mazex

mazex, I have been a programmer and I always commented my code. Indeed, I probably over-commented it. However, I was in a large development team where you could be working on anything at any time, not a one-man operation like BFC. Whilst I agree that commenting code is important I think you shouldn't be too harsh on Charles, who by all accounts is an exceptional coder. He probably just didn't have the time to thoroughly comment everything and didn't see the point as he was the only coder. Maybe he even left the comments out for a bit of added job security. If no-one else can understand the code I guess your job is safe! </font>

Programmers that don't comment their code should be taken behind a shed and shot. There is never an excuse to not comment your code. <- Period /Mazex

Well, I guess the image you posted shows that they are now "lodding" the terrain as they should have from the beginning. The problem is from where the loddning is done - what's the center of the world? The 1.04 terrain lodding works for me, but I think that there should be some levels in the terrain LOD:s. As it is now there seems to be only two levels which makes spotting the LOD-switch too easy. A few more levels and it would be much more transparent I guess...

What we did was identify that one of the biggest reasons for slowdowns was the 8x8 grid being drawn in the distance with one texture for each 8x8 spot. This is the way to get maximum detail, but it is slower. After it became clear to us that people would be willing to take a small hit to the graphics to get a larger boost in speed, Charles recoded the engine to use a technique that FPS and RTS games use. That is... Instead of drawing a unique tile for each 8x8 spot, large sections of the map are drawn using a portion of a much larger texture. The portion shown matches the terrain type, so you still can see what the different terrain types are, but the detail is reduced because you're not seeing a "custom made" tile for that one spot. The thing is that it's hardly noticable at medium range, not noticable at all at far range. Therefore the graphics quality tradeoff isn't as much as we initially thought it would be, but the speed boost is MUCH better than we hoped for. In other words, we didn't use this technique earlier because we thought the tradeoff would be noticably worse graphics for a small increase in speed. We're very glad we were wrong about both Steve </font>

Good work! Can't help the following comment though. Here's a little quote from a post I made the 17:th of september when Nvidias 8800 drivers and hardware where beeing blamed for the problem: As the 8800 problem is gone now with the same drivers, without doing some ugly workaround for a specific card, It's really hard to not put in a little "well?" here /Mazex

Got it now from Gamershell! Woahh! Gotta play!

Running Vista? OpenGL support in Vista is crap. In XP, IL2 runs better in OpenGL than in DIrectX with my 8800GTX at least. I'm running at 100+ fps at maximum settings all the time so in that game OpenGL wirks fine in XP at least. Nevertheless, the terrain engine in CM:SF seems to be the problem just as you say. Check out my thread here where I try out a completely empty map with 1600x1600 meters of dirt with lousy fps (11)... /Mazex

WiC technically inferior to CM:SF? I'm not sure that I agree on that one. Name another game on the market with less bugs in the 1.0 release, and a better RTS 3D engine... Comparing the gameplay in WiC and CM:SF is like comparing Halo and Operation Flashpoint from a realism viewpoint. And yes, Massive has ~100 employees focused on WiC so it's not hard to realize that Charles has no way of doing an engine like that... /Mazex

Well as an FO, beeing outside of the artillery fan should be very rare hopefully? Sorry, couldn't resist it

There sure are problems with the rendering engine. Even though your 22 fps for a primitive map with a bunch of units is better than my 11 with the 8800GTX , it's still WAY to bad. It's not like the GeForce 6800 is a bad card. An old Geforce 2 card should be able to get a way higher score on a practically empty flat map like that... Just my 2 cent's. I'm almost thinking of writing an example game that renders a map like that wuth a few tanks to see what fps I could get... /Mazex

Hmm, interesting... Right in line with the findings here as you say. Did a small test scenario called "The 1600" centered around a very exiting battle over 1600x1600 meters of dirt in the middle of nowhere! It's some completely flat dirt with a house on each side and a tree in the middle to fight over. Company sized units on each side and free LOS naturally! I also did an empty version of the mission with no units, houses or trees, just those damned 1600x1600 meters of dirt! See my tests below (Fraps fps score in yellow as usual): First off, the empty version of the scenario, starting as Blue and looking at the startup view: OK, and then the sharp version, startup blue - before starting the mission timer: OK, finally an image from the battle after starting the timer, lots of carnage! Anyone notice something that is the same on all three images? These amazingly exiting battles are downloadable here (copy to "?\Combat Mission Shock Force\Game Files\Scenarios" directory): The 1600 The 1600 (empty version) /Mazex [ September 23, 2007, 12:40 PM: Message edited by: mazex ]

