Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Amo]

Good morning!

I made several 3d Actor tests during the last days and recognized, that the poly counter tells my something total different to what Max says.
My Actor in Max has 2088 Triangles but WMEs poly counter shows about 4600 in an nearly empty test scene and about 6500 (!) after opening the Escape Menu (just some little textured windows with standard buttons save, exit, etc. )
How is that comming? Or better asked, how can I optimize that? After loading the actor twice one as NPC one as player I lost about 30 fps (from 85 to 53) I better do not think about whats happening after loading a second NPC.
My workstation is really not slow (P4 3Ghz, GeForce 6600GT, 1Gbyte RAM), but we can't expect that possible users accept that high system specs for a 2.75D adventure.
What is the polycounter really counting? I can't find where the triangles should be.

[Mnemonic]

The counter shows polygons actually rendered. It's approximately twice as much as the character's polycount, because the character is rendered twice (once for the shadow silhouette).

[Amo]

OMG!?! Twice for the shadows...Hm... I hate the idea behind killing a half of my triangles...How about the DrawBackfaces attribute? Is it working as standard, or has it to be activated manually?

[metamorphium]

that's really strange. I am testing my game on Athlon XP+ 1800, with GeForce FX5600 and I have 86fps (monitor refresh rate) with exactly two times bigger framerate (including particle engines and such).

On the other hand typical low poly model for such engines is around 3000 polys max.

One more thing, I believe that you can switch off shadows, but if you want to have shadows on your scene, it's necessary to render them so there's no way around that.

[metamorphium]

what's your screen resolution?

[Mnemonic]

OMG!?! Twice for the shadows...Hm... I hate the idea behind killing a half of my triangles...

Well that's the way it is. The shadow has to be rendered *somehow*. Of course, you could sacrifice the shadow quality by using the "simple shadow", i.e.  the simple black blob. It's just 2 polygons

How about the DrawBackfaces attribute? Is it working as standard, or has it to be activated manually?

By default DrawBackfaces is enabled. If your model doesn't rely on backfaces, you can set it to false (actor.DrawBackfaces = false;).

As for the window raising polygon count, you can "optimize" it by not using the "tiled image" for the window backround, but a single image.

[Amo]

That is not that strange in fact, because the res is 1024 768 4x Antialiasing and two monitors. It is more the fact behind having so many Triangles (as said the double of the figure normally has). Even what I do not understand is, that the menu has about 2600 Tris.... I do not want to decrease the tris of the actor down to 1500 than he looks like Trinity and she is really low. The menu is actually no problem, because the framerate is jumping back to 85, I was just wondering about.

Ok, when you say... I normally do not give a damn about shadows, that is the thing of our coder 

[metamorphium]

I am using 1024x768 6x alias on the Ati card and 4x on the GeForce card... Strange.

[Amo]

(actor.DrawBackfaces = false;).

I tried it out, it made no difference, wether for frame nor for the poly counter...

@metamorphium: Can the second monitor be the reason for this behaviour? Do you have a second one?

[metamorphium]

no. I don't have second monitor. Maybe it can really be related. Maybe if you upload somewhere some test scene, we can look at that on our computers.

[Amo]

Unfortunately uploading a test scene is not possible yet, it is problem with the rights (the project is commercial). I try it out, I'll pump the actor up to 7000 tris and try it one time with both screens and than deactivate the second one.
Give me a minute.

[Amo]

Ok, I pumped him up to 10 000 that caused a maximum poly count of 23 000 in the scene (low poly NPC, scene, high poly actor).
With second screen: 35 frames
without: 36 frames

That is not the reason. Ok, I'll eat something and than I continue my search.

[Amo]

I can't find a reason, playing WME only on the second screen makes no difference at all.
Hopefully it works after adding more sprites and scripts not as lame as a one legged turtle.

Another question about the actors. With the Ms3d actors it was possible to cut all animations to several files, to load only that one, you need, like an separate take animation. Is that also possible with the X files? I tried it at the same way I used to do with the milkshapes but it doesn't work.

[metamorphium]

try closing all other applications. For example 3d studio Max tends to reduce performance to half the number of the frames.
Also trz to run it in compiled mode with project man and scene edit instances closed.

[Amo]

Does scene edit and project man need so many resources? That could be a reason, max is already closed. We try, otherwise I do not know what to do.