Spring RTS Engine

take the .sdd off of the end of the whakamatunga directory. Someone with your "prowess" and "expertise" should have figured that out easily enough.

I have not loaded up that map in quite a long time. Interestingly enough, I was getting 30fps on it. Wonder what changed?

BTW the "Junk" is there for a reason. It was never my intention to make a serious release of this map in sm3, I only remade it in sm3 to show off the abilities of sm3.

Cease your bickering, please. Neither of you are right.

neddiedrow wrote:Cease your bickering, please. Neither of you are right.

Yes I am. However, argh came in wanting a fight. All he's accomplished so far is to make himself look like an idiot.

Look, do you guys want me to test SM3? Tell me how and I'll set aside some time, and then you will have an impartial contributor to this discussion.

forb, he was trying to help in beginning, then it started getting heated when the name calling started. Please, stop and get back to the productive discussion.

Argh, bear in mind that your machine also is running with some extremely tweaked out settings... for example my card has another 4 pipelines i can unlock but I never like tweaking past the defaults.. to do so may cause issues. You hardware is a few notches faster if only from the tweaks.

my machine is pretty fast and hefty

2.4ghz ath 3200+
6800 rad 256 mem
3 gigs of ram

I know I could upgrade to dual core and a new video card but that is about 800-1000 for me. However, is that really a slow machine?


Zwzsg, all attempts to make usage of the "tiles" feature of mapconv have failed. Smt compression is one of the shittiest programs I have ever seen. However, consider nice rendered ota maps with tiling worked in. They are still huge, smts are build from tons of tiles with MIP levels. That is MUCH larger.

Neddie, I honestly don't care dude. I never wanted this to turn into an argument about sm3, but as usual argh manages to derail a thread. Honestly, this thread has outlived it's usefulness to me and should just be locked *looks for matt*

Nothing against you Neddie, you know better than that, but in what I have been *ahem* "Discussing" with argh... I am right.

Facts, sm3 has some issues. Are they large issues? Not really, but lack of lobby support is the main chokepoint here.

I have been wrestling with my opinion of sm3 for a long time now. In many ways I love it, in some ways it just irritates me. For those of us who are very good with terrains it is both a step forward and a step back at the same time. As long as compatability remains for the sm2 format I will be happy, cause there is a good chance that I will be using both.

I would like for shaders to remain as well for sm3, due to some people will be able to use them, others won't. Honestly, I'm still somewhat shocked I was getting 30 fps out of whakamatuna riri just now. Something must have really changed for that to happen.

SM3 is a completely different way of mapmaking. For example, if oyu normally use a renderer, for sm3 it's like you are manually setting up the processes for it to render in turn. In terms of hardware usage, etc etc etc etc, it is a huge step forward. But from a terrain makers standpoint, it's both a step forward and a step back.

Myself and Icexuick discussed this quite some time back, and pretty much felt the same way about it.

Smoth
Read his 2nd post to me. If he would have talked to you in that condecending tone you would have been irritated to.

Particularly this one here:

Argh wrote: 20 layers? Bet I find that you're using huge texture tiles, too. Don't tell ME I don't know a lot about optimization, bucko. That's really condescending coming from the guy who causes the most complaints about "it's pretty, but"... when he releases maps. There are plenty of ways to cut down to low numbers of tiles and still make things look really good, you're just not used to them.

If that isn't condecending flamebait I don't know what is.

Why do people have trouble understanding that Whakamatunga Riri sm3 is a techdemo of sorts, to show off what sm3 can do.

Technically, I can see the need to use about 4 layers tops and have a really nice looking map.

So really, JC was right. But the thing is, you're prolly not going to be able to use sm3 for ultra detailed complex texturing. Might be able to tho, would probably depend on how you set it up.

Just to give some independent results:

On my AMD 3200+ w/ 1G RAM GeForce 7600 GT it runs between 60 and 90 frames per second, in both 0.74b3 and trunk builds. 0.74b3 seems about 10 fps slower in average, but this could just be variance.

The SM3 options were set as follows (this is the default). Spring was run in windowed mode 1024x768 24 bit color, 24 bit zbuffer. Also, the paths in the .sm3 files are case sensitive on Linux, and the maps folder is lowercase. So I had to fix this before being able to run it. Anyone making sm3 maps please remember this or your maps will be OS dependent: maps/mods/base folders are lowercase!

12fps for me

Thanks much Tobi, I've been checking out some stuff. Losing shaders on sm3 in the curret versions of spring nets me about 20 fps.

So really, JC was right. But the thing is, you're prolly not going to be able to use sm3 for ultra detailed complex texturing. Might be able to tho, would probably depend on how you set it up.

You can use lots of layers, but the essential point is that they shouldn't be active on the same locations. The SM3 renderer optimizes terrain sections where some layers have < 5 % visibility or > 95 % visibility (The layer is either removed or optimized to not use its blendmap)

About lobby support, I can start SM3 maps from tasclient, but I have never tried with more people. Unitsync completely supports sm3 though.

Anyway, I dont really mind the spring sm3 status... I only hope people will be mapping for CE when it works :) I plan on writing a better layer-based map renderer for it.

JC, or tobi, could one of you guys confirm for me whether tasclient supports sm3 currently, and/or in the next version? I have yet to be able to get a sm3 map to show up in the lobby.

jcnossen wrote:

Anyway, I dont really mind the spring sm3 status... I only hope people will be mapping for CE when it works :) I plan on writing a better layer-based map renderer for it.

does that mean that sm3 is not going to get any more work done to it?

I dont mind making the bumpmapping optional (so you can have shadows without bumpmaps), but other than that, yes.

JC, or tobi, could one of you guys confirm for me whether tasclient supports sm3 currently, and/or in the next version? I have yet to be able to get a sm3 map to show up in the lobby.

It has worked for me quite a while already (also in the last version, or even earlier versions) Even without minimap (the minimap view will just show up black in tasclient) it is selectable.

The whole Riverdale pack (which was multiple maps) was like 12 megs. I haven't seen a map in like year that was below 25. Now, I know you think that your map is the best thing since sliced bread... but the whole reason that nobody plays your latest and greatest new map (whatever it is) is because downloading, pathing, and learning the damned thing takes too long.

I've seen mappers claim that visible metal would ugly-up their map, repeating-textures would ugly-up their map, etc. The fact is that I don't care - if you want to make maps that look pretty, post them on your blog or various rendering sites. If you want to make maps that work for Spring, focus on Spring's features. Somebody went to a lot of trouble to implement the repeating-texture system, SM3, and various other bits and pieces of Spring. Post a map that ignores all this and focuses primarily on looking the best shows that you don't care that you're sharing the hard disk with other maps and a full engine.

There is a reason that everyone just plays Small Supreme, Speedmetal, and Altored Divide over and over again. It's convenience. And your continued urge to focus entirely on visual appeal instead of convenience is not only marginalizing your own maps, but everyones, since it means that there's a chilling effect - downloading a map means a headache of waiting, pathing, and learning a map with a non-obvious layout.

I prefer the visual appeal of forbs maps. I do not have altored because it is ugly

i wouldnt really care if all maps were a solid grey texture

Ishach wrote:i wouldnt really care if all maps were a solid grey texture

Heh, wow.

Ishach wrote:i wouldnt really care if all maps were a solid grey texture

By the time I end a game, most of the map is underwater. So I guess in reality it doesn't really matter, but its still something nice to show off.

Ishach wrote:i wouldnt really care if all maps were a solid grey texture

Should we make everything completely flat too?

People make things and some things are supposed to be pretty/look like something. And maps, in my opinion are supposed to look like something or be pretty.