OK - as there is a lot of talk about this problem beeing caused by bad drivers from Nvidia for the 8800GTX i tried the same test as above on my Media Center... Computer: A7N8X-Deluxe Motherboard AMD Athlon XP3000+ 400Mhz FSB 2 x 512Mb PC3200 memory Asus X800 Pro (256Mb) - Catalyst 7.9 drivers MCE 2005 CMSF Settings - same as above but 1360x768 as that's what my LCD TV likes best (less pixels than 1280x1024 to render by ~30%) First one with a plain dirt map 512m x 512m. The X800 produces 48 fps, the 8800GTX gets 152 1600 x 1600 meter dirt map. It runs at 14 fps while the 8800GTX gets 10 fps. OK, the 8800GTX should increase it's lead instead of loosing it at the larger map - but still 14 fps for showing 1600x1600 meters of dirt for the X800 is REALLY bad to! Fix the underlying problem and everyone will be happy. Stop blaming Nvidia... /Mazex [ September 23, 2007, 10:08 AM: Message edited by: mazex ]

-> continued from post above... OK so I tried out some other tiles to see if it was only some that caused the problems (using the map size of 1024x1024 at first) Grass (drop to ~23 from the ~40 for dirt) : Other stuff (rocks etc seemed to be like dirt, around 40). The highest performer I found was pavement2 ("plain" texture without small rocks and such like dirt and the others). Here it is on the 1024x1024 map - increase to 135... A lot better but still no good for a plain map though!: OK, so I tried to go up to a 1600x1600 meter map with pavement2 (that cause 10 fps with dirt). Went from 10 fps to 65. The interesting thing is that from this altitude they look almost identical : OK guys. Look up how you render the plain tiles. Getting 10 fps for rendering a small square of dirt is NO good. Get some help as that must be really easy to fix. Do you have some array of all the tiles that is looped through and each tile is rendered as a new texture instance? Is it all the "small garbage" on the tiles that is still processed from FAR away? Whatever, it must be possible to fix. I would really like to see the FPS that Charles is getting when rendering a plain 1600m x 1600m map with dirt on the 8800GTX machine that you have no problems with. Rendering a flat terrain box on an 8800GTX should be running at 500+ fps or something. Anyone else with another card that can try a 1600x1600 dirt map and post the fps? Good luck! /Mazex [ September 23, 2007, 02:24 AM: Message edited by: mazex ]

You're naturally right. I did not intend to do the "camera ride" bunch of images at first, I just wanted to show that my fps was not at 10 all the time and realized that a "ride" like that may be interesting to the devs if they have no machine that behaves bad themselves. Well, amazingly I haven't even fired up the editor in CMx2 yet so I did so to try it a bit more structured, to see which objects cause problems etc. It was easier than that. Just showing a plain 1600m x 1600m flat empty dirt map gets my fps down to 10. Here's how I tested (see system specs and CMSF settings in my first post in this thread- yellow Fraps fps numbers in the top right corner): First I did a plain 512x512 dirt map. And previewed it (going straight up from the "start" corner and looking slightly down against the other corner) - the fps is OK but an 8800Gtx card should do better on a plain surface just covered with textures: OK - I increased to 1024x1024. Already in the editor it was becoming a pain to work. The mouse lag is really annoying (8fps!) OK - a preview in the same way as before of the flat 1024x1024 dirt map: OK - lets go to 1600m x 1600m with flat dirt. I didn't go above this as the editor becomes completely unresponsive... Preview in the same manner - here we have those 10 fps. Does not matter with the number of Strykers etc or LOD of distant vehicles. Just painting the completey flat dirt causes the 10 fps! (continued) [ September 23, 2007, 02:21 AM: Message edited by: mazex ]

Good luck! /Mazex

Less stuff - fps going skyrocket... Turning around 180deg and going back again to the origin... (continued) [ September 22, 2007, 03:23 PM: Message edited by: mazex ]

No increase in fps when the M1A1 goes out of view... (continued) [ September 22, 2007, 03:20 PM: Message edited by: mazex ]

Hi! I read this in the CM:SF forum ("What's your frame rate?" thread): I just want to clarify that this is not the case (for me at least!). On some large maps (Allahs Fist etc.) the framerate is awful for me - IN SOME DIRECTIONS! On other maps it's just fine. As an example I've put together a "camera ride" from one end of the first campaign mission map to the other - and back again. I hope that it may be of some help in understanding the 8800GTX problems. Some LOD/Z-buffer problem maybe? Bad models of the Stryker? From one direction (see the jump in fps between image 7 and 8 - the only difference is that a corner of a Stryker is visible on image 7). When going in the other direction (image 22ff) there are no such differences. Well, you have said you don't have any 8800GTX machine that behaves bad so if it's of any help here are the 26 images of the "camera ride". NOTE! fraps fps number in top right corner... My settings and hardware: Game settings: Resolution - 1280x1024 Models - balanced Textures - better Vertical sync - off AA - nope Hardware: Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 (@3.0Ghz - 1200Mhz FSB) Asus Striker Extreme NForce680i SLI MB Asus GeForce 8800GTX 768Mb (163.69 drivers) 2 x 1Gb Corsair PC6400 XMS2 XTREME CAS4 @900Mhz 4-4-4-15 2,1 Volt 1 x RAPTOR 150GB + 2 x Raptor 74Gb (raid 0) + Hitatchi T7K500 320GB Creative SB X-Fi Xtreme Gamer Fatal1ty Professional Dual boot - Windows XP SP2+ and Vista64 Ultimate Starting image - outside of map, looking AWAY from map: Turning around 180deg, looking towards the fort... Moving closer... Moving closer... ... Interesting leap in fps from above image (28->53) when the Stryker goes out of sight... (continued) [ September 22, 2007, 04:06 PM: Message edited by: mazex ]

