I supported you on greenlight! Good luck!

Hello.

Thank you!



Yes, there is an option to change the Field of View.

voted too!

Me too.
I suggest you set the default arc to 80 and keep the option to de-/ increase the FoV. Keep in mind how close a player normally sits in front of his computer monitor (compared to a TV when he plays on a console) and that the camera normally should represent an extension of the player's view, that's why a higher arc on a PC monitor feels more natural.

Hello.

Thank you all again for your support.

I think you are right. I will raise up the arc to 80 as default value. People can change it everytime they want.

A problem could be a performance impact. The bigger the Field of View the more objects must be rendered. And the Engine does not support model instancing.

Here is an example of the current performance with ATI Radeon 6850 HD:
With SSAO, with Bloom, with Anisotropy x 16, with Shadows, with per pixel light and a resolution of 1230 * 1024 you have the locked 30 FPS. And all the things are optimized. Mipmapping, Level of Detail, Distance Boosters, Trace Boosters, Combined objects, Streaming elements, ... The biggest problem I see in this engine is the amount of draw calls. For outdoor scenes a big problem. For example: The grass objects. With a laborious procedure we have combined the most of the grass objects to about 4 - 10 big objects. That was raising up the speed. Disadvantage is, that you can not add to all that combined grass objects any waving instructions. Only for the other ones that are not combined.

I hope that there will be any solution in the future to reduce the amount of draw calls. Not only for sprites (A8). Because you can not combine all kind of models to bigger models. They also need memory.

it's true, rendering gets slower. I've read a thread a year ago about model instancing in A8, where Jcl said: "Model instancing was implemented some months ago, but never made it into a release. We found that the speed gain in normal levels was too small for being a useful feature.", and "...but it turned out that it was not worth the hassle. The scenes where instancing offered any advantage, in the form of a frame rate increase, were rare in an ABT engine. In many scenes it was even slightly slower, due to the sorting overhead. Thus, almost no one would have used model instancing and we saved the precious implementation time for other features."

I don't know A8 Pro sprite instancing is how efficient in fact, is it really suitable for large open terrain vegetation or not (together with terrain lod, which results in a sensible speed increase as I remember when tested the trial version), probably okay for grass, but definitely not suitable for a RTS like forest overview... this will once push me to change to another engine (beside some other reasons).

@BME for waving have you considered using a vertex shader?

Hello.

Yes, we have tried a vertex shader. It is okay for smaller bundles of grass. But not for very big area bundles. Difficult to explain. You have to see it yourself.

@sivan
Sprite instancing is nice, but as you have said: Not for forrest or more other dense vegetation. And not each grass should be looking like a cross. This game can not use sprite instancing, because it is made with A7. And we don't use sprites for the grass. But grass-models in very very big bundles are okay.

The biggest FPS killer with vegetation in my experience is the alpha blending. If you don't do it already, I suggest you use an alpha test material instead.

Hello.

Yes, this is also one of the biggest FPS killers. But most of the objects are already using an alpha test material. This is also a must have for the big grass bundles. Otherwise you would see sorting problems.