decrease quality at high distances

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catsoup

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I don't know if it's already done or not, but i tend to believe that it's not done, because even when I see two dozens of riders at the very horizon the framerate drops down. The idea is to use primitive polygon models and fewer animations for a thing far away (in battles) as it is done in some games. (f.e. rome:TW; TES3; NFS; GTA:VC/SA etc.)
 
When I have 2 dozen riders on the horizon, frame rates are still above the 50 - 60 mark...

Are you running the game on a 386? :wink:

My hardware is a 2.3g celeron with 1 gig of ram and a raedon 9600 pro...
Nothing flash by todays standards... One thing I can suggest to people with 512 ram, boost it to a gig.. I found it was the cheapest and most effective speed boost I noticed...
 
The biggest problem i noticed with the fps on M&B is that it starts to feel very laggy around 50 or so. And i can tell whenever it drops below 80ish. I never really noticed it before, until i was playing morrowind the other day, and realized that that game ran almost perfectly smooth at 40fps, and even fairly smooth at 20...but on M&B 20 fps is nearly unplayable because it becomes so choppy. I'm not sure why this is though, it doesn't make any sense, but M&B is certainly much more fps sensitive than most games unfortunately. However, some fps boosting features really should be included. Units behind an obstruction should take just as much processing power as units behind you for instance. And a few more ingame video options wouldn't hurt either.
 
60FPS? Oi dats nossin to me, slyloki. I've gotta five IBM supercomputers with 3 terrabyte of ram and about my thirty 5ghz cpus... I better stay silent.
Okay, seriously I've got a geforce 5thousand and somethin and an athlon 2200 and half-of-a-gig of ram. And okay, once i'll update to 1000, what will I do being approached by 4 dozens of riders? I've noticed that they munch as much frames being far (& fighting) as being close, and that could/should be fixed. By the way, what operating system are you using? Since I switched to XP many games got slower. Perhaps that's the problem.
 
I tend to agree, but the battlefields aren't that big, enemies close up on you pretty quick. You'd probably get worse lag from the system swapping the models out than you'd save.

::edit:: for the record, I have basically the same system as Slyloki, 512 ram, 2.something ghz athalon, radeon 9600. The only time I lag is when I get a fountain of blood in the face.
 
Am running XP catsoup... I couldn't say if games would run slower or not on it, I don't really have anything to compare it to...
I'm not a tweekgeek either so I havn't spend weeks trying to squeeze every last bit from my system either...
The main thing I did was spend a few days before buying it on checking through websites, magazines and forums for what people considered good stable compatible hardware which is nicely clockable (and upgradable cheaply)...
Not that I have clocked it, my theory was that if it was stable clocked, then in default configuration it should be rock solid.. (a theory thats almost worked)

So I ended up with an Abit IS7 mobo 800MHz FSB with 1 gig dual channel ram, celly 2.3c and the ATI raedon 9600 pro..
The other good thing about this mobo was that there were some reports that the onboard 10/100 lan was sometimes a gigabit port, which I can happily confirm.. :smile:

This is running quite happily at 1280x1024 on most modern games without lag, though there is the odd hog that needs to be switched down if I want all the bells and whistles..

The mobo can take a proper P4, but so far I havn't been able to justify the expense or had the need to...

Back to topic, I think Nairgorn is right in that swapping out models given the scale of things would not give a good enough return for the effort required...
 
Slyloki said:
When I have 2 dozen riders on the horizon, frame rates are still above the 50 - 60 mark...

Are you running the game on a 386? :wink:

My hardware is a 2.3g celeron with 1 gig of ram and a raedon 9600 pro...
Nothing flash by todays standards... One thing I can suggest to people with 512 ram, boost it to a gig.. I found it was the cheapest and most effective speed boost I noticed...
!!!!!!!
i mean, DUH!, of course it wont slow down with THAT!
and an 386 doesnt mean anything...
 
and forgot...
yeah, lowering polys when distance is far away would help a great deal
since the program has to load the polys, scale them so you see it, and load it on the map...
 
kroc said:
and an 386 doesnt mean anything...
So I suppose I imagined reading about an Intel processor called the 386... Anyways, I don't think this game should reduce detail at distance because that would totaly nerf bow/crossbow sniping, which is hard enough as it is.
 
at far away distance you dont see the whole polyobject the way it is anyway, so it wont change as much on how you see it....
 
?!?!?!?!?
Why reducing poly?
You could simply put low detailed textures at long distance to reduce the graphic card's job(and is realistic too, from far away the human eye can't distinguish things clearly).
Reducing poly would make the ppl move kinda wierd when zooming in...
Well, that's just my guess. =D
Cya
 
compfreak said:
kroc said:
and an 386 doesnt mean anything...
So I suppose I imagined reading about an Intel processor called the 386...
What, so I have an imaginary comp sitting in the room I'm right now? Heck, I once put it back together just to play some Lands of Lore... fun game, that.

LODing is a nice idea. Reducing textures/polycount will not show if done correctly... Doing that CORRECTLY, however, is not that easy. Dynamic LOD tends to create vibrating objects (Sacrifice, Black & White), but I think LODing was pretty nicely done in Operation Flashpoint.
 
LOD would definitely be nice, especially with the bigger battles mod. There's no reason to have all those polies when the enemy is just a speck in the distance. And I wonder, does the game also take into consideration terrain blocking your view of enemies? Or does it draw everyone even if you can't see them?

LOD is pretty standard in games nowadays, and I would like the game to be as optimized as possible. I like my FPS.
 
Heck, you could even have units off in the distance become 2D sprites as in the Total War series. If done properly you wouldn't be able to see the difference.
 
The game already uses low-res textures for far-away objects. It's a standard technique called mipmapping and is supported by DirectX.

About Polygonal LOD; I don't think M&B would benefit much from polygonal LOD as well. The scale variation in Mount&Blade is much less than that in Rome:Total War or Black&White. So it wouldn't improve framerate that drastically.

Not drawing NPCs that are blocked by the terrain is another matter. That's in my Todo list and I'll work on it when I have the opportunity.

Thanks to everyone for suggestions.
 
armagan said:
About Polygonal LOD; I don't think M&B would benefit much from polygonal LOD as well. The scale variation in Mount&Blade is much less than that in Rome:Total War or Black&White. So it wouldn't improve framerate that drastically.

I have a really hard time believing it wouldn't make a big difference in many situations..? I tend to experience serious drops in framrate mostly when both me and my enemy have a large number of mounted troops. Worst case scenario: A knight-only army vs dark knights, on a flat battlefield, so they'll pretty much all be in view all the time. If there were several Levels Of Detail on the character models, you should, in many situations, be able to shave off thousands of polygons in a typical scene from such a battle.

I understand if it's not a priority, what with coding it and making LODs of all the models and all, and I'd probably even applaud applying your time and effort elsewhere, but nevertheless I find it hard to believe that it wouldn't make a big difference in some situations, and a noticable difference in most battles.
 
I get tons of lag when there are a lot of far away enemies as well. I bet if just the facial features were toned down at a distance it would help a lot, since you can barely see faces until up close anyway.

I still think LOD would be useful. I don't know how much work it takes though, so I understand if it's low on the priority list.
 
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