PSA (animation) files. - by massimilianogoi
New Horizon on 15/2/2009 at 23:10
Quote Posted by Beleg Cúthalion
I just fear that this goes out uncommented again and people use it as another anti-T3Ed argument... well, if there can be any more. :rolleyes:
Oh for goodness sake. It's not an anti-T3Ed argument. It's simple clarification. Does everything have to turn into a big defensive front? I'm just trying to help clear up the confusion. Jeez. Can someone not even say something true without it being taken as a slur against T3Ed?
Beleg Cúthalion on 16/2/2009 at 08:45
As long as things like (
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1821204#post1821204) this (by one of our most... differentiating grinches) go largely uncommented and form a gloomy legend by being repeated and built upon... as long as that's the case I don't think I can be paranoid enough. And this is not even much after all.
But since we're on it (and maybe these posts can be moved to a new thread, just in case there's one mod in this forum): What, left aside this light sensitivity, is bad about it? After all it was enough for a decent Thief environment in which you don't need a lot of lights and it still looked really good.
massimilianogoi on 16/2/2009 at 10:50
So, I succeeded to make Gamall a single step noise instead of double when it (or she) walks.
More: I've tried to use that weapon notes already present in its animations in a new one that was the copy of patrolA and succeeded: Gamall started to kill everyone even more bastardly than beforev haha, it (or she) didn't had neither to lift the hands to launch the projectile.
I'm feeling that I'm near to complete this robot.
Now we have to wait Shadowspawn, if he is able to convert the Thief 2 animations into 3dsmax.
Shadowspawn and Abru in first list in the thanks of my FM. :thumb:
New Horizon on 17/2/2009 at 00:15
Quote Posted by Beleg Cúthalion
But since we're on it (and maybe these posts can be moved to a new thread, just in case there's one mod in this forum): What, left aside this light sensitivity, is bad about it? After all it was enough for a decent Thief environment in which you don't need a lot of lights and it still looked really good.
I'm not debating how good it looks, it looks fine....that's a non issue. From a purely technical standpoint, it needed some serious optimization to run reasonably well on the low to mid range systems of the time, and to fit into the memory constraints of the XBOX architecture. Warren Spector himself said that they didn't optimize but probably should have. On my...at the time of T3....mid range system, T3 was barely playable on low settings but doom 3 flew for me on medium. Heck, even higher end systems choked on it at the time...that says a lot about the design right there.
With the power of todays computers, yes...you can do a lot more, but as I alluded to before...throwing more power at the engine doesn't erase the fact that it was and is an unoptimized resource hog. I do agree that it's pretty looking though.
str8g8 on 17/2/2009 at 12:47
Yes, the fact Flesh is unoptimized is well documented on here and elsewhere, but I think as time goes by it will become less of an issue because even a low end gaming machine nowadays will play T3 fine, which is I think what BG originally meant.
Anyway, good work on the animation notetrack stuff, it still amazes me what is coming out the community... :thumb:
New Horizon on 17/2/2009 at 21:06
Quote Posted by str8g8
....but I think as time goes by it will become less of an issue because even a low end gaming machine nowadays will play T3 fine, which is I think what BG originally meant.
lol Yes, I know that's what he meant...my point was that while this is true, it's just the infinite loop of throwing more power at something when it could have and should have been better optimized from the get go....but that point was misconstrued into something else. :) So, we've come full circle and are right back where it all started. haha
str8g8 on 20/2/2009 at 14:50
Well I guess I'm being defensive again :)
But I'm really trying to defend the developers, not the engine. It's unfair, even disingenuous, to compare TDS to Doom3, and say ISA "could have" or "should have" done more. Sure they could, if they'd been given another 6 months and another team of programmers.
Of all the games that get released, very few are particularly optimized to the extend of something like unreal or doom. These are made with one eye on the lucrative licensing deals and so that's were the money goes. In fact, Unreal Tournament is pretty much a tech demo for unreal engines.
In the real world of game development, it's not really worth the investment of time and money to optimize to the extent you suggest should be the default.
Most games are unoptimized resource hogs, you just don't notice it because they're working within established boundaries of current hardware. The reason TDS played like a dog is that it was really stretching what was possible at that point in the hardware cycle. (It was the first game I played with proper normal mapping, dynamic lighting). Basically they were reaching too far and they didn't have the budget to back it up.
But could a bigger budget really be justified? I don't know the numbers, but it's a fair bet that TDS didn't make a return - ISA closed soon after. Would an acceptable framerate have transformed the game into a massive hit and saved the studio? I doubt it. Without extra resources the only thing that could have saved the framerate would be to have scaled back the tech - this is what would usually happen, but in this case it was essential to the gameplay - how could you cut the dyanamic shadow casting?
Until you have been under the kind of pressure developers are, working round the clock, late nights and weekends, not seeing your kids, all to get something out the door on time and to budget ... you simply have no idea. ISA deserve a medal for shipping TDS, they certainly don't deserve the sniping that is routinely dished out on ttlg.
Judith on 20/2/2009 at 16:31
Quote:
But could a bigger budget really be justified? I don't know the numbers, but it's a fair bet that TDS didn't make a return - ISA closed soon after. Would an acceptable framerate have transformed the game into a massive hit and saved the studio? I doubt it. Without extra resources the only thing that could have saved the framerate would be to have scaled back the tech - this is what would usually happen, but in this case it was essential to the gameplay - how could you cut the dyanamic shadow casting?
Even if they had a budget for some R&D and the renderer code hadn't been a case closed, the overall outcome wouldn't have been much different IMO. Just compare T3ED with modern engines like UE 3.0, which uses both dynamic lights and lightmapped shadows. There aren't many realtime shadows in games like Gears of War or Unreal Tournament 3, they use prerendered shadows in most cases. Now look at the timeline, how many years have passed until both techniques were incorporated into the engine and became fairly optimized. There's no way the Ion team would have prepared such feature within one title developement cycle.
But again, one thing makes me wonder, why there's so much discussion about how bad is this engine, when we already found some effective workarounds and managed to employ the Flesh to do most things we want? And most of these discussions look more like a flamewars between T3ed users and some people from Darkmod team: me vs NH, Beleg vs NH, etc. All the same quarrels over and over again. :tsktsk:
On the other hand, I haven't noticed anyone from here poking around Darkmod forum, lurking for every occasion to point out every flaw of Doom 3 engine in any given topic, and it does have plenty too. Maybe they're not as... hmm... rudimentary as in case of TDS.
But I guess I already know the answer: "no, I just wanted to talk, jeez, you are oversensitive, jeez". :) Maybe it's high time someone started thinking about it as an obsession of some kind, and did something about it? ;)
Judith on 20/2/2009 at 16:53
Ah, remains of a good old prefab/character browser from UE 2.5/2.x :) Not much of use since we have static mesh browser, still it could have bigger preview window. Oh, Abru suggested that such parameters as window sizes are written in T3ed.exe, I even had a version with bigger 3d mesh view from him. I'll see if I still have it. If you have some programming skills, you could try fiddling with some other values, maybe you could find some other functionalities we could benefit from :)
Btw. Convert to static mesh option was buggy even in classic UE 2.5, it was recommended to use external modelling package instead.
