Graphics and scenes Problems/Feedback/Suggestions

[semipr0]

So I've been playing Floris Expanded for awhile and largely I have the system to handle it.

Speccy data in spoiler:

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Operating System
         MS Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit SP1
      CPU
         Intel Core i7 960  @ 3.20GHz   46 °C
         Bloomfield 45nm Technology
      RAM
         8.00 GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 534MHz (8-8-8-20)
      Motherboard
         ASUSTeK Computer INC. P6X58-E PRO (LGA1366)   35 °C
      Graphics
         PX2710MW (1920x1080@60Hz)
         NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti
         NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti
      Hard Drives
         488GB Seagate ST3500320AS ATA Device (SATA)   29 °C
      Optical Drives
         No optical disk drives detected
      Audio
         NVIDIA High Definition Audio

So anyways that's more than enough computer to handle Warband, but I gotta admit, Floris Expanded forces me after awhile to start deactivating graphics options simply to stop losing frames. And that shouldn't even happen cause my Skyrim installation has over 19.4GB of mod data associated with it and it runs at 300FPS.

Granted the Warband Engine isn't half as optimized as Bethesda's reworked Gamebyro Creation Engine is, but still....its Warband for the love of god.

Anyways I was looking through the assets to see where the issues might lie, being a developer and texture artist myself I noticed that almost every single DXT map in use was a DXT5 Interpolated Alpha at 1024x1024 dimensions.

This is simply not even required for Warband and Floris when fully loaded, sitting on the travel map, is running 1.6GB of physical memory on my system....that's the same load Skyrim puts on my computer and, to be frank Warband is never going to look like Skyrim.

A lot of these DXT maps could very easily use DXT1 or DXT3 formats and to be honest I can't logically even get my head around the use of 1024x1024 resolutions when the detail in Warband is never going to get much better than a 512x512 resolution could provide anyways.

Anyways just some optimization thoughts. I like the Expanded version, I like the thought that's gone into reworking sco's and adding new depth to the scenes and all that...but...seriously, theres no reason for Floris Expanded to be pushing 1.6GB of physical memory at the travel map screen, you're barely gaining any significant increase in detail for twice the memory usage.

Anyways just my thoughts on the matter. Take them as you will.

[semipr0]

BTW not to complain without a solution but you might try DDSOpt as an option for mass method of reducing DXT file size.

I'm currently experimenting with it after having backed up the primary Expanded texture folder. Will report back with results.

I'm mass converting the files to 1:1 lossless compression, but reducing dimensions to 512x512 for now, will experiment with dropping down to DXT3 after I make sure this doesn't cause Floris to explode.

EDIT: After optimization pass, the Texture resources come down from 1.47GB to 580 MB, I am going to spend the next few hours inspecting items and .sco's for any expressly noticeable loss of detail

[semipr0]

Marked drop in physical memory usage, down from 1.6GB to around 900MB, not too bad an improvement.

There are some optimization errors in regards to the DXT Alpha's for some of the scene trees on battlefields and castle scenes I'm going to isolate which one cause it seems to be the same one in each scene I've checked out

Also a few of the Floris specific backscreen images have some text and image degradation, notably the player creation menu and the Lord Holdings background image (which obviously doesn't appreciate the mass conversion), and looks like banners would benefit from staying at a 1024 resolution just because they're small enough already and tightly packed.

Armor and weapon items look fine.

Only major issue I'm seeing here is the bump maps for buildings don't seem to have taken well during the conversion so I'll dink around with the compression settings and get them a little less lossy (oddly they became extremely lossy using loseless conversion...but an answer will provide itself soon enough) so some parts of castle scenes look a little less stellar than I'd have hoped for, though village scenes look fine...seems like the bumps in use for castle walls were extremely detailed and sharp and didn't survive the conversion with their MIPs intact. Though now that I think about it generating new MIPs and LODs would probably be more favorable than a mass conversion of this type.

Anyways, performance did improve...heavily, but seems like its a case of deciding what textures can use smaller resolutions and which ones should not be batch converted.

[Hanakoganei]

Haha yeah I noticed the same thing. I'm not a developer but I've been playing modded games for many years, and some of the problems with non-professionally made textures like those used in mods is this. Bad sizes or compression styles. I used a similar software to fix the texture problems and it's improved loading times and reduced microstutter when moving in range or turning to look at the offending textures, though my framerate was already high to begin with for me to notice an improvement with my own eyes.

[Duh]

These things should be disccused in the Graphics department sticky (simply so that the right people catch your comment). Believe it or not, wingcutangel did actually already go over many (if not all) of the textures and optimized things by removing redundant alpha channels (? not that i know what that means ). He is also a professional graphics developer so have no fear of speaking in tongues, he will understand.

Owe and if you do get a satisfactory result from your experiments, you are more than welcome to upload and share it with everyone. Be assured that we will check it out and use it if the team likes it. But providing it for everyone early on would help in catching rare mistakes/bugs before we bring out 2.6 with it.

I really appreciate the effort and input

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Just a little info on the general matter - Up until recently (when wingcut joined), we didnt have a single person experienced in graphics on the team, all of us are mainly coders, which is a good thing since often mods suffer from to few of them, but its bad because we cant do much except use open source models/textures. At the point when wingcut joined Floris was already under development for over a year, so you can imagine the workload of things that were and still are sitting in the graphics department.

