[Blade of Agony] Road to Wolfenstein Devblog Part 07 | p173

[Rachael]

I get it that it's mostly cinematic... but my, how standards have changed if 13 FPS is considered "running pretty well".

[Captain J]

But then again, that's one BEAST of a Scenery!

[Ozymandias81]

I get it that it's mostly cinematic... but my, how standards have changed if 13 FPS is considered "running pretty well".

Ahah well, let's say... mute films and very old cameras were running at 16-24fps, 22-28 around 30s. You will notice that it in motion works pretty well and makes sense.

Captain J - Thanks for the kind words, team effort at its best!

[HAL9000]

2007: Can it run Crysis?
2019: Can it run BOA?

[drfrag]

I get it that it's mostly cinematic... but my, how standards have changed if 13 FPS is considered "running pretty well".

12 fps was considered playable back in the early nineties (Doom on a 386).

[Rachael]

It's all fun and games until you realize that's a very critical sticking point for BOA. It's bloated and it lags hard. You may still manage to impress some people - but there's quite a lot of people who will not play it because of that.

It comes up again, and again, and again - but it's not something to be proud of. It's shameful that the team does not do more to try and fix the issues.

But it's your mod - you do you, boo.

[Graf Zahl]

Rule of thumb: If it lags on my system, it'll be a slideshow on low end rigs. And it does lag on my system - sometimes quite badly.

[Ozymandias81]

It's shameful that the team does not do more to try and fix the issues.

Eh? Really? Sometimes you say things without being exactly aware of what's behind, I am always polite and never incline to start fights or feel butthurt, but this time since me and all other members are working HARD on this from 2015, this pops up a nerve: TITLEMAP has improved greatly for example, on my end was running at 8fps and now 28, you can swap trees from 3d to 2d, reduce/deactivate all kind of weather effects, turn on/off reflections/mirrors, countless and countless hours of tests and rework (and I am 37, not much free time recently)...
GZDoom has some limits and we are pushing them at their max, okay, but don't come to say that to us, no. Words aren't meaningless, check all commits since now of BoA and you'll see how much (and still) we are going through optimizations and tweaks, even if recent builds of the engine introduced some slowdowns with vanilla gameplay experience. It's 50/50, we love what we do same as you devs do with GZDoom, but you can't satisfy everyone.

[Kinsie]

CUTSCEN1's big intro in the stadium runs at 37fps on a computer that hits Rage 2's Recommended specs, which while not as bad as previously-witnessed performance issues is still Something Of A Problem. A bit of jiggling and poking revealed that the cause was the scrolling floor used to make the parade "walk" - presumably the engine doesn't like the idea of carting around thousands of actors with full collision enabled. I'm not entirely sure what a better solution would be off the top of my head, though - NOBLOCKMAP projectiles? I'm sure there's a problem with that that doesn't immediately come to mind, though.

My initial thought was that there was a shitload of actors making up the crowd, but there were some very clever workarounds used instead, so kudos on that particular magic trick.

An extra bug report while I'm at it: If you try moving your mouse during the cutscene maps, the motion blur shader freaks out and tries to blur camera movement that isn't happening.

[doomjedi]

I don't tend to write alot in this thread, and have nothing to do with engine optimization - but this reads offensive to me as well, to all who do alot of work for years - trying to make this mod happen. Juggling family, work, and even other mods.
There is alot of effort for engine optimization, against gzDoom limitations we are not to blame for.

I'm the first to feel any slowdowns, having no "gaming" video card at all, just onboard Intel one.
So I can see your side and frustrations, but still, to claim we don't put efforts into fps of this mod - is offensive and so unjustified.

[Tormentor667]

@Ozymandias81 That looks awesome!!!
Now the main question....Is everything on that screenshot killable?

Actually the people on the ranks are only textures, the only actors are the nazis which are moving in one direction, now See/Look AI involved.

I get it that it's mostly cinematic... but my, how standards have changed if 13 FPS is considered "running pretty well".

Is this from your latest test or just a joke?

It's all fun and games until you realize that's a very critical sticking point for BOA. It's bloated and it lags hard. You may still manage to impress some people - but there's quite a lot of people who will not play it because of that. It comes up again, and again, and again - but it's not something to be proud of. It's shameful that the team does not do more to try and fix the issues. But it's your mod - you do you, boo.

Well, actually we do a lot of bugtracking and improving on the performance departure, for details you might consider checking the GitHub commits of the past 12 months. We have added a huge amount of controls and settings into the mod so people can decide what they want to deactivate and activate for performance and looks. We "ship" BoA with the "best experience" settings. If that's a problem for people's computers, they simply need to adjust the options. That's how it works since ages now.

