Fix the engine please...

[PersianPaladin]

I played the game yesterday when i had a NORMAL army amount of 22 recruits facing a 51 manned Vaegir army. The total result was 71 units on a battlefield. Now, given the fact that they are all low-poly and i have an ATHLON 64 3400+ with 1 GIG of memory and a X800 PRO graphics card...it should NOT reduce to 11 FPS....

What on earth is going on?

 

[svart]

I would assume no current Depth of field, or hidden polygons un-rendering which are present in popular games.
Although programmingwise ten 100 polygons characters would render slower than one 1000 polygon character, the fps still shouldn't hit 10 on our highend system (got a 6800gt here)

I gotta admit the game handles low fps better than many commercial engines i know, in 10fps the game is still playable, unlike many engines i know.

 

[mfberg]

To make the game a little faster you can disable dead bodies, reduce your detail level in the configure file (if it is 50, then try 20). Or make it easier by reducing battle size to 40 max (the max before the large battles mod) or even 14 (the minimum in the unmodded game).

mfberg

 

[Volkier]

Maybe check your graphics settings? Sometimes people (including myself) forget to off fored anti-aliasing and filtering which lags the game up..
And isn't there a scroll-bar on how many units you are able to have on the battlefield at any one time? Set it to lower, so they come in waves, and you wouldn't have any problems..

 

[quixotecoyote]

I'm assuming you've alreaedy checked your drivers and hardware and they're working fine on other games.

 

[Juno]

Heh, my specs are worse than yours and i still get 17fps I suggest as mentioned, to update all drivers.

 

[Skyrage]

Well, all in all, it's likely that the game engine needs some major tweaking cause it's clearly not taking full advantage of hardware nor does it seem to be fully optimized for maximum efficiency.

We'll see how it'll look in the future though...if I recall correctly this was a home-made engine, and making one that's optimized to the max is I believe more or less impossible, unless you got massive resources for it...

 

[Sir Prince]

WOW. PErsian, next time don't be so rude!
THat's all I have to say as you have been answered.

 

[DaLagga]

WOW. PErsian, next time don't be so rude!
THat's all I have to say as you have been answered.

He was rude?... Well, i've got a 9800 pro, which is a step down from the other cards mentioned, and when i turn AA to 6x, AF to 16x, and set my resolution to 1600x1200 i only notice a drop of about 10% in fps...if that. So i seriously doubt it is the video card causing the problem. The engine desperately needs further optimization. And as i said before, the biggest problem is that your sensitivity increases dramatically as your fps falls. So the game appears to jerk and becomes difficult to control at around 25fps because of this.

I gotta admit the game handles low fps better than many commercial engines i know, in 10fps the game is still playable, unlike many engines i know.

Uhhhh...i have to disagree, for the reason i just mentioned. The mouse becomes VERY difficult to control at around 20fps. And i can't even nor do i want to imagine 10fps... But at least the mouse doesn't actually have that laggy feeling like some games. Where after you move the mouse it takes a second to actually move, and takes a second to stop.

 

[Volkier]

Actually the initial post was kinda rude... If I were Armagan I would be offended, but perhaps persian knows something which he doesn't so he can help him fix the engine, or create a better one alltogether? I'm sure Armagan would be happy to accept such, should it happen and we all would be greatful ::\

 

[Narcissus]

The thread's title was extreme (all caps!!), which was rude/irritating. His post was also worded in a very confrontational way.

I can see that he feels he has a point, its just that the way that he approached it was wrong.

The game's engine isn't perfect, I admit ... yet it is far from bad either. Then when you consider that it was created by one man and not a team of programmers ... add in the fact that it is still in beta ... throw in that it will probably receive some optimizations before final release = I find it hard to fault.

PersianPaladin ... if you want to make a suggestion, please try and be more aware of the way you aproach things.

Narcissus

 

[barbaros]

How can you be sure engine needs serious optimization?. FPS drops to 30 only when there are 20-30 people (most of them mounted) on the screen on my relatively old system (AMD2500+, FX5700). Im playing FEAR in 640x480, nearly all settings at minimum and I get around 25-30 FPS at best. And I didn't see more than 4-5 people (they are clones) on screen in any time. Of course graphic detail of FEAR is better than M&B (not sure it looks better for me since everything is at minimum and res. is 640X480). But you people talk as if there are at least 20-30 mounted people on screen in every game out there at very high FPS and M&B must also do it easily. I didn't see this much of people and horses on screen in any game except RTS games.
But I have to agree that there is something strange happening at low FPS's. Actually I can feel lagging when FPS drops below 50 but I don't feel any lagging in other games even at 20-25 FPS.

