A few curious questions of mine.

[reepblue]

While I'm in my neck of the woods developing Vectronic, I've stumbled upon a few things about the engine that I got aware of while playtesting. I've been wondering about these for a while (and some since I started with the engine) so I decided to post all of these questions here.

 

1) How do you reduce/remedy the frustum culling for the FPS camera?

While I do understand why this happens, I was wondering if it was possible to make walls and objects popping into place less obvious. While in Marble Games and Darkness Awaits this is not a problem as the camera is just following the player around. However, since the FPS camera is constantly moving, and rotating, you notice the frustum culling the most, espeucally when the mouse is set to a high sensitivity. Is there a trick to make it so at least brushes don't do this if the player is in the same room as it/less noticeable?

 

2) Intense slowdown with 16x MSSA even on high end cards.

While for me I can't go any higher than 4x (Well I can, It just seems to stick to 30fps for a bit before shooting to 60), One of my tester has a GTX970 and he was surprised that 16x mssa chugs his framerate down to the forties. (With Vsync on). Is everything working correctly, or something is acting up? I would expect a 970 to run Leadwerks at max with no problems, especially when the map looks like this with no shadows.

 

 

I can get his full system specs if you need it. He can do 8x without any issues. I was also gonna ask someone with a GTX 980 to test it, but they're distracted playing Fallout 4. If something is up with 16x or it's some hardware limitation, I can just disable the option for 16x mssa.

 

I thought I had more, but those two seem to be on the top of my head right now. While they are not "Game Canceling" issues, I hope to have some explanation of what's going on so I can create a better product. Thanks.

[shadmar]

1. Not sure, I think it comes with a slow framerate, but disable occlusion culling might help if it's on.

2. MSAA looks great but is a very slow AA technique in my opinion. You could try combing, like 2 x MSAA + FXAA looks pretty good. Or just use plain FXAA for speed.

[Josh]

While I'm in my neck of the woods developing Vectronic, I've stumbled upon a few things about the engine that I got aware of while playtesting. I've been wondering about these for a while (and some since I started with the engine) so I decided to post all of these questions here.

 

1) How do you reduce/remedy the frustum culling for the FPS camera?

While I do understand why this happens, I was wondering if it was possible to make walls and objects popping into place less obvious. While in Marble Games and Darkness Awaits this is not a problem as the camera is just following the player around. However, since the FPS camera is constantly moving, and rotating, you notice the frustum culling the most, espeucally when the mouse is set to a high sensitivity. Is there a trick to make it so at least brushes don't do this if the player is in the same room as it/less noticeable?

 

2) Intense slowdown with 16x MSSA even on high end cards.

While for me I can't go any higher than 4x (Well I can, It just seems to stick to 30fps for a bit before shooting to 60), One of my tester has a GTX970 and he was surprised that 16x mssa chugs his framerate down to the forties. (With Vsync on). Is everything working correctly, or something is acting up? I would expect a 970 to run Leadwerks at max with no problems, especially when the map looks like this with no shadows.

 

 

I can get his full system specs if you need it. He can do 8x without any issues. I was also gonna ask someone with a GTX 980 to test it, but they're distracted playing Fallout 4. If something is up with 16x or it's some hardware limitation, I can just disable the option for 16x mssa.

 

I thought I had more, but those two seem to be on the top of my head right now. While they are not "Game Canceling" issues, I hope to have some explanation of what's going on so I can create a better product. Thanks.

1. I wouldn't worry about it. It's a GPU thing and only visible on slow machines. The advantage of fully dynamic GPU culling is too great to pass by.

2, 16x MSAA is slow? Really? No AAA game even has this option. Leadwerks allows some options far beyond what might be practical on today's hardware. I would limit it to 4x MSAA max!

[reepblue]

Oh really, I would expect to see the culling on my machine since it's a 5 year old PC with a GTX 750ti in it, but a bit shocked to see that my tester with a newer PC and a GTX 970 is seeing this too. Then again, I'm sure if you set the mouse sensitivity too low, no GPU on the market will be able to keep up.

 

I was seeing issues with 8x, but it turned out that my flood lights had their ranges too big or something. I was getting frame dips in full screen when I transitioned to certain levels. I managed to fix this, and the flood lights are temp anyway. Only 16x lags now on my testers and my end now so I'll probably limit it to 8x in the options menu; but people can still use 16x with a launch property.

 

Thanks guys, was curious myself, and now I have answers for my testers.

[Josh]

I have found that 4x is really the max you can even see. 8x generally just makes it slower without any appreciable improvement. Not sure, maybe leave it as a super high res setting.

[reepblue]

I guess I'll make that decision when the game matures more. I personally don't see a huge plus with 8x at this point, but then again, the maps are very primitive as of now. I'm gonna hide 16x of being an option in the menu, but not sure about 8x. People with "Power PCs" tend to set everything to max out of habit, and I don't want them selecting an expensive option that just slows everything down. I'll have to see how 8x plays when the maps get an art pass.

[Einlander]

1. I wouldn't worry about it. It's a GPU thing and only visible on slow machines. The advantage of fully dynamic GPU culling is too great to pass by.

2, 16x MSAA is slow? Really? No AAA game even has this option. Leadwerks allows some options far beyond what might be practical on today's hardware. I would limit it to 4x MSAA max!

 

#1 is not true. It is highly visible and easily reproducible Especially on AMD cards. If your map is not entirely in Quadrant 1 in the Leadwerks editor, in game you can see it have culling issues. It gets drastically worse the bigger your level is. It becomes unignorable once vsync is turned on.

 

I've been having this problem for a long time.

http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/topic/9892-how-make-occlusion-less-greedy/page__hl__greedy

http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/topic/9194-occlusionrendering-failure/page__hl__cull

[reepblue]

I looked through those threads, and I'm shocked I did not see that this was discussed before,

 

What I can do is add some padding to make the occlusion AABBs a little bigger than their real size, so they will come into view early and avoid most of this artifact.

 

Did you applied this yet Josh, or was it written down on a sticky note somewhere and other things came up, or you did as it was way worse before. Again, right now it's not game ruining, but it would be nice to see this better accommodated when I'm ready to ship if possible. And I'm sure others would like to see this too.

[Josh]

The system currently uses extra padding of 2.0 meters.