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Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 13 Jan 2013, 13:27
by Renwood
Well our team has been hard at work rendering up a storm working on the"Myth 2 HD" plugin.
This will make everything in Myth 2 HD and will work on ALL normal Bungie maps or any 3rd party map with normal Myth 2 units, including Multiplayer, coop or single player, all new and HD and with flowing blood!
New units, New effects,TONS more body parts and all forms of battlefield detritus, more angles for just about everything, from a sword laying on the ground, to heads, arms, and middle fingers...PLUS all new blood globs trailing through the air, new aMinals galore, same exact myth 2 gameplay and unit types, just with a much needed facelift.
Look forward to optimizations that will enable people to run it super smooth and fast on just about any system ever made.
If you like playing with super low res sprites made circa 1998 and do not want a new fresh look to enemies you blow up, hack to bits and utterly smear over the terrain in game, then keep on doing it. If you think its 2013 and Myth needs the same gameplay but with a little something extra so it will no longer look like uber pixelated garbage, then this new release we are working on is for you!
I know none of you really deserve such FREE awesomeness bestowed upon you, but what the hell I am an Altruistic Super Peachie Fuck after all.
-Renwood
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 13 Jan 2013, 16:37
by c⁄J⁄Iılk c⁄J⁄Iån ◊§t◊
Awesome, fuck yea
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 13 Jan 2013, 18:45
by Pogue
If it will help out I will pledge 50 cents to help pay for and "kickstart" the promotional campaign of this "free awesomeness" you are bestowing upon us super peachie fuck.
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 14 Jan 2013, 11:57
by grim
Is this the same or separate project from that HD project Jongod has been advertising for the past 3 years or something.
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 15 Jan 2013, 00:34
by Jon God
grim wrote:Is this the same or separate project from that HD project Jongod has been advertising for the past 3 years or something.
I haven't been advertising it for 3 years. People just keep asking me about it. I wouldn't talk about it unless I had something to share.
Also, this is not the same project. This would be the continuation Renwood's Myth IV.
-JG
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 15 Jan 2013, 04:39
by Renwood
Incorect JG.
What I am talking about is a plugin that makes all Myth 2 games HD. Multiplayer or singleplayer/coop as long as the units are unedited, so all Bungie netmaps will work with our Myth 2 HD plugin, as well as 3rd party maps. An example of something it would not work with would be a Mazz type plugin, with edited units.
Our content is higher def then JG's project. Our goal is to stay true to the Bungie look and feel of the original Bungie units and Myth 2's gameplay.
As I stated before, with all new effects and ambient life and new body parts and other peachieness.
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 15 Jan 2013, 05:46
by Jon God
Renwood wrote:Incorect JG.
What I am talking about is a plugin that makes all Myth 2 games HD. Multiplayer or singleplayer/coop as long as the units are unedited, so all Bungie netmaps will work with our Myth 2 HD plugin, as well as 3rd party maps. An example of something it would not work with would be a Mazz type plugin, with edited units.
Our content is higher def then JG's project. Our goal is to stay true to the Bungie look and feel of the original Bungie units and Myth 2's gameplay.
As I stated before, with all new effects and ambient life and new body parts and other peachieness.
Which to me, sounds like a visual tagset of your Myth IV?
I am not going to get into an argument about projects and will step out now.
-JG
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 15 Jan 2013, 06:19
by Renwood
JG, the Difference is our last HD project had a ton of "Myth IV" style weapons and attacks for units with inventorys and it ONLY worked on predefined maps of our choosing. This new offering is also streamline and optimized so it will play faster for people on modern versions of myth 2.
Our new HD project will work on ANY map with normal myth 2 units on it, and it will only include myth 2 styled gameplay, like M2 attacks and weapons/abilities.
Not sure how you think there is anything to argue about here...
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 15 Jan 2013, 09:48
by Renwood
This is showing what the renders look like and how we choose what quality to go for the final renders that appear in game.
Now the bigger they get rendered, the longer it takes to well...render them.
So its a matter of time required for the puter to rendy poo, and how much time you want to have your computer taken over by stuff that sucks the memory and CPU power of your system. There are many sequences to render. Taunting, attack, block, dying, idles, walks and more. Body parts must also be set up and rendered.
So with the guy thats 513 pixels tall he renders in about 1:50 mins per frame. There are about 600 frames, not including body parts.
The guy thats 626 pixels tall takes about 3:00 mins per frame. So seeing as how it would also make for a much larger collection, since he is WIDER and TALLER and takes longer to render. We will go for the sweet spot of 513 tall piggy! Oink Oink Mutha Fuckas!
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 15 Jan 2013, 14:24
by grim
Jon God wrote:grim wrote:Is this the same or separate project from that HD project Jongod has been advertising for the past 3 years or something.
I haven't been advertising it for 3 years. People just keep asking me about it. I wouldn't talk about it unless I had something to share.
-JG
Well, the beta version has been hovering around for at least two. Was just wondering if this is the same thing.
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 15 Jan 2013, 19:33
by punkUser
grim wrote:
Well, the beta version has been hovering around for at least two. Was just wondering if this is the same thing.
I think you're thinking of Jon God's detail textures. That's a separate thing (landscape) from these alternate high-resolution sprites.
