About the latest version of the game

action9000 · **Reply #700 on:** October 26, 2009, 09:37:32 PM

I'd love to talk to you about the design for a new map whenever we both have time, Malte!

As for the scale, I don't need a new map for the scale; I can set up the scale in my terrain program to anything I want so I can just play with it (so yep, it's the existing map on a larger scale). I do think that we need to talk about assigning some actual distances to pixels and 3d units, as you mentioned before, since it's nothing but guesstimating right now to avoid making the river (and the valley in general) too big or too small.

action9000 · **Reply #701 on:** October 29, 2009, 04:28:45 PM

I have tried adjusting the terrain a bit by making the river a bit narrower and shallower. Here's a new screenshot:

Belmont2500 · **Reply #702 on:** October 29, 2009, 04:46:59 PM

it just keeps getting better and better.

Grungecat · **Reply #703 on:** October 31, 2009, 01:23:54 PM

Lookin' good!

action9000 · **Reply #704 on:** November 17, 2009, 05:39:05 PM

Hey all!

Just letting you know that I have a bunch of coding to do before the next version is released, but I basically have a plan. I just need to find the time to do it.

raga · **Reply #705 on:** November 17, 2009, 06:23:34 PM

Looking foward to it! And I'm happy I didn't miss any updates in my absence.

action9000 · **Reply #706 on:** November 17, 2009, 09:01:54 PM

I just got something working that really improves how well the game runs. Basically, I am now splitting the terrain into a bunch of tiny pieces and only drawing the pieces that are visible.

In technical terms, this cuts the number of polygons rendered from 250,000 from the previous version to an average of a much more desirable 50,000 to 75,000 now.

In short, the more polygons (3d elements that make up the map's shape) are being drawn, the more work your video card has to do and the worse the performance will be. The "view Distance" setting in the game's options will also affect this now, by not drawing any pieces of the terrain beyond this view distance.

One the game is more complete and the landscapes are vast, lower-end computers will be able to cut down the view distance to hugely speed things up and higher-end computers can leave the view distance up while still getting good performance (by cutting out excess polygons behind and beside you).

Another big benefit is that I'm able to cut down on the computing (CPU) power necessary to calculate collisions between your player and the ground, because the "ground" object is smaller and less complex: I only need to check the piece of the terrain that the player is dealing with, rather than the entire map.

I know this is a lot of technical blahblahblah, but this is an important step for making our game playable in the future, once we have big, giant landscapes. So far, so good!

66948 polygons in this scene and I'd say it looks pretty good. I'll work on getting it even better but this is definitely workable!

There is still the problem that the game eats up a lot of RAM. I can't seem to get it below 250MB of RAM at the moment, unless I completely kill the texture resolution. I will set up a Quality option for textures, using the following system:

Low quality: 256x256 textures
Medium Quality: 512x512 textures
High Quality: 1024x1024 textures (as seen in the screenshot. May remove this option as it seems to be a bit slow).

512x512 looks almost as good as 1024x1024 and eats up half the RAM so I might remove the 1024x1024 option completely, since 1024 is so bloody slow. Either way, I will include the low-quality option for lower-memory computers.

512x512 is using 250MB of RAM total.
1024x1024 is using 500MB of RAM total.

I am about to experiment to see what 256x256 uses.

action9000 · **Reply #707 on:** November 17, 2009, 10:46:15 PM

Test complete.

256x256 textures load much faster (about 1/3 the time as 512 and about 1/10 the time as 1024) and use 180MB of RAM in total.
Here's what it looks like:

Not quite as clean but I wouldn't say it's a lot worse, considering how much better the performance is.

Just for fun, here's a theoretical screenshot of what 2048x2048 textures would look like. Sadly they're just too bulky and slow to be functional, because it would be pretty as heck.

My goal is to get graphic quality similar to this without having to kill performance to do so.

Belmont2500 · **Reply #708 on:** November 17, 2009, 10:59:51 PM

That's a shame because even in low quality(which I always play on although I have a Vista laptop(HP)) the game still looks like a masterpiece in the making.

action9000 · **Reply #709 on:** November 17, 2009, 11:07:15 PM

Much appreciated.

