Rathmor comments and suggestions

[HwitVlf]

you and John swear by his stuff, and I trust both of you 100%..... 

Just to say, I haven't tried Ex since it got out of it's infant stage (year(s) back) so all my information comes through Ben and Mick. I can't make a recommendation one way or the other with no experience. 

[Madison Lastrega]

Hey Ben,
  Just wanted to make a public comment on your game :-)   excellent work sir, just awesome, or as they say in the UK smashing..... I watched some of your you tubes videos, and againg just f*$%ing awesome work sir, you have became a meta master if I must say, my knowledge of meta is crap compared to yours now sir...I want know more about rigging , like a simple tiny creature from start to end, would be nice.....     But I can't tell you enough how far you have surpassed me my friend....   And I want everyone to know my game will NOT , I repeat NOT look as awesome as rathmore.... My friend besides the menus, it does not look like a som game.... You should be commended, and I hope you will continue to bestow your plethora of knowledge to me sir :-)     oh yeah I could listen to your smooth brithish accent for hours by the way, making your video tutorials most pleasant :-) ....................ML

[Smittiox]

Hey Verdite 

    Been a while eh? Thought I'd try out your demo again. Didn't get far back in february but I can say it sure looks great man but it ran so choppy for me It was less than enjoyable unfortunately   I think it may just be a low memory problem on my end or some setting I'm overlooking. I can run the demo smoothly in the tiniest window setting but I'm old n blind lol. Any suggestions man ?

   I'm trying to run it now on an HP Pavillion laptop with an AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-60 2GHZ (rated at 3.2 GHZ by can_you_run_it) , Nvidia GeForce 7150M/nForce 630M graphics, 3G Ram and vista OS. I ran it before on a toshiba satellite L455D with win 7 and got the same thing though. I can't remember all the specs off hand but i know it's a walmart special with a decent card and memory but a junk 1.6GHZ single core. I'd like to put an AMD Turion Ultra  ZM87 2.4 GHZ dual core in it and see what happens though. Didn't even try it on the old dell D610 with XP  i can do about everything else on it though except high poly stuff (20k + per model) and for some reason X2MDL doesn't work on it either. may be the old shader 2.0 .. Som imp cries about the shader too. ,i dunno it works on the HP and the toshiba fine *shrugs* anyhoo, this is getting away from the demo ... Probably something I should direct to Holy Diver.
   
   I put the last patch you posted in and was ducking and jumping around somewhat here n there Pretty cool stuff ! I wandered around enjoying the scenery and plants. It's got a cold damp feel too it. Like after a light rain on a november morning. But like I said, the 'choppiness' was such an aggravation I didn't play long. It's looking really great though man. I can sure  appreciate all the work you've put into this project. My wife liked the pics of the 'egg thief' enemies. Dented armour from headbutts for sure lol. Hmm, mabey damaged and fixable armour is in the future ? Put that old dwarf from KFTAC back to work !!

hmm, anything else ... Oh yeah, I liked your rigging vid on youtube. It helped me to understand some things better. Anchorless bones are great ! I agree with one of the  comments. You're very pleasant to listen too. Ever thought of doing any voice acting or narration ?

[Verdite]

Hello Smittiox its good to see you around again and your funky new avatar! It really reminded me of this head item from Virtua Fighter 4 : evolution!

Actually the problem is neglect on my end. The walls in the village are too high poly, and they are four sided  which means that when you are looking at the front of a wall your computer is loading the sides, and back too... I dont really have any excuses other than rushing the demo out for christmas. But because someone has actually posted about this issue im willing to put time into fixing it.

The demo actually needs a rehaul in terms of visuals and I dont think its style will be consistent with the final game. If I went back to remake it, it would take a bit of doing ; namely the NPCs dont match my new ones in terms of quality or aesthetics. But in your case I wouldnt mind fixing the map pieces.

Before you post to Holy, I can tell you that x2mdl is a conversion program for direct x files, meaning that it is only usable for converting animated models saved in this format. It was created so that the likes of the eggthief could be put into SOM - thanks for the comments by the way! I have put alot of my life into my game but its been worth it.

Thats kind of you, again, to mention about my voice. It has a calming effect on people, a bit like the 'voice of the emperor' skill that Imperials have in Oblivion, though I never play Imperial   

[Smittiox]

Hey Verdite !

  Lol, never played virtua fighter 4 but I see what ya mean.  I was feelin silly and MS paint was there so ...  Mabey I should give him a beanie too.