Looking forward to seeing this Renwood, but please don't make them some ridiculous size. All that does is waste memory. Make them the resolution such that you get a ~1:1 pixel mapping at *normal zoomed out distances* on a reasonable resolution display (say 1080p). Resolution beyond that does literally nothing other than waste memory and make it unplayable on lower end machines. If you are saying you want to optimize them to run on a wider variety of hardware, not going nuts on resolution is precisely the way.
Also pay careful attention to the hue data. It was pretty haphazard/messed up in a lot of sprites in the original game (see HG's swords for instance), so that would be good to fix as its even more obvious at higher resolutions.
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 15 Jan 2013, 23:18
by Renwood
Thanks for the advice punkuser!
The thing is, ooga can allways batch action the renders in photoshop to make them smaller.
I just allways want to have the highest quality (that wont take 4 days to render) as a base, and it can allways get lowered/smaller in size later.
This is the same approach I took with the Music production on our "Myth IV" Musical score.
Most of the problems with the renders that have ever been created in myth, can be attributed to the fact that they get lower from 16, 24 or 32 bit color into 8 bit color so they can appear. This can really be seen in Myth's colormaps getting murdered with lowered detail from their original Photoshop RGB forms. Now that 8 bits is not the only options for collections, they should look a whole lot better.
Seeing as you are a Graphical programmer punkuser, you already know alll that though ~8^)
I know JG was working on TFL solo map detail textures, hows that going? Last I saw it was very promising indeed.
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 15 Jan 2013, 23:22
by Renwood
O yea, I also added 2 new frames of animation to the Maul's block today!
His normal block is almost undetectable and really sucked, (He would have been stuck in the head by swords had he tried to block like that in reality) so I added a whole....2 MORE FRAMES OF ANIMATION!
BIG WHOOP DEE DO! Lookit me! Im using my knowledge gained while training From the Kukkiwon To help make the animations for the denizens of myth less lame!
Now we will see if ooga can add these new frames without it chaging the timing of anything in combat, if not, they will get axed!
O well, gotta take ooga's advice on all collection related thingies since hes like the master ambering collections.
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 16 Jan 2013, 04:02
by punkUser
Renwood wrote:
The thing is, ooga can allways batch action the renders in photoshop to make them smaller.
Sure, render them at whatever resolution you want, just optimize the final collection for regular zoom levels. IMHO it's not a good trade-off at all to make it so that when I zoom in they are super-high detailed because having that detail cuts by a large fraction the amount of people that can use the plugin at all. Zooming in is sort of a gimmick anyways - for real gameplay people always sit as max zoom out, so optimize for that.
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 17 Jan 2013, 00:56
by Renwood
Keep in mind as I have said it will be optimized and streamlined compared to our HD offering from January of 2010.
You know, when creating new content, it is not very logical to lower the quality level based on idea some people who have really old computers will not be able to play it as fast. For instance, when Myth 2 came out in 1998, I had to build an entirely new computer because my old TFL computer (Pentium 100Mhz with 32 GIGs of RAM and a 2 MEG video card S3 Virge baby!!!)
would get like 3 FPS if a single fire arrows was burning on the ground. Myth 2 was virtually unplayable at all other times for me.
I would not ask a developer to hinder their new content vision or lower the quality of the content they are creating because I had an old computer. It is 2013 after all, my computer is from 2005, and It plays our stuff just fine. I would rather have our stuff look as good as it can, and have less people play it due to their old computers limits, then to have less people who even WANT to play it because its a lower quality level and less impressive then we can produce and the modern myth engine can handel. Part of being a GAMER, is upgrading your system so you can take part in the fun of new content. I have bought new video cards, RAM and copies of $50 games just so I could play a New Mod or Total Conversion on a game like battlefield 1942 (Desert Combat) or battlefield 2142 (First Strike) Did people not Buy DVD players since they would have to upgrade from VHS? Have people not moved from DVD to Blue rays to get higher Def viewing of new content?
Its kind of why they do not develop for the N64 anymore or the SNES or Mac 0S 9, or still release movies on VHS.
People can always lower the resolution, or close some background applications to dedicate more system power to the game they are playing if they need more speed.
Pushing the limits of what games can do, and finding work arounds to achieve the desired look and feel of a gameplay vision, is what has driven our team for over the last decade to create new content.
I have had many people tell me there were very pleased that there was a graphical release for myth that had such high quality content, it gave them a good reason to upgrade their Video card, CPU or RAM.
I completely dout that the computers that met the recommended system specs for myth 2 when it was released, would be able to play
Mazz VI. So does that mean the developers of Mazz should limit what the creative vision for the series should be, because people with a system that meets the recommended system specs for Myth 2 would get poor performance? After all, Myth 2 is almost 15 years old, why should a computer from the same era as when the game was released not be able to play all the NEW content that is made for Myth2?
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 17 Jan 2013, 17:11
by c⁄J⁄Iılk c⁄J⁄Iån ◊§t◊
Zooming in is sort of a gimmick anyways - for real gameplay people always sit as max zoom out, so optimize for that.
You don't zoom in to micro your melee punk? Scoff, noob
From what I understand this plug will allow people to opt in or out of HD and still play with one another, so I guess shooting high makes sense, no?
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 17 Jan 2013, 18:24
by punkUser
Renwood wrote:
You know, when creating new content, it is not very logical to lower the quality level based on idea some people who have really old computers will not be able to play it as fast.
