http://www.speeds.quaddicted.com/screw_r_speeds.jpg

12k wpoly is as much as I got w/o breaking 32k marsurfaces limit. unvised. 48 monsters, collision hulls optimised tho. still runs at ~33 fps on my athlon xp 2.2 and bambus has ~30 on atthlon xp 1.8 in fitz

who uses a slower PC to play quake? 

http://www.speeds.quaddicted.com/maps/rspe.zip 

http://g.photos.cx/fitz0027-df.jpg
Athlon XP 1800 or so,
geforce4 mx
fitz 

p2 400 MHz with GF2MX 32MB
21-22fps at just 2800 wpoly/4800 epoly
fitzquake too 

how do you make fitz show fps? 

 

if your card is fillrate-limited at that resolution, it makes a big difference to framerate. 

 

host_maxfps 

Hah - this is the other way!
I jus' did it on my PC for crack!

we should plot the results on a graph...

http://www.mediafire.com/imageview.php?quickkey=jx9g0pojdhg&thumb=4 

p2 400 MHz with GF2MX ran at 640 x480
me (I have gf7600) and bamb @ 1024x768 obviously
another one 2.4GHz (celeron) with GF7600GS :
http://img132.imageshack.us/img132/7034/fitz0000lh3.jpg


so there you go - for a ~five year old pc (~2ghz speed) ~10k wpoly with ~10k epoly would be still playable

but if you care for the really old hardware I guess about 2000/4000 is a good limit

and be carefull with the hordes in the open detailed areas - lots of dynamic light really eats fps

btw DP runs this map ~2-3 times slower 

engines speedtest. timedemo, average fps
(all run in the same v mode)

aguirRe gl quake 49
MHquake 6 47,6
latest fitzhack 43
DP (from Spe 27 2007) 19 

people always look at w_poly, but its often e_poly going over the roof with AI, collision and dynamic lights from all those monsters that bogs down the performance

Very much so - I've found this to be the case as well. Epolys have a much more severe performance hit than Wpolys (with hardware acceleration).

For example, I had some collision hull issues with pkeg1 (the classic "getting stuck on invisible edges where angled brushes meet other surfaces"). I initially fixed this by making some of the problem brushes func_wall, but I saw a noticeable performance hit after doing so.

This suggests that some popular solutions for reducing r_speeds (e.g. making pillars func_illusionary so they don't create lots of BSP splits and extra polys) might actually cause decreased performance, even though the r_speeds will be lower. 

Grunts and dogs in place of, say, Enforcers and Scrags cause problems as well because they're more likely to gib, hitting both epoly and entity count. 

There's more reasons for poly limits in an engine than just how fast your processor is. Sickbase had similar poly counts to a Quake3 map (in the thousands), and Quake3 runs its maps a hell of a lot better than Fitzquake ran sickbase. Engines will use certain methods over others because of computational/memory/etc tradeoffs, and the choice is usually determined by a good educated guess at how big your data set is going to be. An engine properly optimized for its target hardware and content will not scale in power linearly with the cpu speed of the machine you put it on.


The weapons and monsters in Quake are also all designed to be used in the kinds of levels that Quake shipped with. There's no ultra-long-range combat or vehicle bits, because monster movement, aggression, attack range, projectile speed, leap distance, etc, are all based on spaces no bigger than a large atrium. Quake monsters in Far Cry, for example, would only work in the indoor bits.


There's more. Part of what I think is essential to Quake's fun feel is the fact that it's lower fidelity than new games. The story and the combat have a simplicity to them that is conceptually inappropriate in higher detail or higher resolution. I'm going to call on the warren spector lectures I've been going through recently (specifically Hal Barwood this time), but only because it nicely quote-packages something I would have said here anyway: "maintain level of abstraction." He describes how the simpler and more toony pixel-art look of games like Indiana Jones and his Desktop Adventures or Yoda Stories is conceptually appropriate to the more casual slant the game takes. The more fidelity you see, the more you expect in other ways. The success of Gears of War is probably proof that most of the market doesn't think that way, but we're clearly not most of the market. 

It doesnt work. Only runs in AguirRe's engine. 

Lunaran

I would argue though that Gears may have a lot of visual fidelity but the core gameplay loop is extremely tight. Cover and limited weapon selection drive the gameplay down very defined paths which are easily understood.

I think the graphics draw people into Gears at first but the easy to understand gameplay keeps them there.

If Gears was hyper complicated (say, matching the gameplay against the graphics) it wouldn't have done nearly as well. 

"That featured the earth in real scale. So you just dropped for minutes until you hit the ground."
Yes, there was a DP only map that did that. Urre made it. In a text editor. It took about 23 minutes for me to reach the bottom, with accelerated time. Humorously it was losing precision near the end, as my shotgun kept struggling to keep up with me as I fell further and further. And the surface of the 'earth' (since its just a plain, not a sphere) is ridiculously huge. Not exactly a practical map, but neat in its own right. You can dl it at his page here, http://urre.quakedev.com/ 

Please keep r_speeds under 800

from quakeworld.nu, thread here:

http://www.quakeworld.nu/forum/viewtopic.php?id=2685

So if you care for your map's DM play (who does?), perhaps r_speeds do matter?

At least my e1m2 remix is vanilla DM compatible (including jump distances etc), if just for tradition, and most of the rest should be, except for the boss maps. Luckily it's almost all rooms-and-corridors, so naturally low r_speeds (mostly 200-600) even after applying Ijed's "30% bigger" rule (I love that one.) ;-P

So I guess what I'm asking is, who cares for deathmatch? Whose maps will be DM capable? 

I dont think anyone plays sp maps in dm at all 

I hear some ppl still play e1m2.

The runequake folks play a lot of id1. 

"The story and the combat have a simplicity to them that is conceptually inappropriate in higher detail or higher resolution."

I miss this level of abstraction, when there was a basic cheesiness factor that no one could really break out of. I like the idea of games as a limited form of entertainment where the player's enjoyment is based on the art/atmosphere and a simple gameplay mechanic (this is why I like Quake, Rune, etc). In a way, Quake really was no more refined than a side-scroller, it was essentially the same concept but with better art and action. Now, when someone makes something like Painkiller, it is not only deliberately a throwback, but even so it's also influenced by Blade, Underworld, the Matrix, etc. In a way Quake was the last cheesy game where they weren't doing it deliberately.

Basically I guess I'm arguing there should be more games that focus on simple but effective/tactical action, without civilians, npc's, soundtracks by the latest band, or voices by hollywood actors. It'd be great to just be able to jump into a game with a quality SP campaign you could blast through and then on to DM, the "arcade" type element in games seems lacking now.

Essentially, a long time ago I was looking better to a more dynamic game world, better graphics and especially photorealism, but now I consider this basically a curse. 

they spend so much money these days adding shit to games that I don't even want. 

everyone who plays 4on4 plays e1m2. It's the standard map along with dm2 and dm3. 

The scene actually playing newly released deathmatch maps is smaller than the singleplayer scene.