Download fraps at http://www.fraps.com/ Install it and start it up and minimize it. Then start CMSF and you will have a big yellow number in the top right corner showing your FPS (if you have a Logitech G15 keyboard, you will get a nice graph of the fps in the keyboard LCD too). Good luck! /Mazex

Well, I posted an image from WiC as I have a close relationship with the development team I know it's Dx but it's kind of an interesting comparison as the units used are very similar even though the games are very different in style... Have tried to convince the CEO that a serious turn based version of WiC would be interesting but it's hard to get funding for that as you know... Here's one from an OGL game from my rig taken a few minutes ago if you like that better. An interesting side note is that ET:QW has been "capped" at 30fps. Never goes above it at any settings and almost never drops below it at any settings on the 8800GTX. When the whole world explodes around you it dips to 25-26 at max/max setting. Enemy Territory : Quake Wars OpenGL 1280x1024 ALL settings max (16x aniso, 16x AA) It's rather refreshing to be called unintelligent. Don't remember the last time actually /Mazex

Thats a tone I like more than the "It's the drivers fault". Being a bit pissed off like above is fine with me as long as you don't blame the whole problem on the 8800GTX drivers which was the undertone I felt in some earlier posts. Sure, it's damn annoying trying to track down bugs like this but It can be done! The problem is always the least expected and almost always extremeley easy to correct when found. That does not make it a bit less annoying A side note, do not forget blaming M$ as they where the ones that put the axe in OpenGL by crippling the OGL API in Vista... Good luck! /Mazex

Beeing evil by nature, I could not resist this... If it's the drivers fault then have a look at these two screenshots I captured today using my 8800GTX of two recent games with M1A1:s and T72:s fighting it out (Fraps FPS in yellow in the top right corner): Nvidias latest 163.69 drivers at 1280x1024 CMSF paused before start - balanced models, better textures, 10 fps World in Conflict, battle going on with smoke and helicopters etc - all settings at max, 72 fps Which one looks best and who has used the crappy drivers in the best way is up to you /Mazex

FC2? Great game. Those where the days... Played it recently and it runs like a charm on the 8800GTX /Mazex

Hi! Sorry to say it but it does not fix the issues with my 8800GTX at least... FPS at startup of Allahs Fist seems to have gone from 9 to a weak 10 so it's maybe worth the download? Game settings: Resolution - 1280x1024 Models - balanced Textures - better Vertical sync - off AA - nope My rig: Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 (@3.0Ghz - 1200Mhz FSB) Asus Striker Extreme NForce680i SLI MB Asus GeForce 8800GTX 768Mb 2 x 1Gb Corsair PC6400 XMS2 XTREME CAS4 @900Mhz 4-4-4-15 2,1 Volt 1 x RAPTOR 150GB + 2 x Raptor 74Gb (raid 0) + Hitatchi T7K500 320GB Creative SB X-Fi Xtreme Gamer Fatal1ty Professional Dual boot - Windows XP SP2+ and Vista64 Ultimate

Well, I'm not saying that it isn't a driver issue. What I'm saying is that during the beta phase you have to try out the most popular cards out there in different combinations (GPU/CPU/Chipset etc) to make sure that your code runs well on most of them. In many cases you find out that some cards don't work as fast as they should and when you hunt down those bugs you often realize that you had done something in a sub optimal way. Thus the fix increases the performance for the older cards too. Been there, done that! As ALL other games run fine on my rig, I think it's a bit tough to blame the drivers. I see that ATI gets their share of blame in other threads here too. Really weird - the CMSF renderer is written in an optimal way and for some reason that other developer don't run into the game gets a lot of unexpected driver issues. As both Nvidia and Ati gets blamed, which cards where used during development and testing? Matrox? Sure, this seems to be one of the bugs that is not immediately reproduceable on all 8800 cards as there seems to be some other hardware/software combination that casues it. Still - it seems like many customers are experiencing it and it should not be impossible to track down. Does the Open GL game Quake Wars run on single digit FPS on my rid with ALL custom sliders in the bottom + 16 aniso and 16 AA? Nope, NEVER drops below 30 fps. But I'm fairly sure that during many phases of the development it would have! Looking on the list of sticky threads here it's rather clear that this is not an isolated bug in the 8800 drivers. Fixes for ATI, 7xxx etc. /Mazex