You missed my point. I'm not asking for you to "lower the quality level" specifically to cater to older computers - I'm asking you to not add resolution that is only visible when zooming in. No one plays zoomed in, so you're adding very little value by providing those resolutions and you are doing actual harm to *all* players by wasting that memory. You also make the entire experience more jittery since bigger sprites take longer to decode/upload when they are used.
This isn't hyperbole... in 1.8 with mipmapping *that data will never be used*. It will instead use the lower mip levels that correspond to the actual resolution you're seeing it at (you're welcome for fixing the sparkly/flickery silliness in TWA btw
). It'll just waste VRAM, RAM and virtual address space.
So yeah, don't cater to ancient computers, but also don't cater to being zoomed in. Provide adequate resolution, but not overkill. Realize that there are modern computers that are lower-end or mobile, and if you optimize appropriately your stuff can run all the way down to tablets and below. Thus this has nothing to do with your "artistic vision"... we're talking purely whether or not you're going to use resolutions that are only visible when zoomed in *at the expense of* playability. I say that's a poor trade-off.
Claiming people need to "upgrade" for Myth at this stage is a bit silly. We're not talking about a legitimate use of computing resources here... going nuts on sprite resolution just demonstrates how inefficient sprites are when scaled up, so please keep it reasonable and try to understand the limits of the underlying technology that you are working with.
Renwood wrote:
People can always lower the resolution, or close some background applications to dedicate more system power to the game they are playing if they need more speed.
No they can't - that won't help if you've included ridiculous sprite sizes. By using really high resolutions you are basically making it unplayable for people with nothing they can do to adjust.
Anyways, you can obviously do whatever you want, but I'd personally just like to see the plugin be more broadly useful this time around.
Milk Man wrote:
You don't zoom in to micro your melee punk? Scoff, noob
Hehe, yeah I've never found the need to zoom in to click stuff myself. It's quite large already at max zoom, but then I do have a pretty large monitor
Milk Man wrote:
From what I understand this plug will allow people to opt in or out of HD and still play with one another, so I guess shooting high makes sense, no?
That's not possible right now. Plugins will require everyone to have them, same as usual.
Same old Song and Dance
Posted: 17 Jan 2013, 23:40
by blahblahblah
This getting to be like Jeykll and Hyde with Renwood doing his good cop bad cop routine. [Sometimes even in a single post] Good cop, the "Salesman" says whatever he thinks will get people to support the latest incarnation of his 10 year old project, while Bad Cop, a misunderstood egocentric artist, sometimes actually tells the truth as he rails at anyone who can't understand and support his artistic 'vision'.
Good cop says :
Renwood wrote:Look forward to optimizations that will enable people to run it super smooth and fast on just about any system ever made.
Renwood wrote:Keep in mind as I have said it will be optimized and streamlined compared to our HD offering from January of 2010.
Then Bad Cop says :
Renwood wrote:...it is not very logical to lower the quality level based on idea some people who have really old computers will not be able to play it as fast.
and
Renwood wrote: I would rather have our stuff look as good as it can, and have less people play it due to their old computers limits, then to have less people who even WANT to play it because its a lower quality level and less impressive...
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 18 Jan 2013, 00:54
by c⁄J⁄Iılk c⁄J⁄Iån ◊§t◊
but then I do have a pretty large monitor
Compensating for something?
That's not possible right now. Plugins will require everyone to have them, same as usual.
Aw that sucks... thought it could work like HD textures.
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 18 Jan 2013, 01:17
by punkUser
Milk Man wrote:
Compensating for something?
My tiny... speakers?
It's mainly for work (I do graphics/games-related stuff). I just get to use it for gaming as a side benefit
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 18 Jan 2013, 02:40
by Renwood
punkuser
Some maps are pretty zoomed in because the mesh is high, and other players zoom in to micro, and I like to zoom in to find tiny objects in the middle of piles of bodies and stuff on the battlefield. Like roots or puss, or anything else that kinda tiny.
Why exactly are you acting like MIP mapping will not fix the exact problem of having large textures even when zoomed all the way?
You know as well as I do, that MIP mapping is better then even LOD (Level of detail) in most games where there are a finite amount of multiple quality levels for objects. The lower quality being displayed when the camera is futherest away from the object, and the highest quality being shown when very close to the object. Just as Myrd explained how programaticly These textures changed on the fly in 2009. Being an Open GL programmer you are very aware of these things. Yet you act like they do not exsist, or maybe are unaware of how much they help speed things up in game.
I dont know if you even bothered to look at our Kickstarter video and video updates that show THOUSANDS of sprites in formations and the maximum number of units on the screen running around at the same time and max projectiles flying all over and a HUGE view distance rendering/showing 80% of the ENTIRE MAP from Gate Of Storms....because if you did, you would have noticed it played fast and smooth FPS even will all the crazy amount shit on the screen at the SAME time, and O yes, ALL the stuff on screen was HD collections. Maybe it is punkuser that needs to have a better understanding of what is going on behind the scenes and what Myth is capable of. O yea AND it was looking THIS GOOD with my computer from 2005, with AMD Athalon 64 X2 @ 2.2 GHZ, 2 gigs of system RAM and a 256 Meg Video card. As allways, our Dev team knows the power of the fetures implemented into the myth engine and the capabilites of the myth engine even better then the people who HAVE the source code and make all the changes.
