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Lets make a RenegadeX map


kenz3001

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but there very we might be one lol

I'm sorry, what you mean?

I went to investigate if indeed the collision spawned by the CollisionVolume was not able to cull out of the game and yes indeed, they always stayed there (as you said). (checked by opening console: show collision)

So I thought that, if we apply a cull to it by the volume, the collision with the actor should dis appear. Because what I'm actually doing in code is I'm spawning a blockingmesh.

However, if the cull volume does not even work on normal static mesh actors, I can't rely on it being able to cull out other stuff as well. Culling by the volume is enabled on default on all actors so we'll see. I'm crossing my fingers to get this right, else I also might add a lot of static mesh actors manually. I'm not fond of this so I 'd like to sort out those cull volumes first.

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However, if the cull volume does not even work on normal static mesh actors,

Got it to work, don't ask me how and/or why but it works now. Tried several combo's.

I didn't manage to cull the spawned blockingmeshes though. I'll take a closer look at those and see if I can modify the script to get them culled anyway. I'd really like to see this working and I got a feeling somewhere that I'm on the right track.

Gravity volumes as you also proposed are also possible of course, but I'm gonna investigate this first. Will share my knowledge when I got it to work. (or not)

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Awesome dude! Can't believe you got it to work so well! I imagined this process when you talked about it, never realised it would take so much time!

Maybe you can get a better performance if you turn down the overall shadow quality? Since they're on the move I think it's questionable if you really want to have a high shadow quality. Especially for the trees in the middle .. I can only imagine that they're causing the performance hit and drag FPS to 33 overall.

Maybe this is a good start to begin map optimisations? I'd like to see how you optimise your map.. making the map pretty is pretty much shown already (I think, prove me wrong). For ex; I don't think many people know that Mesa_II has 64 light bounces and therefore takes a shit while to render etc etc.. Making the stuff look pretty is something that also can be done of camera perhaps? Except for the helipad's I think

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You can also use the foliage for the trees (once again) and add the foliagecollisionvolume if you want to.

Here's the stuff you need: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/j6t9bx7zdkdm ... NDx0a?dl=0

Just copy-paste the folder into your main folder. The new collision works fine in my opinion. Once I culled the stuff out, performance was great. Even some guys testing the stuff said performance was good, so.. At the moment, servers only need a mutator to run this script. Maybe we can get RypeL to integrate these files into RenX_Game someday, that'd be great.

There are a few conditions on this new volume:

1. Foliage which supposed to have new collision actors MUST have an existing collision mesh already computed in the static mesh editor, else it will fail to apply

2. Everything inside the volume gets a new collision actor. if a foliage item is not completely in, it won't get collision.

3. Be careful with adding collision to tiberium. A quick workaround is to remove the collision on the tiberium mesh in the static mesh editor to not have it have collision inside the foliage volume

4. Servers MUST run the mutator (at the moment, maybe we can get this custom volume in the renx_game.u in the future)

5. Foliage culling (the instanced mesh) is still done via the foliage tool, along with it's grouping etc.. The invisible collision actor is completely separated from this foliage instance in terms of spawn rate

Spawned collision actors will get culled out at a distance of 500 by default. This is more than enough because you only need the collision mesh up close, when you 'hit' something.

It also accepts cull distance volumes if you want to bring it down even more.

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right now im trying out some other stuff ... but ill give that volume a go soon

in the mean time 60fps ! (well sort of)

Nice! The moment you have set the LODdistancefactor of the landscape to 3 your decals dis appeared. Maybe it's got something to do with that!

Honestly I don't think we need to place cells in the air because that would only mean we would cull out stuff above or below us.. since most of the to-be-culled-crap is horizontal anyway, why bother placing cells in the air?

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Heya Kenz, I just saw episode 63, where you put the FoliageCollisionVolume in. Do note that we have been testing with that in the official testing server. I managed to cull the invisible blocking volumes out for FPS sake, but experience told us that the server is having a hard time calculating those meshes somehow. We don't know exactly where it comes from, but everyone in the server in my map (with foliagecollisionvolume) seems to have a high ping. After some googeling, it turned out that it was most likely that the server is calculating something. I'm working on a new version of the script which checks for distance between the player and the foliage, and only spawns it when it's closer than 400..

At the moment it spawns at once and then culls out.