   Yeah, That'd be a real job to fix the demo and you've got a lot on your plate as it is I'm thinking. Much appreciated but no rush or pressure if ya can't find the time :) Been looking forward to Rathmore along with everyone else  I got the processor for the Toshiba a few days ago but haven't put it in yet. I'm just curious to see if the demo will run with it or not. Either way it'll be a cheap fix for an old 'slobot' computer. I saw a processor for sale with 16 (!) cores the othe day online. geesh ! lol

    x2mdl on the old dell will convert the models but not textures for some reason. Gives me the direct x is likely not on the machine messeage but it is and it's the most current  DX9. *shrugs & blames Dell* lol. I just keep droppin' em through on the other machines in the house if I can't get it going on there. btw, I thought mabey the shader was the problem on the Dell for x2mdl. It works fine on the toshiba and the HP which have 3.0 or better ( not sure with the toshiba but it's only a couple years old)

    Just started a new game on Skyrim a few days ago. Bought the disk with the DLC's on it for ps3. I don't play for the Imperial scum either lol. I mean, C'mon .. By the Eight ? It's 9 !! Long live Talos & the Stormcloaks !! Been fiddling around with Hearthfire. You can build things for the houses but the locations are preset and after using the SOM editor it seems limited but it's a lot of fun. Paid a bard to come n play but he's a jerk lol. Yells at me for picking up things in my own home. Punched him once. Bet he's an imperial 

Take care n see ya around :)

[Holy_Diver]

If you think its the shader you can manually adjust the rathmor ex.ini file in the demo and edit;

directx_version_to_use_for_window = 9 (change this number to 7)

One of the best things about SomEx is that it allows game users to change game preferences.

http://en.swordofmoonlight.org/wiki/Sword_of_Moonlight_Extension_Library/list_of_extensions

7 is SOM's native mode* You want 9 for performance. SOM is very slow on low-profile gaming boxes because modern day gaming works on the GPU so the CPUs are often much weaker than CPUs were when SOM was released in 2000. Not to mention SOM is single-threaded, so it uses only one CPU and nowadays CPUs are much weaker because they work cooperatively.

My XP box is pretty new. Its CPUs are effectively 800Mhz. My primary goal right now is to get SOM games running smoothly on this class of machinery. Basically PCs built for applications, not computationally-intensive-video-game-like OS's like Windows Vista/8. I'm quite happy spending $150 or less for a CPU-GPU-mainboard combo myself. Bygone are the days when each of those components would set you back 150$.


*EDITED: Besides, I don't make a point of maintaining 7. So it's likely to have bugs that go unnoticed for months if not years.

[dmpdesign]

If you end up basically rewriting the whole engine, will you make a 64 bit version that would allow for use of the threading capabilities and memory etc?  I mean its not as if SOM should really require it, but if you eventually get some zealous fan that wants to make something on the engine using more modern graphics it could help :)

[Holy_Diver]

If you end up basically rewriting the whole engine, will you make a 64 bit version that would allow for use of the threading capabilities and memory etc?  I mean its not as if SOM should really require it, but if you eventually get some zealous fan that wants to make something on the engine using more modern graphics it could help :)

64-bit doesn't really matter. x64 processors can run in 32-bit mode. And there is nothing much to be gained by not doing so. There are some minor benefits for multithreading since you can atomically lock 64bits at a time instead of 32. And likewise for parallel operations, usually over matrices and vectors you can shunt more memory. But 64 bit mainly just exists for more accurate floating point calculations (for science) and more memory at the driver level (32bits is more than enough address space for a multitask application.)

Games are normally effectively single-threaded. No mainstream game would risk being multi-threaded. SomEx will always be single threaded, and 32bit if it interacts with From's images. However the graphics can be on a separate thread from the main game loop. As can the sound and input. The new renderer is part of Somplayer.dll which is designed to be massively multi-threaded in a way that is really best described as experimental. In case the future lies in hundreds of CPUs working cooperatively. When SomEx.dll is built, it uses some preprocessor macros that makes the Somplayer.dll code behave as if it is single-threaded.

So you effectively have two game platforms, one conservative, and one experimental. The experimental version also includes editing tools, so that it should be able to edit the game in game. It's an all in one design. Any application can link to Somplayer.dll. It also includes editors for everything and an artificial intelligence API.


PS: These things have already been implemented. There is open source code at svn.swordofmoonlight.net.