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 18 Jan 2013, 02:42
by Renwood
Hey Blablalbla, I see you only have made 1 post and joined january 17th just so you could post in my thread with negative BS. Could you maybe be a magma devotee signing up under a dummy screename?
Use your normal myth persona, or are you too scarwed?
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 18 Jan 2013, 02:58
by Renwood
Today, I made some new frames of animations for the Maul, and even some new dead bodies!
Because Myth can NEVER have enough dead body variations on the map at one time!
Made some all new body parts and Gore for the maul as well. He will be the MOST FUN to blow up myth unit ever created!
-Renwood
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 18 Jan 2013, 02:59
by punkUser
Ren don't turn this discussion stupid please. I'm the one who knows this stuff, so perhaps just listen to me and accept what I say instead of the usual passive-aggressive nonsense. If you legitimately want to learn I'm happy to help educate, but if you just want to troll and try and confuse less technical Myth folks, I'm not going to waste my time (again).
Assuming for one more post that you do want to learn...
Renwood wrote:
Why exactly are you acting like MIP mapping will not fix the exact problem of having large textures even when zoomed all the way?
Mipmapping prevents the higher resolution textures from being sampled when they are not need, but they still consume VRAM, and thus they still have to be uploaded as well. The main cost of sprites is VRAM, not sampling, so mipmapping doesn't help you here. The main reason it was added was to do proper prefiltering of the sprites so that you don't get flickery, undersampling high-frequency detail when they are minified.
Be careful with your next reply if you want to continue the discussion...
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 18 Jan 2013, 03:15
by Renwood
Thats a rather odd tone you take with me if your concern is to help and educate. But I wil take you at face value for your word.
I am sure you do not think I make forum posts to spread the word about new projects we work on, just to start flame wars.
I understand what you are saying, my point is, what does what you are saying matter at all about the Vram, if my computer from 2005 can still handel it just fine with 1.8 and even with all the thousands of HD sprites on the screen and gigantic view distances being rendered?
I am sure you would agree that having over 8000 HD sprites on the screen and miles of view distance of virtual myth world units
not something the average plugin, or myth player would ever even be trying to render at the same time.
And yet, on my 8 year old computer, it plays nice and smooth.
I could see your point IF I had like a quad core or 8 core Beast with 16 or 32 GIGs of RAM and a 1 or 2 GIG video card.
That maybe It would be taking up a ton of system resources that I am not aware of, but the sheer excessive POWER of my "system" just shrugs off the load. IF that beast was my system it would not be a good general test platfrom for most of the installed user base that still plays myth, you might of had a point. but my system is super outdated and modest by any means.
So I guess the point we need to define is, What amount of VRAM is being used, and what do you believe is an exsessive amount of it to be used. And is this choice of yours based on the total amount avalible or just an arbitray number that you believe myth should not excced? For instance do you think that nothing should ever use more then 128 megs of VRAM at one time if its some form of myth content? What is the number, that you deem is exsessive? less then 128 megs of VRAM, more then 256? Are you taking into account the amount availible? It certainly can not be over 256 Megs of VRAM you are speaking of, because I only have a 256 MEG video card.
I look forward to your detailed and well informed response.
-Ren
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 18 Jan 2013, 03:44
by punkUser
Renwood wrote:
For instance do you think that nothing should ever use more then 128 megs of VRAM at one time if its some form of myth content?
Well for starters, Myth's texture cache only goes to a maximum of 512MB, so keeping all usage under that is ideal if you don't want thrash/jitters.
And yes, you can have lots of units onscreen if they are using a fairly small working set of textures (i.e. small set of colors, small set of units/animations, etc.), but once you have many different combinations (16 player game with lots of unit variety for each an every player), you'll definitely start thrashing with high resolution sprites.
Let's get more specific since you wanted a "detailed and informed" response. If I load up one of the TWA multiplayer maps and scroll/orbit around a bit and taunt and walk my units around I'm already >350MB of texture cache usage. Thus on a 256MB VRAM card, you've already evicted some textures which will need to be reuploaded and nothing has even happened yet and there's just one team... If you start adding more teams and actual fighting (so you get all those animations, effects, body parts and the like) it can easy max out the texture cache.
A maxed texture cache means you're getting additional jittering and stuttering that you don't want due to evictions and reuploads of sprites. Your FPS may not show this unless the working set on the screen at a single time exceeds the limit (fairly unlikely, but not impossible), but smoothness is sacrificed. If you want to learn more, go read some of the recent reviews at
http://techreport.com/, who have been doing frame time/latency measurements for games. The jitters that they show with the high speed camera are precisely the sort that will happen if you thrash the Myth texture cache and produce frame time spikes.
So yeah, it's quite possible to be specific here. "Too much" is thrashing the cache on a typical run-through of of a 16-player game for instance. Keep the usage under 512MB for all the sprites it needs to upload during that sort of representative game, or you'll be negatively affecting the game even on the highest end machines. This is easily doable if you pick reasonable zoom levels to optimize your sprite resolutions for.
If you have a reasonably recent version of 1.8 - which I assume you do given your comments - use shift-F12 to show texture cache usage and optimize for that.
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 18 Jan 2013, 05:39
by Renwood
Thank you for taking the time to give a detailed response punkuser.
From what I can tell everything you said seems to mostly make sense.