And just for the sake of comparison, here's a similar scene in the "normal quality", 512x512 resolution:

Littlefoot Fan · **Reply #710 on:** November 17, 2009, 11:07:46 PM

Very nice. One of the most important aspects of making a game is trying to make it look as best you can while eating up as little CPU as possible. Looks like you're really working hard in that department.

DarkWolf91 · **Reply #711 on:** November 17, 2009, 11:08:13 PM

Ooooh, fantastic! I love seeing the progress on this. Sorry I don't have anything more useful to say right now... But keep up the great work, anyways

Malte279 · **Reply #712 on:** November 18, 2009, 05:41:33 AM

I hope to meet you on MSN soon Tim. There is something to be discussed on the mapwork. Something surprised me there and I am not yet a 100% sure if the cause of that surprise is a good or a bad thing. It looks like a much smaller scale in the mapmaker than I had expected will do to turn the 2D maps very roughly to the scale which I had in mind (any ways to make the scale precise as in the 1 pixel = x meter scales of the 2D maps?).

action9000 · **Reply #713 on:** November 18, 2009, 02:44:13 PM

Quote

any ways to make the scale precise as in the 1 pixel = x meter scales of the 2D maps?

We are saying that the the distance of one "Littlefoot" is 1.75 Meters, which is approximately 66.04 units in 3d space.

I also know that 1/8th of the terrain in one direction is 6240 3d units, therefore the terrain in its entirety at the moment is:

49920 x 49920 3d units

Converting this to "littlefeet",

49920 / 66.04 =
755.90551181102362204724409448819 Littlefeet =
755.90551181102362204724409448819 * 1.75M =

1322.8346456692913385826771653543 M square =

1.3228 KM square.

We also know that this map is at a resolution of 256x256 vertices.
IN my current map, that means

1322.83464.... / 256 =
5.1673228346456692913385826771654 M

5.167 M per vertex / pixel on a 2d map in the current resolution of 256x256.

As for other scenarios:

in 512x512, it would be
2.58366M per pixel

in 1024, it would be
1.2918M per pixel

aabicus (LettuceBacon&Tomato) · **Reply #714 on:** November 18, 2009, 03:36:08 PM

^That's a pretty big pixel. Reminds me of the pixels of Pluto:

(EDIT:Waiting for pic resizer to email me a new link. Pic will be smaller soon.)

Malte279 · **Reply #715 on:** November 21, 2009, 06:16:44 PM

Quote

^That's a pretty big pixel. Reminds me of the pixels of Pluto

There are two scales for the 2d maps. 1 pixel = 10 meter is only to get an overview and a basic structure for the maps of a higher scale. 1 pixel = 2 meters will be for most of the map making one pixel there would be a bit larger than a Littlefoot sized dinosaur which (given the dimensions of the valley) will suffice for most purposes. For all those purposes where the preceeding scale does not surfice there will be the scale of 1pixel = 40 centimeters. That scale however will only be needed for such parts of the Valley where there are passages too narrow for all but the little characters (flyers and swimmers).

action9000 · **Reply #716 on:** November 26, 2009, 04:49:25 PM

Hey all!

I currently have an extremely crude save/load game feature working, though it's not practical yet. It's purely a tech demo at this point, proving that I can store and recall the data between the game and the save file.

I'm working on improving the character creation process at this point, including the ability to load your games from the game menu, more advanced character creation, and other cool stuff!

action9000 · **Reply #717 on:** December 05, 2009, 01:05:31 PM

I'm almost ready with the save/load game system in the game.

Here's a screenshot to show how it works so far:

The counter on the top-right shows how many saved games there are in total. The two portraits on the left represent each saved game. One was saved as a longneck character and the other was saved with a threehorn character. This screen draws the correct portrait(s) based on the contents of the save file.

I haven't yet put this into the program yet but clicking on the portrait will display the stats of that saved game in the big box on the right. You can then click a Play button (which doesn't appear yet either

) to continue from that file.

All the data from the save file loads properly, I just need to make it possible to continue that game now. It almost works!

Oh..and yes, the "hatch a new dinosaur" graphic is temporary, I know it's ugly.

Belmont2500 · **Reply #718 on:** December 05, 2009, 02:06:58 PM

it looks great, although the great wall still looks like it had been nuked.

raga · **Reply #719 on:** December 05, 2009, 02:56:25 PM

I think it looks great, but is there some way to put a name with the portraits? That way if some one has two longnecks, they can tell which is which