POLL: Tesseract vs. Cube 2

[qreeves]

do I sense some passive-agressive sarcasm here?

No, Dratz just has trouble communicating like we would. Please don't be offended, he means well.

[Dratz-_C]

Hi Folks,
This is probably not going to be interesting to most of you so feel free to skip the rest. It is a crazy experiment in performance evaluation by someone with a nettop he bought 3 & 1/2 years ago. I am working on translating the "Tesseract" map "The Complex" back to "Red Eclipse." I am mostly done with reconnecting it in all the necessary ways to the requisite data. I can share an early picture. I added a white sunlight with offset -1 for a bright single lightray. I set up a relatively dark ambient skylight. Then I made the light -precision and -error each 1. I believe this is as sharp and detailed as I can get with lightmaps with the present "Red Eclipse" code. I took the picture with maximum graphics and display options. When it turns out that sharing the map would get me in some trouble, I'll have to keep it to myself. Conversely, if permissible and when I am finished, I will happily share it with anybody who wants it.
Cheers

[qreeves]

Amazing as usual, and quite a faithful adaption.

[Evropi]

That's awesome!

It would be great if you could make a comparative benchmark at the end of your project. I can think of no better way to benchmark performance for the two than have the exact same map running in both.

[Ulukai]

That's looking awesome Dratz! I'm being curious, which textures did you use for the floor tiles? And those reflections on the windows look exactly like those in Tesseract. How did you achiev that? Took a look at the config file of Complex?

[TristamK]

That's looking awesome Dratz! I'm being curious, which textures did you use for the floor tiles? And those reflections on the windows look exactly like those in Tesseract. How did you achiev that? Took a look at the config file of Complex?

I think he use textures from tesseract. But looks cool.

look as bad as the original Doom

Lol greeser, doom cal look MUCH better -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTWP3wvAUuQ

btw, i spent some polls in my VK group about using tesseract in RE. 20% of polls participants say, that they want see RE on tesseract. 50% of polls participants say, that Tess looks cool, but without optimization it's a useless tool.

[qreeves]

I'm being curious, which textures did you use for the floor tiles? And those reflections on the windows look exactly like those in Tesseract. How did you achiev that? Took a look at the config file of Complex?

The tiles look like the ones in RE, vcolor'd appropriately. You can make "static" world-only reflections in RE by using an envmap entity and selecting the correct texture shader (eg. bumpenvspecparallaxworld, or bumpenvworld, or whatever..).

[Dratz-_C]

Hi Again Folks,
If you are curious enough to decipher this description of the process I am using to bring "The Complex" to "Red Eclipse," keep reading. The geometry and textures in the map are all from "Tesseract." I did this primarily to keep the map as equal in performance demand as I could between the two games, and secondarily because I had no desire to guess at substitutions when I didn't have to. For those wanting to do this yourselves, just take a map, MapName.ogz, and MapName.cfg, copy them both and paste them into the "Red Eclipse" user maps folder. Change MapName.ogz to MapName.mpz. Open up "Notepad++" or an equivalent program. Look in the .cfg configuration file you just pasted to "Red Eclipse." For textures, with search-and-replace change the PhilipK references to match "Red Eclipse's" slightly differing directory structure to save space. Looking at the "Red Eclipse" directory tree and the "Tesseract" directory tree, think only about where the "Tesseract" media and the "Red Eclipse" data are relative to the map files. Now knowing how to correlate them, copy all of the "Tesseract" textures to the user home directory for "Red Eclipse." This should beside where the user maps folder resides. So far I haven't had to change any other texture references in the copied map configuration file because they match in the way they are positioned in "Tesseract" and "Red Eclipse" in a map-centric way. After you load the map in edit mode in "Red Eclipse" the textures now appear. What's left is resizing the textures, I have found from "vscale 1" to "vscale 0.5." Do this resizing on one example square of texture and then type "replace" to replace a bunch of other scales on identically formatted texturing. The vcolor information is still present after you move the map files so you don't have to guess at where to color what. This preservation of values is also true for the materials and entities including those responsible for the reflections in the glass. In my experience, the games are in the same family and so work well communicating with each other. With this method, soon the "Tesseract" map will become as close of an image of the original as is possible in "Red Eclipse."
I haven't moved the "Tesseract" models yet so I'll write about those provided I have some success in transplanting them. Until then, have fun with what I have learned. That is the main idea, right?
Cheers

[CancukTux]

Could we add the ability to make environments full-bright and turn off shaders entirely, or do you think lighting is crucial to RE game play.
If we could give people with older computers a fighting chance it would be ok with me.