What I dont understand is, if you are correct about the Myth IV HD multiplayer demo 1.3 (wich is the version you tested)
taking up to 350 megs of VRAM for just your team on a multilayer map and the small amount of units that apear on screen
Then why am I able to have the "Gate of storms Myth IV" styled battle with the thousands upon thousands of HD sprites on the screen at the same time, miles of view distance and rendering, the maxium amout of projectiles flying around and even the maximum amount of monster running around and animating at the same time, and still get good FPS?
It might be that everything is just refreshing so fast even though if it is at the 512 "limit", that it makes no difference in actual gameplay smoothness. As I have mentioned, I am on a computer from 2005 so it cant just be that sheer brutepower is pulling it off.
Now let me calrify that we have in the past rendered units that were soo large and high quality/large texture sizes that if you had more then a few unit types on the screen animating at the same time, it DID freak out and stutter and get low FPS, BUT that was in 2009 with 1.7 and no MIP mapping. So we are certainly more aware then any other myth Dev team that there IS a point where things are too big.
I claim this because we found these limits in 2009, long before others were doing super large collections or renders.
I should upload the much larger quality/textures size plugin I am talking so you could check it out.
The plugin was called the "Our Farewell FPS Test"
Im am surprized you say you slowed down with just your 1 team on a multiplayer map with our older Myth IV multiplayer HD plugin even while using 1.8
It leads to be believe a few things,
#1 that you are a mac user, with a possibly lower end machine (mac minis and such)
#2 that if you are a mac user you have played it as a VERY large screen res and have lots of other applications running in the background at the time of playing taking up system resources
#3 that if you did try it on a PC, that you had a super high screen res of 2048 X 1920 or something even bigger, and lots of other applications or programs using system resources. Maybe it is also an OLDER pc?
What are your system specs? And what settings in myth did you have selected?
In january 2010 when we first released the Myth IV HD multiplayer demo 1.3 People reported in the past that some but not all macs had trouble with the large collection sizes for the images and got lower FPS.
They were talking about the "Newer" mac minis being sow and other lower end mac machines from circa 2009.
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 18 Jan 2013, 06:29
by punkUser
Renwood, you're either not reading or not understanding what I'm saying. I will respond one more time, but I'm not going to keep repeating myself over and over.
Renwood wrote:
Then why am I able to have the "Gate of storms Myth IV" styled battle with the thousands upon thousands of HD sprites on the screen at the same time, miles of view distance and rendering, the maxium amout of projectiles flying around and even the maximum amount of monster running around and animating at the same time, and still get good FPS?
Read what I wrote before, I already explained this. I'll summarize one more time:
1) FPS measurements won't be too noticeably affected by texture cache thrashing unless it's really extreme. However frame times will be spiky which will cause smoothness issues that are not captured by FPS. Did you read any of the methodology to do with frame time measurements and how they relate to smoothness at the site that I linked?
2) The total number of units rendered is irrelevant, it's the number of unique permutations (colors, unit types, etc) that are resident in the texture cache and how that relates to how many are updated each frame that matters.
Renwood wrote:
It might be that everything is just refreshing so fast even though if it is at the 512 "limit", that it makes no difference in actual gameplay smoothness.
It doesn't make a difference to FPS, but it adds spikes/jitters, especially when panning/rotating and introducing texture cache thrash. Some people are less sensitive to this than others, and I'm willing to believe you are particularly less sensitive considering our previous discussion about Myth 1.3's "smoothness".
Renwood wrote:
Now let me calrify that we have in the past rendered units that were soo large and high quality/large texture sizes that if you had more then a few unit types on the screen animating at the same time, it DID freak out and stutter and get low FPS, BUT that was in 2009 with 1.7 and no MIP mapping.
This is the scenario that I explained before as well... i.e. the *working set* of units on the screen is larger than the texture cache, so most/all of them are being reuploaded every frame.
Note that you keep mentioning mipmapping, so I'll reiterate one more point again... mipmapping does not help the texture cache situation. In fact, it slightly hinders it since mipmaps add approximate another 33-50% additional storage to each sprite.
My argument here is one of cost vs. benefit. There is a cost - that I have described - to having larger resolutions. It will be larger on lower end machines but it is present on all machines. Uploads will take longer and the texture cache will thrash more, thus there will be more stuttering and jitteryness during gameplay, especially during periods when new sequences are first being loaded (start of battles, orbiting, weight exploding, etc). The real issue though is that the benefit of resolutions beyond the point that you need for standard zoom are extremely small. That's the main point here... you're sacrificing "some" amount of smoothness for no practical benefit during standard gameplay. IMHO that's a poor trade-off.
But hey, maybe I'm the minority on zooming, etc. Why don't you take a vote though here on how much people care about zoomed-in quality of the sprites. Ask if people are willing to sacrifice even a small amount of gameplay smoothness for better quality sprites only while zoomed in. Make it very clear that the sprites will look *exactly* the same in both cases at regular zoom levels.
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 18 Jan 2013, 09:26
by Renwood
First I will address the 1.3 camera smoothnes issue that you refer to.
Melekor long ago claim myth 2 Never had frame rates of FPS above 30, untill he coded it into the engine MANY years later.
Myself and other would say "O wait melekor that is BS because I used to zoom in on a mountain all the way so like 2 world units took up the entire screen and it would display hundreds of FPS in the counter!"