Also, you referenced the wrong thread in your comment section:

viewtopic.php?f=136&t=75255&p=150513#p150513

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cool ... i was trying to attach the volume to the player ... but the volume needs to be dynamic for that ... big concern i have is if it works for bots
I'm considering coding an alternative scenario where we use the 'touch' event by any actor (bots included) and then spawn in the collision. would mean that we can regulate the load with the size of our volumes.. so, the bigger the volume, the bigger the load at once. The smaller the volume, the smaller the load (nearby)

This also has it's advantages on the server side. (server should have less load, unless everyone starts tree hugging all at once but I doubt that will ever happen)

At the moment i'm looking into spawning in the collision when an actor is nearby (looking for distance) but I'm running into many issues there..

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Okay, while the Day/Night cycle seems cool, we really need to test how much impact it can make. I tried to tweak brightness of my Directional Light through matinee this one time and the result was quite horrible performance-wise

I don't know if you played the game Interstellar Marines over the free weekend, if not you can check it out on YT

but...

In that game night time is literally so dark that you can't see enemy unless he is 5 meters in front of you. Not knowing whether the enemy is also sitting in the dark near you and having to rely on almost exclusively on sound is very adrenaline pumping. If that could be replicated on RenX then sneaking into the base would take whole new dimension.

Although I imagine that would require putting restriction on gamma setting.

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Wow played for the first time, not bad my fps was ok, hovering in the mid 50s

Some issues, on nod by the heli pad there clearly needs to be a blocker because you can basically go out side the map and drive on hils and stuff that are clearly not meant to be driven on, or are they?

same thing found various parts where you can escape the inner boundary and roam around.

the day / night is nice, however, the night seems to bright, is is possible to make it darker like field dark?

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Average FPS is about 40 here. High = 50 low = 30. But I knew that FPS was going to be a hit with dynamic lights. Its looking cool though! I really like the cycle!

As previously mentioned by Alkaline, the night time seems a bit off.. Is there a way in which you can set a float for the trace distance to cancel it out? To me it looked like we were in Alpha Centauri with the 2 suns rather than it being a moon ;).

On the bright side: Your custom map really looks awesome. I know it was a drag to create / release this all by yourself and even show it to people while you;re doing it.... almost there!!

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  • Totem Arts Staff

i can make the night time darker easy and as for the bounders well i missed them out until i get the pt stuff fully working

this was an alpha release its no were near finished just i dont wonna do any more untill we have the new sdk (i could use the dev udk but i feel thats abit unfair to you guys )

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New collision volume works perfectly. https://www.dropbox.com/sh/j6t9bx7zdkdm ... NDx0a?dl=0

Features:

- Use for adding collision to foliage.

- Only foliage which has an existing collision mesh gets the blockingmesh spawned to it. So, stuff like grass etc, don't get the blockingmesh because they don't have a collision mesh by default in their properties

- The foliage spawns in when ever a vehicle touches the volume, so, mappers beware!! Keep an eye upon the sizes of your volume.

- More trees = more load, keep that in mind, you as a mapper have total control over the amount of trees to be loaded with blockingmeshes. The smaller the volumes the less load you will have on the server the better the performance.

- If you have non-flying levels, keep in mind that you only have to rig the outer ring of the forest with this volume, since the inner ring will be inaccessible to vehicles anyway.

- The collision despawns (or gets destroyed actually) after ALL the vehicles inside the volume have left the volume. So, If there is still a vehicle inside the volume (also when empty) the collision will still stay there. (Hence the importance of the size of your volume)

Thanks to Handepsilon for coding the last bit and helping me debugging. Thanks to others which have helped me out creating this, they're mentioned in the file.

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  • 2 months later...
  • Totem Arts Staff

well i dont know if i should use the volume with all the mesh instanced i have in the map ...i plan to add more and more lol

but i forgot to post this here been working on stuff off camera

footage from a youtube live stream (think this is how im going to do the vids for the map from now on)

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  • Totem Arts Staff
Wow, great to see that the Helipad is back! Nice work remaking it.

Will it be a destroyable structure like the other buildings?

no the pad is not a "building" but it is possible to tie it in to a buildings health (so if a building is dead it will up the cost of vehicals "pp" or disable vehicle spawning "WF/Air" but right now it cant take damage like a building

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Yoo Kenz, as suggested ingame / on IRC:

Wouldn't it be cool to make the path between enemy bases defended by some automatic base defences (turrets or AGT / Oby) but that you can either choose to destroy them or use the water (a bit like in coastal) to get behind enemy lines with units / vehicles.

A capturable flightdeck carrier from which you can fly planes is also cool, but maybe over the top.

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