Friday 6 June 2014

A Good Friday

Another very quick week for me, and ending on a high with the final build of V1.071 for Friday which is pretty cool. More performance, better A.I, more stability and generally oozing goodness. My interview went well, and I very much enjoyed the questions. Might do another one in a few months when Reloaded is further along!  It's now over to the internal alpha testers to punish the V1.071 build to see if we missed any show stoppers. One fix I did make which I thought was pretty long overdue was the IDE now detects if there are any old FPSC-MapEditor.exe instances running and terminates them before starting. This avoids the issue of FPSC Reloaded launching and then just sitting there in a frozen state. You should no longer need to open Task Manager to restore your session - at least that is the theory.

Not decorating the house this weekend so will be hanging around the forums to see how everyone is getting on and answering questions where I can. Going to potter in the garden and recharge my battery a little, but next week should be another very cool week as we take our two-compounds level and take it to the MAX. What that means precisely I will reveal in the weeks to come, but I think you will approve and it is definitely the right thing to do at this stage. We don't just want a GOOD result, we want a GREAT result, and we have a plan to deliver this.

Before I forget, when you get your mitts on the V1.071 hot fix, check out the new sliders in the Shader Panel, I think they are pretty cool and might be responsible for some serious performance improvements if you have the right kind of GPU.


Okay so I could not wait until the release. As you can see you can control the transition distance which tells the shader precisely when to use the cheaper fragment code to boost your FPS.  If your GPU handles IF branches a certain way, you will see a leap in performance when you reduce the slider to bring the cheaper pixels closer to the camera!

Anyhoo, have a great weekend everyone and we'll report the findings of our testers next week, and hopefully reports their elation too!

6 comments:

  1. Sounds great. I hope we can get this hotfix by early next week so we can use in the contest. It would certainly make things better for everyone entering. I know some have withdrawn or on the verge of doing so because of some nagging issues with 1.007.

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  2. I'm 90% done on my contest level. But I can not add any AI. The map editor crashes at the initiating physics window. I don't believe this has to do with custom media as over 90% of my game uses it, and I can still run around the entire level. I just can't add any fighting, or any other media, whether my own, or stock media. It feels like a memory issue. Hope that fix comes very soon, or will send you a game without much action. Thanks for your hard work, enjoy your weekend. Cheers!

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  3. agree with michael hills,
    if i place more than 18 ammo box the game crash (without any errors) at the initiating physics message... :'(

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  4. Having all those options is fine for our own use, however what use are they for when you create a game and give it to someone that you have no control over their hardware? What I believe needs to happen is the game does some kind of detection and sets options optimally.

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  5. I was thinking more of an option menu when your in the stand alone game that prior to the actual game you can change various video settings. Like the ability to adjust shader quality and shadow detail.

    When I first got skyrim I was using a pretty bad computer but was able to still enjoy the game thankfully due to some quality adjustments in its settings menu. Now that I have a better computer I just max out all the settings. Its good to give this option to your players to allow for more people to play it.

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    Replies
    1. Of course. It goes without saying that any PC game MUST have an options menu with graphics settings.

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