Then Melekor would say something like "You guys are missremembering things, trust me Myth could not show more then 30 FPS untill I coded it"
Then I mentioned something about "How smooth the game looked in 3Dfx capable machines, and that arrows and body parts and everything was smoother and it would show more then 30 FPS all the time"
Myth was in fact much smoother on 3Dfx machines, the 3Dfx enginers used to COME to bungie studios and help out directly with Myth optimization for the Glide API.
So what I was saying was true. But melekor being the smug person he is, would not just say this simple statement of informtion that only HE (being able to mess with the source code first hand) was privvy to that would have informed everybody who cared. " Well guys, I know that the FPS counter SAID it was showing more then 30 FPS, but its was a FALSE reading! anytime it said it was over 30 FPS it was lying." Now that is a COMPLETELY different reality then telling people they "missremember things" when people like myself or ooga or other players kept saying they remember the FPS counter showing in the hundreds. melekor was just saying we had bad memorys, if we remembered seeing any number of 30 FPS in the counter.
If it was me in his place, I would just have said, "You guys are remembering correctly, the counter showed it was getting far above 30 FPS, BUT it was LYING!" There, 1 post end of story.
As soon as he FINNALY explained it that way, I believed him. sooo yea there ya go.
I played the Myth IV HD Mutliplayer demo 1.3 with StoneC during MWC, he said that it had been slow and choppy for him before with 1.7, but when we played it with 1.8, he said it was nice and smooth, or at least nothing like it had been for him before.
I know you guys did a lot of differnt kinds of optimizations in 1.8 of High res sprite collections, and new rendering front ends and stuff, so good job! And here I thought it was almost soley Mip Mapping that was the hero here with smoother speeds.
Did you guys ever do anything to increase the amount of GEOMS that can go on at one time? Or increase the areas they can affect?
I know a lot of the AI scrpting inventorys that we made, you can not have more then 2 or 3 units running these scripts at one time.
Like an AI scripting inventory J man that auto heals freindly units if they come nearby the J man, Taunt and are below a certain amount of health, the J man is Idle, has more then 1 root, and is set to the auto heal inventory. If all those conditions are MET, the Fattie will HEAL! Its pretty sweet behaviour that can be tured on AND off in game, with algorithms and conditions on those algorithms. Was the GEOMS limit to blame for this not working with more then 2 or 3 units running these AI scripts at 1 time? Was was it something else behind the scences? Whatever the limit was, it also made it so you could not have more then 2 dorfs using an AI inventory script to gather satchles at the same time, 2 of the 3 would get a little more stupid, and the 3rd dwarf would often not do anything at all.
This also is the case with our 3 AI Trow enemies as seen on the Myth IV HD Mutliplayer Demo 1.3's Raisin Barn 2 light FFA hunting mesh. There are 3 trows that will hunt the pesants AND the players, but 2 trow are smart and the 3rd trow is stupid and just sits there. On the Raisin barn 2 we released for MWC 2012, it only has 2 trow on FFA light hunting, and they act very smart.
People who see them for the firs time allways say they act just like human players shadowing you can picking off your units then running away over and over.
It would be cool if whatever limit is making these great AI scripts break was some limit that could be upped.
-Renwood
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 18 Jan 2013, 20:34
by blahblahblah
Renwood wrote:Hey Blablalbla, I see you only have made 1 post and joined january 17th just so you could post in my thread with negative BS. Could you maybe be a magma devotee signing up under a dummy screename?
Use your normal myth persona, or are you too scarwed?
The 'negative BS' I posted is your own words. If you feel I've misinterpreted what you said then please elxplain how I am wrong instead of trying to turn this into a personality issue. stop trying to pretend everyone who disagrees with you must be a magmahead. you don't have to be in magma to realize you say competeley contradictory things and have only a superficial knowledge of what you are talking about - all that requires is a functioning brain. Everyone who really pays attention to what you say comes to the same conclusion.
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 18 Jan 2013, 22:49
by Melekor
Ren, how dumb do you have to be to lie about a conversation that you KNOW I have a screenshot of? Are you really that dense or are you just misremembering things again (ironic, given your post)? I know I don't really need to defend myself here but the screenshot makes it so obvious, how can I resist?
Link:
sceenshot of what really happened.
Melekor long ago claim myth 2 Never had frame rates of FPS above 30, untill he coded it into the engine MANY years later.
Myself and other would say "O wait melekor that is BS because I used to zoom in on a mountain all the way so like 2 world units took up the entire screen and it would display hundreds of FPS in the counter!"
In actual fact, nothing was said about the FPS counter until more than half way through, and I was the first one to mention it. At no point did you make clear that you were talking about the FPS counter. Instead, it was all about how 3Dfx felt "smooth".
Then I mentioned something about "How smooth the game looked in 3Dfx capable machines, and that arrows and body parts and everything was smoother and it would show more then 30 FPS all the time"
Myth was in fact much smoother on 3Dfx machines, the 3Dfx enginers used to COME to bungie studios and help out directly with Myth optimization for the Glide API.
So what I was saying was true.
Pie is tasty. So what I was saying was true. Nice logic there you tool. This is doubly retarded because wasn't the whole point of your post is that it WASN'T true, but I'm a bad guy because I didn't explain that to you properly in a non-smug way?
If it was me in his place, I would just have said, "You guys are remembering correctly, the counter showed it was getting far above 30 FPS, BUT it was LYING!" There, 1 post end of story.
As soon as he FINNALY explained it that way, I believed him. sooo yea there ya go.
