[Wolfenstein: Blade of Agony] v3.1 released (p204)

For Total Conversions and projects that don't otherwise fall under the other categories.
Forum rules
The Projects forums are only for projects. If you are asking questions about a project, either find that project's thread, or start a thread in the General section instead.

Got a cool project idea but nothing else? Put it in the project ideas thread instead!

Projects for any Doom-based engine (especially 3DGE) are perfectly acceptable here too.

Please read the full rules for more details.
User avatar
RockstarRaccoon
Posts: 598
Joined: Sun Jul 31, 2016 2:43 pm

Re: [Blade of Agony] Tank Battlefield Screens! | p161

Post by RockstarRaccoon »

Tormentor667 wrote:Sorry for asking a dumb question, but what would you suggest instead? An elevator?
He's telling you to use the old technique of just building a little bit of fake area beneath the ground, using 3D floors and having the player fall into a silent teleporter, giving the illusion of seamlessness. It's a technique from before portals.
I have never heard the term crossbeam-bridge before so what is it actually? How can I improve C3M3 by replacing these with 3d floors?
He means the technique where you use a mid-texture and have the player walk on that.
For my understanding, 3d floors are more performance-intensive than portals - or did I get something wrong? :(
You got something very wrong.

When you draw a portal, you are having the engine renders everything on the other side of that portal, whenever the portal is in view. That means it draws every sector and detail over there. Mirrors are similar.

Meanwhile, adding a 3D floor to a sector barely adds to its render time, because it's just some extra textures, occlusion, and lighting. Even then, it's BSP limited, so it only draws what the player can see.

The difference is night and day.

This post of yours has answered a lot of questions. I'm not sure who told you that or where you got that idea, but everything you said here explains a lot. I guess now you understand what I meant when I kept talking about "portal abuse"...
User avatar
Tormentor667
Posts: 13530
Joined: Wed Jul 16, 2003 3:52 am
Contact:

Re: [Blade of Agony] Tank Battlefield Screens! | p161

Post by Tormentor667 »

Thanks kindly for the info, that makes sense. According to that, I just committed a new version, splitting C3M3 into two maps - exactly where the portal was. It should definitely improve performance on both parts of the map.

For something else now - just to make sure I understood everything correctly: At the very beginning of C3M3 (now C3M3_A) at the outside of a house, there is a small portal leading to a cellar room. Does this impact performance a lot or is it okay?
User avatar
RockstarRaccoon
Posts: 598
Joined: Sun Jul 31, 2016 2:43 pm

Re: [Blade of Agony] Tank Battlefield Screens! | p161

Post by RockstarRaccoon »

It has been quite some time since I looked at that map, but I remember that simply having it in front of me would set the frame rate to a crawl, making the only way to make that level work to go in there and keep the entrance behind me..

Your recent change may have fixed that, but it's hard to say. As a general rule of thumb though, you should never have portals visible from such a huge area.
User avatar
Tormentor667
Posts: 13530
Joined: Wed Jul 16, 2003 3:52 am
Contact:

Re: [Blade of Agony] Tank Battlefield Screens! | p161

Post by Tormentor667 »

I think you are messing the positions :) Can you check it ingame?
User avatar
Wiw
Posts: 766
Joined: Thu Jun 11, 2015 1:58 am
Graphics Processor: nVidia with Vulkan support
Location: Everywhere and nowhere.

Re: [Blade of Agony] Tank Battlefield Screens! | p161

Post by Wiw »

Well, the 2D trees improve the framerate quite dramatically! There's only one thing: they get a little janky. I'll provide a screenshot.

Image
User avatar
RockstarRaccoon
Posts: 598
Joined: Sun Jul 31, 2016 2:43 pm

Re: [Blade of Agony] Tank Battlefield Screens! | p161

Post by RockstarRaccoon »

...where is the tree in this? That looks like C3M1 normally looks to me, sheared polygons in the sky and everything...
User avatar
Wiw
Posts: 766
Joined: Thu Jun 11, 2015 1:58 am
Graphics Processor: nVidia with Vulkan support
Location: Everywhere and nowhere.

Re: [Blade of Agony] Tank Battlefield Screens! | p161

Post by Wiw »

No, you're right, it's coming from the chimneys, I think.
User avatar
Ozymandias81
Posts: 2062
Joined: Thu Jul 04, 2013 8:01 am
Graphics Processor: nVidia with Vulkan support
Location: Mount Olympus, Mars
Contact:

Re: [Blade of Agony] Tank Battlefield Screens! | p161

Post by Ozymandias81 »

Wiw wrote:Well, the 2D trees improve the framerate quite dramatically! There's only one thing: they get a little janky. I'll provide a screenshot.
You should use r406 of GZDoom since recent builds have Mirrors and Reflections broken, so playtests wouldn't be realistic
User avatar
Ozymandias81
Posts: 2062
Joined: Thu Jul 04, 2013 8:01 am
Graphics Processor: nVidia with Vulkan support
Location: Mount Olympus, Mars
Contact:

Re: [Blade of Agony] Tank Battlefield Screens! | p161

Post by Ozymandias81 »

BTW I added switchability for Plane Reflections, and since we won't release BoA for Multiplayer it is a very good implementation performance wise. As you can see very noticeable improvements on C2M5_A and C2M6_A
Unfortunately it isn't the same for C3M1 atm, which I'll carefully check with Torm permission to improve its performance... Many portals there are too far from where they should be.

