstall empires from scratch as for some reason my barracks backup got corrupted and wont work anymore
I'm sure someone can send you the barracks model file. If noone has in a couple of hours I will when I get home.
:D :D :D :D Okies, i got a working version uploaded to HERE It was a quick test as im in a rush here, so you'll do the rest. Please test and be sure you take a backup of original one. *Rabbit Runs*