In fact, when this finaly came up later in the conversation, you denied it and continued on about how it was smoother. So either you are misremembering or you are a liar.
TLDR; you are full of shit (but we already knew that)
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 18 Jan 2013, 22:58
by Melekor
punkUser wrote:Renwood, you're either not reading or not understanding what I'm saying. I will respond one more time, but I'm not going to keep repeating myself over and over.
Punk, you're doing it wrong in a couple ways:
1) He won't respond to normal intelligent conversation. You gotta use reverse psychology.
2) You're trying to make his plug better, you should be trying to make it worse so it fails that much harder.
Here let me give it a shot:
Hey Ren, your HD myth plug is awesome dude but why not make the sprites even bigger? Go for 1000 pixels tall for every unit it will be even more awesome I dont care about old computers screw em man more zoom for the win! Woo!
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 19 Jan 2013, 07:13
by Renwood
melekor, unlike you, punkuser isnt filled with a giant smug ego, and wants to see myth get better and thrive.
Dont piss in his cornflakes!
I cant wait for 1.8 to get released, with your "high res" collections!
When is that release date BTW? Anytime soon perhaps? It would be great if it came out while people were like...you know...still around playing myth. Are you guys still hell bent on rendering "high res" content at such low quality levels and small rendering sizes that its allmost completely ruins the finished product and makes the entire endeavour pointless? I hope not! The last things I saw were certainly not going to be anything that should be toggled on and off in game. You guys might want to look into the term "Production design" another handy subject to look up to make a better product would be "art direction"
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 19 Jan 2013, 07:17
by Renwood
blabla, you have NO understanding of that you speak of what so ever.
I have been making Myth content since the late 90s.
I am published by Bungie software, take2 interactive and mumbo jumbo. So keep on insulting my lack of myth knowledge on how to make awesome content. It just shows what a total uneducated, dipshit lame ass you really are. And use your normal myth name you coward.
Untill then, I will assume you are OM/VR. Though that might be unfair to him ~8^0
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 19 Jan 2013, 07:20
by Renwood
Why dont you magma meanspirited types (not including punkuser) make a thread on here talking about cool new 1.8 features and what we can look forward to, and how it will benefit myth fans and content creators.
That would be a much better use of your time then bicking on a thread about shit only about 3 or 4 people in the community will even bother to read.
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 19 Jan 2013, 07:27
by blahblahblah
Not talking about your knowledge of Myth, dumbass, talking about how you are ignorantly arguing about how computers render graphics with a professional coder who clearly knows more about it than you do.
But keep on trying to make this a personality issue if it helps you avoid having to defend what you said.
Keep on making funny accusations like "magma devotee" "om/vr" if it helps you avoid explaining how your own words are bullshit. (your words)
Go ahead and assume I am whoever you want if it makes you feel warm and snuggly and gives you the freedom to ignore the reality of your own words or any responsibility for what you say.
Just keep on riding that delusional train.
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 19 Jan 2013, 07:44
by Renwood
Hey blabla, you need to work on something called "reading comprehension"!
I ask punkuser things because I know he is the one coding them. So it is clear from our conversations, that I listen to what he is saying since he is privvy to things I am not behind the scenes and codes them himself.
One thing I know for SURE, is NOBODY on this PLANET knows MORE about making new super high quality content for myth and BENDING the damn engine to their will to get the desired results, with our without coding changes.
How many plugins has punkuser created? How many giant battles with thousands of HD sprites and MILES of view distance has he created on multiple all new levels? I have done all these things and many more, including helping to raise limits in the myth engine to support new creations and visions. The only person that comes close to my unique understanding of how all these elements interact in a non theoretical way is ooga.
Our team pushes the limits of myth like none other, and has for YEARS. And we dont even have source code to fiddle with.
Maybe before you talk out your ass again, go do all the stuff we have done, then come back.
It will only take you a few years. Or at least try all our content we have made, some is at the tain. others ya gotta hunt around for. BUT like Most magama types, you will be happy as a pig in shit to be completely OBTUSE, when it comes to people you dislike.
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 19 Jan 2013, 07:59
by blahblahblah
I am not a 'magma type', dumbass, I am just someone who has a brain, but i can see why that would be a threat. Wanna be cult leaders and charlatans are always threatened by anyone who can think for himself who won't just drink your delusional kool-aid. Sure you make high res myth stuff, and it looks pretty I agree but so what? NO ONE IS ARGUING THAT YOU STUPID DUMBASS, and that doesn't change the fact that you are still a dumbass. Also doesn't change the fact that you were ARGUING with punkuser about how units are rendered by OpenGL and graphics hardware despite your obvious IGNORANCE of computers and how they work - and you kept arguing with him until he could explain how things worked in such baby terms that even a dumbass like you could understand. Now you want to pretend you've been polite all along and were just asking questions because you' know punkuser is the expert and you just wanted information? Unbelievable, but ok peachy whatever you say. You must have no short term memory if you can really completely forget what you wrote an hour ago or two ago.
You really are one of the most deluded dumbasses I've ever run into. Most dumbasses realize at some point that they are a dumbass and give up but you just keep on ticking.
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 19 Jan 2013, 08:09
by Renwood
you should read things for more then 2 seconds per paragraph, before responding.
Having a CONSTRUCTIVE conversation with somebody to learn new things is NOT an argument, even if both sides do not agree on everything. I am not saying you ARE IN magma, just you CLEARLY are a magma fanboy.