[Hanakoganei]

Yup I posted something earlier about some of the major offenders.

[wingcutangel]

Great finds with the texture sizes, there is a lot of textures in Floris so catching all the problems is quite hard.
As to texture size I would not indiscriminately downgrade them to 512 as for me there is a difference in quality, especialy for normal maps. What I'm working on though is optimizing maps that waste texture space.
I've also already changed the file format from dx5 to dx3 or dx1 where possible. For example green normal maps need to be dx5 as they use a blended alpha, its how Gutekfiutek created them and I'll leave them this way for now. If I missed anything let me know eighter here or via a PM.
There is a huge ammount of things that can be changed and optimized for future releases and they range from quick and easy fixes to even recreating and repainting whole textures. I'm slowly working my way through those changes but it will take time. Any additional info or ideas are more than welcome and will help to speed things up.

[Hanakoganei]

You guys probably already noticed this but I'll mention it anyway. Pretty much all of the colored armors (gambesons and tabards) for Swadia have the wrong LOD. They flash in various colors depending on their distance to the viewer.

Many of the armors are using the male versions on female bodies instead of the female ones. The ones that are most obvious are the Vaegir ones (everything except the ar_vae_t5_lamellar_*, ar_vae_t6_cuirbouilli_*, and the ar_vae_t5_studded_a, which seem to be using the right models) and the Sarranid armors (I think all of them, but I haven't really seen them all in-game yet).

It also seems that itm_he_rho_t1_noble_* appears on the floor at the character's feet, leaving the character bald while viewing the character via inventory/shop screens. I gave it to a custom troop so I'm not entirely sure what happens in scenes, but it may be limited to the inventory screen.

I'll try to test some more using the cheat item shop and make a list of some of the messed up ones.

[Kleofas]

Gameplay version - Uxhal

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The gate is not there, but it is there physically - I can walk through only between the guards.

[semipr0]

You guys probably already noticed this but I'll mention it anyway. Pretty much all of the colored armors (gambesons and tabards) for Swadia have the wrong LOD. They flash in various colors depending on their distance to the viewer.

Many of the armors are using the male versions on female bodies instead of the female ones. The ones that are most obvious are the Vaegir ones (everything except the ar_vae_t5_lamellar_*, ar_vae_t6_cuirbouilli_*, and the ar_vae_t5_studded_a, which seem to be using the right models) and the Sarranid armors (I think all of them, but I haven't really seen them all in-game yet).

It also seems that itm_he_rho_t1_noble_* appears on the floor at the character's feet, leaving the character bald while viewing the character via inventory/shop screens. I gave it to a custom troop so I'm not entirely sure what happens in scenes, but it may be limited to the inventory screen.

I'll try to test some more using the cheat item shop and make a list of some of the messed up ones.

Its not just the LOD that is the problem, these Vaegir armors also seem to have an inverted normal map in my Expanded install, along with several of the Mercenary female armors which gives them a very odd light reflection that makes them look as if they're encased in shrink wrap from the top down. Enough of these armors on a large battlefield will cause some serious frame rate issues on my system...which isn't exactly built to drop frames at all.

[PurpleInfinity]

Hi guys,
just noticed that the attackers in Jamiche Castle create a bottleneck on the siege tower :

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It was not that much of a problem during the first waves, but they now come in pairs from time to time.
That's on extended, directx9 (if that changes anything).
And great mod, by the way.

[MightyRavenDark]

How about the helmets effectively making characters bald, including King Ragnar's crown? To me it just looks really ugly to put a helmet on that doesn't cover your entire neck region because the blaring baldness looks so unnatural.

[Caba`drin]

How about the helmets effectively making characters bald, including King Ragnar's crown? To me it just looks really ugly to put a helmet on that doesn't cover your entire neck region because the blaring baldness looks so unnatural.

Fire up Morgh's Tools and find the crowns/helmets and remove the flag itp_covers_hair. Save, reload game. You'll notice the clipping that is our alternative (without fully remaking the crowns/helmets)

[Luthian]

I was told that it might be a good idea to let you know that the chests for most of the Strange Armor set are not in the game. I think it has something to do with the layout changes of some of the towns, wherein the chests were deleted. The only chest you can actually get without using cheats is the one containing the armor and shortsword. I had to acquire the others pieces by enabling the cheat menu and buying them from it.

[oh_no]

So I was playing earlier and ended up luring a large bandit force into an entrenched position.  The scene I got for making my camp in Khergit territory, though visually appealing, ended up being a broken mess once the enemy attacked.  Your camp is located atop a small plateau sealed off on one side by a large number of wooden stakes which forces the enemy to come up a small path.  The problem is that the path is so close to the side that nothing to reasonably fit through, and the AI largely avoids it and ends up getting caught all over the wooden stakes and sits there while you fill them up with arrows.  A few make it up the path overtime, but the vast majority just get themselves more and more stuck and cluster together.

Image album: http://imgur.com/a/r0qei#0

A better alternative may be to increase the distance of the stakes from the camp and create an actual usable path leading up the camp on the side, or perhaps you could recreate the whole thing and have a natural ramp lead up an elevated camp site protected from all other approaches by elevation alone.  Entrenching could add spikes to the ramp, forcing the AI to have to deviate to the side to successfully enter the camp.