What Ozy and Doomjedi say might sound hard but it certainly is something we have discussed for several times within the team now, it's not that we don't care, but we simply have made a decision: It's our mod. We do this because it's a hobby and we want it to look the way we imagine it. We have added options to reach a broader audience with lower rigs but it is not our goal to completely scrap visions and ideas just for the sake of giving people access to our creation who have slower computers - why should we? We are not a commercial gaming company. It's not our goal to sell Blade of Agony to as many people as possible to gain as much wealth as possible. Our primary goal is to realize our vision because it's fun - it's fun to push an engine to its limits and try things that haven't been done ever before. The secondary goal is indeed to entertain people with our vision and to give as many persons access to our vision as possible (that's why we've added the options to change the visuals and improve performance). If we switch these priorities, we will end up "realizing a restricted product of our vision to please everyone" and sorry to say it: If I end up working like that, I want to get paid for it

I'm not entirely sure what a better solution would be off the top of my head, though - NOBLOCKMAP projectiles? I'm sure there's a problem with that that doesn't immediately come to mind, though. My initial thought was that there was a shitload of actors making up the crowd, but there were some very clever workarounds used instead, so kudos on that particular magic trick. An extra bug report while I'm at it: If you try moving your mouse during the cutscene maps, the motion blur shader freaks out and tries to blur camera movement that isn't happening.

Thanks for the kind words and the hint. I think going for projectiles might be indeed the better solution. I will point Ozy towards this (and also to the shader) :

[Rachael]

My comments were not meant to be offensive, but they were meant to be a bit blunt: Every time I turn around, there is yet another useless feature added to it for "spice" - a feature it really doesn't need - and like it or not, these things add up over time.

And plus, consider: Do you really need thousands of actors when a hundred will suffice? The same goes for the special effects, like rain and/or snow, or decorations such as trees.

Is it not just as inconsiderate to the people playing your mod, that you decide that 13 FPS is "good enough"? I know the thousands of hours poured into this mod - that much is obvious. But ordinary players do not appreciate a slide show. Ordinary players are not going to see thousands of hours when their frame rate is chugging along at a pace slower than Doom on a drunken 386-SX. They're going to reach for the quit option in the menu, instead.

[affandede]

I hate it when both sides are right. Why can't anything be Tolkienesque, black and white shit?

[Tormentor667]

My comments were not meant to be offensive, but they were meant to be a bit blunt: Every time I turn around, there is yet another useless feature added to it for "spice" - a feature it really doesn't need - and like it or not, these things add up over time.

And plus, consider: Do you really need thousands of actors when a hundred will suffice? The same goes for the special effects, like rain and/or snow, or decorations such as trees.

Is it not just as inconsiderate to the people playing your mod, that you decide that 13 FPS is "good enough"? I know the thousands of hours poured into this mod - that much is obvious. But ordinary players do not appreciate a slide show. Ordinary players are not going to see thousands of hours when their frame rate is chugging along at a pace slower than Doom on a drunken 386-SX. They're going to reach for the quit option in the menu, instead.

Tell me a feature that is just for spice and can't be deactivated, that we added in recent times

• Shaders can be deactivated
• Weather can be deactivated
• Models for Trees can be deactivated
• Trees in general can be deactivated
• Special effects can be deactivated
• Blood effects can be deactivated

...not to mention all the things that can be deactivated through the GZDoom engine anyway. Saying we do not care isn't only insulting, it's simply untrue

[Rachael]

You know what can't be deactivated? 2-sided linedefs.

Come on, T667, the point isn't whether or not these things are optional. The point is they just keep getting piled on, unnecessarily bloating the size of the final creation as well as the repository. The fact that you can turn them off doesn't suddenly make it "ok". First impressions matter. You should know as well as anyone that there comes a point where you have to cut things you're particularly attached to but don't really add anything to the final presentation. And yes, it hurts a lot, but everyone does it to make their creation better.

You can sing "pay me pay me pay me" until you're blue in the face - and that point is perfectly valid - but still, to someone like me, it makes this mod far less appealing. I just have no interest in trying this thing because of how horrific it has run on my system in previous iterations. And I don't have that bad of a system. So - how do I know it's really that much better?

The reason this is a sore spot for me, in particular, is because I do occasionally see a couple members of your team going around as if this is a point of pride. It really isn't. One of your mappers even brags when he reaches 10,000 (or was it 100,000? I can't remember - it was a really big number) linedefs or more in a single map. That's not good map design - it's an obsession to detail that GZDoom simply can't handle. And even worse - it's showing a lack of desire to creatively work within GZDoom's limits to create something that is both playable AND pretty, as well as showing a harsh disdain for prospective players who don't have the dough to spend hundreds to thousands on upgrading their GPU and motherboard every year to keep their systems up to date. If you say you really care, then what's with statements like that?

People like to rag on GZDoom and its development team for abandoning support for pre-3.3 GPU's, but it's never done anything this bad to its user base. Even what is a bare minimum for running GZDoom these days will never cope with BOA reasonably.

Why don't you try buying a low-end system for €150 and developing the mod on that? Actually - don't do that - because I know for a fact that it will be absolutely unbearable for you.

I'm sorry for ragging on you so hard - this really is a work of art. It's a very pretty mod, and a lot of work has been invested into it. But I don't think your team realizes how serious this issue really is for them - and especially you, in particular, T. This literally will make or break the mod, and a part of me hurts knowing how this issue really breaks it.