Why else did you only sign up to the gjol on the 17th, and your FIRST POST is in one of my threads.
You also are not a new myth user called bla bla, you are using a phony name, to hide behind.
hiding on the internet, how cowardly is that? You will now be muted because you are one of 3 things.
1. A total dipshit not worthy of 2 seconds of mine, or anybody else's time.
2. A obtuse magma fanbody who has no reading comprehension.
3. A Troll who its being a lame ass and cynical like all Trolls do just to engage people and waste their time.
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 19 Jan 2013, 08:50
by blahblahblah
"Lah Lah I CAN"T HEAR YOU" -- my impression of Renwood when faced with someone who won't drink his kool-aid
Although you literally refuse to listen, here are the answers to your 'questions'. This is my only account on these forums. I registered on the 17th because that's the first day I've read a post here that I wanted to say anything about enough to bother registering.
Your two-faced posts motivated me to reply, my reply had nothing to do with Magma - if you had any reading comprehension skills yourself you'd see that nothing I said had ANYTHING to do with magma, YOU brought magma into the conversation, dumbass.
You could have explained how I took your comments 'out of context' or how else it is you think my pasting in your exact quote somehow changed your words into 'negative BS' but you can't because I didn't change your words or twist what you said, you said what you said and you are a dumbass and YOUR words are BS, I was just shining a little light on your dumbassery.
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 19 Jan 2013, 09:59
by Renwood
Hey Blabla, Again your reading comprehension is VERY LOW! I said I muted your dumb ass.
But check this out!
One of my friends is from Hawaii and they LOVE THE SPAM!
They cook it countless ways, none of them less tasty then the next.
He likes to slice spam semi thin, about 1/4 to 1/3 of an inch thick.
Then place the spam on a buttered cookie sheet
Open a can of Pineapple that is cut into those nifty sliced rings.
Place one ring on each spam slice.
sprinkle some FINELY ground cinnimon on top of each pineapple slice atop a bit o spam.
Set the oven to bake at 350 degrees. YOU DID PREHEAT IT DID YOU NOT!!!
Now cook it for like, I dunno, 20 mins.
Now take the cookieshit out when you feel like its done, if you cant wait 20 mins because you have a short attention spam.
now Now you can NEATLY place the cooked spam onto a nifty little dinner platter, OR just be lazy and leave them on the sheet.
Now See those Pineapple rings on the spam? DONT FUCKING EAT THEM!! They are JUST THERE TO ADD FLAVOUR TO THE SPAM MEAT! Throw those damn rings away when you eat each slice, DO NOT Throw them away before hand. Now serve these wondery bits of pork to your friends.
Take notice if anybody eats the pineapple rings. If they eat the rings, it means they are a communist and need to be disposed of immedieatly.
Take a look at how they turned out below!
!
If the dont look like this when they come out of the oven, then you fucked up son!
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 19 Jan 2013, 20:36
by blahblahblah
Renwood wrote:Hey Blabla, Again your reading comprehension is VERY LOW! I said I muted your dumb ass.
Not that anyone needed any more proof of your record-breaking level of dumbassery, but here it is - you are such a dumbass you don't even know what 'muting' someone means.
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 19 Jan 2013, 21:05
by Pogue
Why don't you guys take this conversation over to the tain where the rest of the retards that pretty much never play myth like to post and think they are integral parts of the community. The lack of bombays on these forums saddens me:(
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 19 Jan 2013, 21:38
by blahblahblah
Why don't you make your own bombays instead of just complaining that other people won't make things for you to enjoy?
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 19 Jan 2013, 23:17
by Renwood
Well, as you know pouge I play lots of myth.
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 19 Jan 2013, 23:49
by Renwood
There are screenshots you did not SHOW as well melekor, from other conversations, when I DO MENTION that the fucking FPS counter shows over 30. But you have a selective memory, and love to lie on a consistent basis. Remember the time you posted about how ONLY MAGMA was allowed to creat ANY type of myth content? LOL that was CLASSIC ego filled melekor missinformation. Do you have a screenshot of that as well? I dout it, you will only keep ones you think will make you look good.
The fact you hold onto a billion screenshots from stuff the happened years ago, proves how truly pathetic and myopic a person you are in real life.
Now stop posting on my thread and go work on 1.8 so you can fucking release it allready. Its been over 3 years you know....
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 20 Jan 2013, 00:59
by blahblahblah
Renwood, are these things you said to Punkuser what you call "“Having a CONSTRUCTIVE conversation with somebody to learn new things”?
Renwood wrote:Maybe it is punkuser that needs to have a better understanding of what is going on behind the scenes and what Myth is capable of.
Renwood wrote:As allways, our Dev team knows the power of the fetures implemented into the myth engine and the capabilites of the myth engine even better then the people who HAVE the source code and make all the changes.
Renwood wrote:So what I was saying was true. But melekor being the smug person he is,..
and mega lulz for the "stop posting on MY THREAD" comment. (emphasis added for additional lulz)
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 20 Jan 2013, 04:11
by qwerty
shut up renwood.
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 20 Jan 2013, 12:31
by grim
For a moment I thought qwerty signed up just to post that, but then I noticed she had two posts.
Re: Myth II HD Coming Soon!
Posted: 20 Jan 2013, 14:30
by qwerty
indeed, and now I have 3.