Yes, I'm definitely guilty of that one. I'll do some next week after my exams, just don't expect nice screenshots because I'm not about to make decent assets for the sake of a stress test, but thankfully it's things like the poly-count and texture resolutions that count, and they'll be there. Then I'll write some shaders for it, which WILL be good quality but take me longer (because there's no such thing as a "place-holder" shader -- we obviously want to see SSAO like that and shadows like those).
ok, pm me when you finish a nice one. I can understand the placeholders, I'm a programmer. If you could also put a stats panel in there (fps, visible polys, ents, etc) it would be nice too.
True, but those later on are in the comments. He appeared to post the blog under the impression that the first test was ground-breaking.
Well it is a nice test still, even one 167k poly fortress with a desert scene (trees, buildings, huge terrain, etc) is still a nice test. When testing with A6 I couldn't come close to having that many polys or entities without the engine throwing up on itself. The terrain for A6 was rather slow.
In the A7 manual there's a general material defined for particles, which has "future use" written next to it. I'm going to go hound jcl for that feature so I can write soft-particles -- until we get that, I'll try write soft-sprites to prove I can do it
Mkay
Although my experience with A6 has shown that using sprites over particles is faster.
EDIT: And yes, I know I'm guilty in this post of making a post that does not relate to Torque 3D at all.
pffff, what's a little off topic-ness between arguments
I don't think that's a great argument. I, as a programmer, don't prefer A7 because I get to program
missing features. I prefer it because it's an environment in which I can program innovative features without touching or looking at engine source code. By innovative, I again refer to my example of me fiddling around with SSAO before I'd even heard of it. There are other avenues (more shader stuff, but also other areas such as physics) that I can write stuff as I imagine it, or write it very soon after someone else invents it and opens it to the public, instead of waiting around for the engine developer to implement it or diving into source code.
Why haven't I released anything innovative into the 3DGS community? Quite frankly I haven't touched A7 in more than a year because of other commitments/priorities/issues. And honestly it's also because I'm lazy
Well, I for one don't have Torque, so I'm not gonna say that the engine is groundbreaking and will destroy all engines out there. I will say that the test was really good nonetheless, the facts of the sizes and polycounts alone gives me a jump in wanting to get it.
I'll admit that I don't have A7, but I also don't plan on wasting my money on it(no offense). The reason I do not care for 3DGS much is this; Every time I do a decent test of the engine, a simple test that most other engines can handle the engine dies. I mean a simple test of just some entities and a small amount of code. My experience with A6 has shown me this:
1. The engine renders entities as a whole, meaning that if the textures are changed it doesn't make that huge of a difference. 1024 texs take alot of memory compared to 512, which is right, but anything around the 256 and below area doesn't really change the framerate at all.
2. LOD doesn't make as big a difference as it should. The engine doesn't seem to depend on polys as much as the fact that there is another entity in the game. For instance: In PreVa, we did an Island map that had trees around the island. IF we made the trees individual trees the engine crapped on itself. The framerate was horrible, so we had to make the trees all one model, they still had the same amount of polygons, but once they were made one model the difference was in about 20 fps or more. Making trees all one model like that is a big no-no, but we had to in order to get the framerate we wanted.
3. Sprites render waaaaaay faster than particles. You can pull off alot more sprites than you can particles. You can do some dense smoke and stuff with sprites when if you try to do it with particles, it dies. That's rather odd considering that a particle should have a little less code on it than a sprite, a sprite should be rendered similar to a model.
4. Terrains are not a good idea, even small ones with low poly counts cause extreme framerate drops compared to Torques MegaTerrains.
5. Even making a simple shooter with A6 is slow. I mean a scrolling shooter. Kino One's framerate is a bit slow on certain levels and we can't help it. It's not collision, it's not AI, it's not the player. Just from having entities with low poly counts.
I know that A7 is probably different and I've been told to upgrade quite a few times, but frankly, I don't want to. It's a waste of time and money.
The reason I want torque is that with some of the games I've seen are more than we pulled off in PreVa which leads me to believe that We could've pulled off PreVa with a very high fps and could've done way more than we did with A6. And that's just TGE.
I'm off topic but meh...
