Flux on 17/1/2008 at 21:42
So I went into a shameless copy+pasting spree and combined these three levels into one. At some point I thought my comp will never respond to anymore mouse input ever again, but eventually I made it through.:p
The good thing is I'm getting reasonable framerates even from editor play(20-30). I'm curious how it'll play on other systems. All meshes, navmesh volumes and lights are intact. All aitag volumes are deleted. Since I used one generic playerstart, most of the scripts on ai won't fire. I left the rest of the ai actors & objects & loot, so expect some quirks around. Though I saw some guards in conversation. I just added narrow passages to intersections. Definitely, further optimization is needed around the intersection areas.
Maybe someone will want to make a fresh new mission with this or use it as hub to their other missions. Sure I'll enjoy playing it as it really takes a long way from the ship in the docks to stonemarket.;) I made the connection according to the metal plaques.
my user ini as follows; not big numbers for vertex pools needed.
DynamicVertexPool=6291456
StaticVertexPool=4545728
StaticShadowVertexPool=5242880
Here is the download link.
(
http://thief.bittersense.com/citycomb.unr) http://thief.bittersense.com/citycomb.unr
Lambda on 18/1/2008 at 02:42
Sounds like fun, but can the AI levels be played? (i.e. Easy, Medium, Hard, etc?) I fail at stealth, and would prefer to explore the city without the guards/citizens constantly harassing me :sweat:
Beleg Cúthalion on 18/1/2008 at 12:11
This is MY MAN to glue the Cradle together! :sly: And all the other levels. And then we make the enforcers invisible (for which a solution was found iirc). And then we...ah, nevermind, but the single missions glued together would improve gameplay a lot I think (especially in the Cradle), plus, it should be more simple than creating a whole city.
PS: Not less than about 35 fps (GeForce 7900 GS Ultima, 1024MB RAM, AMD 64 4000+)
Flux on 18/1/2008 at 21:48
Here, the combined cradle. This was easier to merge, it's obvious that it was designed as whole then cut into two. (How many times did we curse consoles on this forum?)
(
http://thief.bittersense.com/cradlecombined.unr) http://thief.bittersense.com/cradlecombined.unr
Quote:
Sounds like fun, but can the AI levels be played? (i.e. Easy, Medium, Hard, etc?) I fail at stealth, and would prefer to explore the city without the guards/citizens constantly harassing me
I don't think so, I made this thinking that someone will want to create a whole new fresh mission in the city section or use it as a gateway hub to other levels. Besides this is unr file, so you need the editor to run.
Beleg Cúthalion on 18/1/2008 at 22:49
I made a little (
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCDA7QMotFk) video from the City sections, please tell me if there is something wrong with it. I made it primarily for the German community, but if you like...
After the second loading T3Ed crashed with a Viktoria error (pool limits I guess, but it worked the first time), so I'll have a look at the higher user.ini values. The puppets were stranger than usual and the guy with the paintings could not follow me into the Outer Cradle which was a pity because it would have been a cool video, too. I wanted to check the navmesh but than the error came and I put it away for this night. I can also imagine that if all the textures and smeshes are changed with the scripts it could be a lot of work to adjust these things. Anyway, great job and thanks a lot! :thumb:
Flux on 19/1/2008 at 00:47
Well that looks very nice.:thumb: The framerates are very reasonable. I think this must be a very big level, compared what I've seen recently in a pc game where there so many truly dynamic lights with all those torch lights around etc...and it's very detailed. I wonder how it would look like without all those compressed textures.
Beleg Cúthalion on 19/1/2008 at 08:35
I have John's textures all the time. 38 fps for a fully-detailed scenery seems reasonable for me. I once had this rate in my little FM in scenes where there was just one light and an added brush or something and I couldn't explain it, but after setting all surfaces to don't-cast-shadows, I'm up to 75 again in every place.
Concerning the details, I really think TDS has more stuff than many new computer games. The screenshots of Oblivion I've seen and also the towns of Dark Messiah, which I've played myself, look not only somehow cute, but also lack the ammount of trims, beams and all the things you can put onto houses in TDS. Or it least it apperas to me so.
Ziemanskye on 19/1/2008 at 12:47
Banging the areas together shouldn't affect performance that much, vertex pools and extra AI effects aside, unless it's straight through where the two maps meet (which we were told is often not the case).
The areas were designed to meet performance requirements of some form after all.
As for the boast about 35fps, well, you are rather over the odds on what the game wants, so it's no surpise it's running well for you. Using the ingame couter (and so the editor *.exe) I tend to get between 6 and 8 fps for the OMs, so something like this would probably run too slow to be playable on my system (much like a lot of the FMs currently available), but it is heartening news for all those people who keep complaining the area sizes are too small.
Judith on 19/1/2008 at 15:21
38 fps on a modern PC is a massive framerate drop. Game should maintain the upper limit of your monitor refresh rate (e.g. 75 fps) most of the time. If it happens ocasionally - fine, but when it becomes permament, it means an unplayable mission for others with less powerful rigs. Well, at least that's something I practice while testing my FM's ;)
New Horizon on 19/1/2008 at 16:39
Finally, the way the missions were meant to be. :)
If the levels get stitched together, a patch could be made to update an original installation.
It should be fairly easy to create a patch differential. I can help walk someone through it if needed.
To keep it small, the person doing it would need to have two fresh installations on their hard drive. No updated textures should be installed in either, as they would get packaged in the diff patch. The only changes should be to maps, scripts, etc...whatever it takes to get the maps functional.
Take a program like the free Patch Wise, and use it to compare the original installation against the altered one. Poof, it will spit out a patch that only contains the differences. Should compress fairly small.