In case you wonder: My rig consists by AMD Athlon x2 250 DualCore 3ghz, 4gb ram 1333mhz single bank, GeForce GT610 1024mb (Nvidia drivers updated), Win 7 64bit Sp1 and .Net Framework 4.7 plus these Visual C++ redists
User avatar
RockstarRaccoon
Posts: 598
Joined: Sun Jul 31, 2016 2:43 pm

Re: [Blade of Agony] Tank Battlefield Screens! | p161

Post by RockstarRaccoon »

You know, I think C3M1's main building could use a redesign, because of issues I had when playtesting. I'll have to either figure out how to show this video I took of me playing it or turn it into notes... (I like the video because I run across the heads of the people who are walking in a line as some sort of absurd looking speedrunning trick)
User avatar
Graf Zahl
Lead GZDoom+Raze Developer
Lead GZDoom+Raze Developer
Posts: 49053
Joined: Sat Jul 19, 2003 10:19 am
Location: Germany

Re: [Blade of Agony] Tank Battlefield Screens! | p161

Post by Graf Zahl »

Tormentor667 wrote: For my understanding, 3d floors are more performance-intensive than portals - or did I get something wrong? :(

Essentially, yes.

Of course it all depends on the scenario but in condensed form it looks like this:

For a 3D floor in the affected sector(s) one or two added planes get rendered, depending on the type. Additionally all outward-facing sides will create a new wall primitive needing to be processed.
The only scenario where this gets expensive is when you got to split sectors in order to add the 3D floor where needed. Ultimately, 3D floors are extremely cheap to process, they only start to hit if you got several 100 of them, but even in that case each one will be like adding one or two more sectors, not more.

A portal on the other hand, requires the following steps at the very least. Note that there can be shortcuts but they only take effect if no sky is visible so they do not apply to BoA:

- the entire portal area needs to be filled with a stencil value that serves as a mask.
- the depth buffer in the affected area needs to be cleared.
- the new scene needs to be rendered into the stencilled area.
- the depth buffer needs to be restored for the following translucent stuff and sprites in general.

It is impossible to do these 4 steps without at least one full stall on the rendering pipeline. Under normal, contained circumstances where you operate in closed-off rooms and one sided walls the stall will be a few microseconds.
In the case of C3M3, however, it occurs inside a highly detailed scene, meaning that before processing the portal, the GPU has to flush the entire main scene and after that re-traverse the BSP with no more parallelization taking place. This will cause a speed hit of several milliseconds which results in a considerable drop of fps.
User avatar
Graf Zahl
Lead GZDoom+Raze Developer
Lead GZDoom+Raze Developer
Posts: 49053
Joined: Sat Jul 19, 2003 10:19 am
Location: Germany

Re: [Blade of Agony] Tank Battlefield Screens! | p161

Post by Graf Zahl »

Tormentor667 wrote: For something else now - just to make sure I understood everything correctly: At the very beginning of C3M3 (now C3M3_A) at the outside of a house, there is a small portal leading to a cellar room. Does this impact performance a lot or is it okay?

For me it's noticeable but not as bad as the one in the village. But it suffers from the same problem, meaning that it's smack in the middle of a scene where no one-sided walls ever block it off.
Ninlhil
Posts: 52
Joined: Mon Mar 02, 2015 11:47 pm

Re: [Blade of Agony] Tank Battlefield Screens! | p161

Post by Ninlhil »

Has anyone else run into a problem in E2M2 where your framerate completely tanks once the alarm claxon horns start going off by the trains?
User avatar
Ozymandias81
Posts: 2062
Joined: Thu Jul 04, 2013 8:01 am
Graphics Processor: nVidia with Vulkan support
Location: Mount Olympus, Mars
Contact:

Re: [Blade of Agony] Tank Battlefield Screens! | p161

Post by Ozymandias81 »

Ninlhil wrote:Has anyone else run into a problem in E2M2 where your framerate completely tanks once the alarm claxon horns start going off by the trains?
Hey Ninlhil thanks for this, I must say that this has been fixed already months ago on dev repository.
I guess you mean when red strobe lights turns on during the ProtoDrones fight, so in this case you can open the console (usually the \ key on your keyboard) and type:

remove StrobeLightRed
remove StrobeEmitterRed

Also set inside ENH.OPTIONS ==> Rendering Options ==> Special Effects at 1024
I assume you are playing Chapter 2 official release.
User avatar
Solid_Beard
Posts: 18
Joined: Mon Jul 10, 2017 5:20 am

Re: [Blade of Agony] Tank Battlefield Screens! | p161

Post by Solid_Beard »

Hey, I recently replaying BOA and I ecounter a bug in the game. While I was killing an Engineer with the shovel in Operation Paris (Not sure if this happens in the other levels that include engineer's) the game crashes. Is this happen to everybody ?
Post Reply

Return to “TCs, Full Games, and Other Projects”