Arcen Games
General Category => AI War II => : x4000 September 07, 2016, 04:50:37 PM
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Hey folks,
In the next couple of days I'm going to put together a little multi-platform "game" (I use the term incredibly loosely) that will let you view a couple of static scenes with some stock art of specific complexities, and it will record the performance of drawing those scenes on your computer as well as some information about your computer. You can then look at the output log it created and send it to us, if you're comfortable (there's nothing private there).
There are a number of permutations of how Blue and I can do the art for this game, and I'm not sure which will have the best performance to visual ratio, while also being the most tune-able for different kinds of graphics cards.
Blue has been out with a power outage since last Thursday thanks to Hermine, but she's back now and working first on the logo, and then far zoom icons (things will be coming up for feedback on the latter tomorrow), and then we'll be moving in to actual ship art and so forth after that.
But before we get too invested in one approach, I want to see just how far we can push the exciting quality bar without making performance a dog. At present in the design document I wrote from the perspective of a minimum-possible-load perspective, but more recently I'm realizing that because of the nature of the game I probably have FAR more latitude than that.
This tester "game" won't actually have any game logic at all in it, nor any original art for this game. But it will do a great job giving me a profile of what is and is not acceptable, and what works the best on your machines, and thus determine the art style path as this moves forward. I have a sneaking suspicion that we can do more than what I'd originally been thinking... ;D
I need folks on windows, linux, and osx, so if you want to be notified please reply to this thread with the "Notify me of replies." on, and I'll post here on probably Friday or Saturday when it is ready. Knock on wood those days...
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Ok, count me in. Windows only but that's probably going to be the majority of testing needed anyway.
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So.... art work is only just starting? Is Blue handling all the spritework this time around? If so I have a favor: could you ask Blue to keep the color schemes of the Mk IV and Mk V ships, but use them on the Mk Is and IIs respectively? It'd save design time, and ram home to long time players that things have changed.
Of course keeping the same color schemes from Classic all the way through saves even more time and effort so I'm fine either way.
Oh amd sign me up for this, I have two PCs of different ability and I can probably get a low end Mac as well.
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I'd be happy to help! Just let me know what to do.
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Cool beans, thanks.
In terms of art work for the game:
1. Some of it is just starting, yes.
2. Other pieces are not.
3. We're not really trying to recreate units from the original game, aside from a few central ones.
4. Certainly not color schemes.
A lot of the art from the original game was from free sources or otherwise just really off for various reasons. It was all pixel-art-based, and now we're moving toward 3D when zoomed in and vector-style art that is cleaner and easier on the eyes when zoomed out. We'll have images of the vector stuff soon, but the graphical load tester noted here is specifically for testing the 3D end of it.
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Sign me up. :) Hopefully AIW 2 is friendly to my 4k monitor. :)
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Count me in :)
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Sure, I'll give it a go as well.
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Count me in for some Linux testing :)
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Linux tester reporting for duty! 8)
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Sure, I'll help out.
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Cool beans, thanks.
In terms of art work for the game:
1. Some of it is just starting, yes.
2. Other pieces are not.
3. We're not really trying to recreate units from the original game, aside from a few central ones.
4. Certainly not color schemes.
A lot of the art from the original game was from free sources or otherwise just really off for various reasons. It was all pixel-art-based, and now we're moving toward 3D when zoomed in and vector-style art that is cleaner and easier on the eyes when zoomed out. We'll have images of the vector stuff soon, but the graphical load tester noted here is specifically for testing the 3D end of it.
Haha you weren't kidding about chaning things, I completely missed that. Aight, looking forward to seeing what they end up being.
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Windows here, if needed.
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Linux with cheap graphic card, reporting for duty.
"Notify me of replies." ? Is that a magic word for invoking the Grep daemon? ;)
I can't wait for these new 3D arts!!
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Windows laptop, reasonably top end Nvidia, will test multiple performance settings (should give you a range of clock speeds as data points), can also test on integrated graphics(!) to tackle the opposite end if desired.
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I'll volunteer my old, slow iMac 10.9 and my older, slower MacBook 10.6 .
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I have windows 10 and I would be more than happy to assist if needed.
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I should note that my low-end computer is still set up and will likely remain for a few more days, but conceivable that it would be trivial to set it up again if necessary.
Due to a series of unfortunate events, it's actually running 64 bit (not 32), but still only has 4GB of ram.
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I'd be happy to help with this. I would be able to run the test on a midrange Windows 10 desktop, a Mac Pro and a Lenovo Ubuntu 16 laptop.
Thanks!
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Windows user reporting! I'll help out to :D
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I can volunteer a fairly beefy gaming PC and a Surface Pro 4. Both on Win 10.
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I'm up for it. Got a Windows laptop and tower, plus another Fedora laptop and desktop.
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i have both a tower for my main setup with dual screen single video card and a couple laptops i could use to give you a variety of results
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Sign me up!
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Sure thing, always keen to help. :)
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I am happy to see how many Linux users there are. :)
Count me in for Linux testings, and I may be able to do some testing on an older OSX machine as well.
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Hi,
I would love to do some testing for you!
I can test on multiple desktop and mobile graphics cards, on Linux( Ubuntu and Steam OS as well as all Microsoft OSes from Windows XP to 10.
Just hook me up with the tool and I'll see what I can do. I can also test on multiple generations on integrated video chips...although a lot of people can test those.
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I am happy to see how many Linux users there are. :)
Yeah! If the trend continues, we will soon be requesting Windows testers! :D
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I volunteer for Linux and Windows testing (yay for having the cake and eating it) One crappy graphics card, one pretty good.
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Can run tests on a reasonably high end Windows rig (Core i7 @3.66, 16 Gb RAM and Nvidia 970 STRiX) and a very low end linux box (i3, nvidia 5xx something).
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I can test on Windows, Mac, and Linux if needed. Windows and Linux are gaming rigs, Mac is a Macbook Pro.
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"reasonably high end"
Gotta update my computer budget I see
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At this point I am planning on probably scrapping the load-testing tool. I've been able to get all the data I needed during my week in hiding, more or less. The most important thing that I'm discovering, to be frank, is that the load of the 3D stuff doesn't matter. We're going to have so many options for turning things off that I'm just not worried about people being unable to run it anymore.
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Good to know. Thanks for the update, and I guess I'll just wait for the earlier-than-early access to see the engine run on my rig.