 

[DaLagga]

The thread's title was extreme (all caps!!), which was rude/irritating. His post was also worded in a very confrontational way.

Oops, i appologize for my oversight...didn't even consider the title for some reason, which was rather rude. Don't get me wrong, the engine is truly amazing, especially considering it was made by two people. But in all honesty, there are several others out there that handle multiple units on the screen at once much better.

I didn't see this much of people on screen in any game except RTS games.

Battlefield 2, Planetside, Starship Troopers, and Saga of Ryzom(actually saw a group of 60+ guys traveling together, quite a sight) just to name a few that i know of. All of which have better graphics, and handle many more than 20 units on the screen without a significant drop in fps. Again, i'm not saying this to insult armagan or the engine, just trying to make it clear that there is alot of room for improvement in that particular area.

 

[barbaros]

Quote:
I didn't see this much of people on screen in any game except RTS games.

Battlefield 2, Planetside, Starship Troopers, and Saga of Ryzom(actually saw a group of 60+ guys traveling together, quite a sight) just to name a few that i know of. All of which have better graphics, and handle many more than 20 units on the screen without a significant drop in fps.

I didn't play any of those games. So I was wrong in my statement I guess.

 

[PersianPaladin]

The whole point is that i want to play with large battles. I am impressed by the two-person design team and i realised that since the graphics are low-poly that i should be able to play it with huge battles with little problem on my powerful machine. I got a big shock when the FPS actually dropped so low as this is abnormal given the low-poly level and my system should be owning this engine. I think there is a flaw that i'm sure Armagan will update...it just seems rather weird that it does that to a high-end machine.

 

[Kamamura]

I gotta admit the game handles low fps better than many commercial engines i know, in 10fps the game is still playable, unlike many engines i know.

I am really not sure if I get the meaning of this sentence, if there is any. 10fps means the game renders 10 frames per seconds, and the one who has to cope with it is the player, not the engine. Maybe you meant that due to the nature of the gameplay, lower frame rates are not that detrimental to the gaming experience. That can be agreed with, since you don't have to headshot an enemy that looks like a cluster of pixels in the distance, but it has no relation to the quality of the graphic engine used.

Personally, I feel that the game could do with some optimization, like some implementation of level-of-detail scaled models. The reason is, the demand of the engine rises too rapidly with the number of the enemy/allied combatants displayed. Therefore, it's difficult to determine optimal setting for a given configuration, because 90% of the time, the system is doing minimum amount of work, displaying 150 fps comfortably, and in a large battle, it drops to mere 20-30. Every piece of software where performance matters needs to be optimized.

 

[Nairagorn]

You've got something else going on. I have a decent system that's hardly top-of-the-line, and I play with huge battle sizes and get very good fps.

 

[Kamamura]

You've got something else going on. I have a decent system that's hardly top-of-the-line, and I play with huge battle sizes and get very good fps.

The point is, however, that the current engine does not scale well.

 

[svart]

Notice how facing a mountain with characters behind it (though they aren't rendered) will still introduce a hit on your fps.
also as mentioned in some other thread, polygons at great distances use the uv textures in the same resolution, many commercial engines remedy that by decreasing texture resolution for rending at higher distances.

From what i heard armagan developed his own engine, from my experience making engines is a lot of hard work so considering the demanding content in m&b it's logical it's not perfect.

Uhhhh...i have to disagree, for the reason i just mentioned. The mouse becomes VERY difficult to control at around 20fps. And i can't even nor do i want to imagine 10fps... But at least the mouse doesn't actually have that laggy feeling like some games. Where after you move the mouse it takes a second to actually move, and takes a second to stop.

Dunno, ever since 0.7 the game became very easy to control even on extreme fps's, unlike most games i know.

 

[[P]aradox]

also as mentioned in some other thread, polygons at great distances use the uv textures in the same resolution, many commercial engines remedy that by decreasing texture resolution for rending at higher distances.

M&B uses mip-mapping which improves scaling speed. I'm not sure if the models have different LODs though.