Spring RTS Engine

Forboding Angel wrote:BTW an easy way to fix particle count in BA is to just switch out cegs for nanoparticles (and yes, it is pretty much as easy as it sounds).

A very good point, it would increase fps a lot in majority games played.

By the time units lag the game because there is so many of them, there is often a shitload of nanos that built said units all going full power.

Limit nano particle count in settings, done.

Auswaschbar wrote:Limit nano particle count in settings, done.

Tell that to the vast hordes of newbies.

hey regret, i heard you could limit nano particle count in settings

how about we add a CEG particle limit to spring?
or a way to control the number of particles spawned based on a particle quality setting.

eg. HIGH will spawn as many as desired
MED will spawn 75% as many
LOW will spawn 50% or something...

The FPS management widget is supposed to automatically turn down the particle count as the game gets laggy. Maybe it should be turned on by default? Also, I think it would be better if it only had the ability to turn your graphics down from the settings you have specified, instead of being able to turn on reflective water and things like that. I can't even use the widget right now since it tries to turn on water mode 3 which crashes on ATI cards.

fps manager should die.

thesleepless wrote:how about we add a CEG particle limit to spring?
or a way to control the number of particles spawned based on a particle quality setting.

eg. HIGH will spawn as many as desired
MED will spawn 75% as many
LOW will spawn 50% or something...

What is 75% as many? 75% of infinity is still infinity.

How about high=unlimited
medium=10,000
low = 5000
[very low = 1000]

thesleepless wrote:how about we add a CEG particle limit to spring?

I made CEG created particles honor the particle limit a few days ago, though the entire way particles are limited could use some more improvements.

For example, it should be possible to let it degrade more gracefully then what happens now. For this something like you suggest with Low, Medium, High prio particles could be used.

These levels would correspond naturally to the 'particle saturation' (that is, current number of particles divided by maximum number of particles) at which they stop being spawned, e.g. Low = stop spawning if particlesSaturation > 0.5, Medium = stop spawning if particlesSaturation > 0.75, High = stop spawning if particlesSaturation > 1.

Tobi wrote:These levels would correspond naturally to the 'particle saturation' (that is, current number of particles divided by maximum number of particles) at which they stop being spawned, e.g. Low = stop spawning if particlesSaturation > 0.5, Medium = stop spawning if particlesSaturation > 0.75, High = stop spawning if particlesSaturation > 1.

How long does a particle last? If it's only a few seconds or so then we can afford to get it wrong a few times. Using a heuristic like the above might result in under-showing of particles when the game happens to have a lot of low-priority ones.

It seems like you could do something smarter here if the engine were allowed to learn during the game and go slightly over the limit. So by default all particles spawn, but when the engine starts going over the limit it begins moving these low/medium thresholds down until it gets it right.