[cdxbow]

The above would be a very nice compromise if technically possible. I also pledge swaying trees etc if RE gets dynamics lights. In fact, I thought it was such a good idea I voted twice! That's great stuff, too Dratz.

[Ulukai]

Yeah I thought I recognized the textures from Tesseract. It sure looks good in RE as well, but what about licenses?

[Ulukai]

Could we add the ability to make environments full-bright and turn off shaders entirely, or do you think lighting is crucial to RE game play.
If we could give people with older computers a fighting chance it would be ok with me.

Full bright maps? Wouldn't that be unfair? It would give advantage over other players, no?

[TristamK]

Yeah I thought I recognized the textures from Tesseract. It sure looks good in RE as well, but what about licenses?

About lisences
Text from folder agf81 in Tes:
All textures fall under the creative commons license 3.0
-All textures are free for personal and commercial use.
-All textures are made by myself.
-If you used my textures, credits or a link are not required.
Enjoy
http://agf81.deviantart.com/
All textures by Nieb have publicdomain lisence
Other textures created by nobiax and philpk fre for using
I just don't know about lisence in cgtextures folder.

[CancukTux]

Could we add the ability to make environments full-bright and turn off shaders entirely, or do you think lighting is crucial to RE game play.
If we could give people with older computers a fighting chance it would be ok with me.

Full bright maps? Wouldn't that be unfair? It would give advantage over other players, no?

Well, anyone who wanted to could use it. Since Tesseract doesn't use burnt lightmpas we could allow for the people using it to change the ambient the ambient light to whatever they wanted to even the odds a bit.

So far Xonotic has done this without destroying their game, but your right, RE is a different beast and lighting is used in gameplay differently.

I would like the ability to turn fullbright as a player on some days when I want to play biolytic or a dark map and their is too much glare and reflect light off my screen to see anything.

[qreeves]

I would like the ability to turn fullbright as a player on some days when I want to play biolytic or a dark map and their is too much glare and reflect light off my screen to see anything.

Try /gamma 150 (or even 200 in really bad glare situations).

[doctorcool]

as much as I would like the game to run and look nicer, im positive my computer would have issues with it. that being said, I also can't be selfish to others. I always say don't fix what's not broken, but what do I know. I feel like this might drive away some players while gaining others (possibly**). I voted for the current.

[Ulukai]

Just look at this to see the amazing Tesseract powers! http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FUYUNgr22m ... UYUNgr22m8

[Dratz-_C]

Could we add the ability to make environments full-bright and turn off shaders entirely, or do you think lighting is crucial to RE game play.
If we could give people with older computers a fighting chance it would be ok with me.

CancukTux and Others the Low-Performance Community,
As a qualification, I believe that enabling the fullbright command in the editor with the "L" key doesn't shut down the lighting processes in the background on the graphics processing unit. They are still in place for when you disable fullbright to look at the lighting again. Now that I see you are already talking about whether enforced fullbright would help performance, maybe you would like to know about the result of one of my first experiments to find a higher preliminary framerate in "Tesseract" which doubled mine.

I open the map "The Complex," set "sunlight 0x000000," "skylight 0x000000" and do "enfind light" followed by pressing delete. This disabled and deleted all light sources. My framerate went from 10 to 20 a second. I upped the contrast on my monitor by 100% and increased and the brightness by 50%. It looked passable while allowing my acquisition of small targets in the distance. It was not necessarily fluid, representing my estimation of half of my framerate in "Red Eclipse" in what I thought were otherwise similar circumstances; however it could characterize some of the progress on the way to a practical experience that low-performance folks would love to ultimately appropriate.

I hadn't shared this information until now because I wanted to do consistent repeatable comparison between sessions on the same map with identical allowed settings in both "Tesseract" and "Red Eclipse" in order to isolate the lighting performance delta. I am in the middle of beginning my next semester at college and building a computer for "Tesseract." I hope folks in general can understand that I would prefer to write more frequently than every several days about the engine and "Red Eclipse" migration, it's just that my other two priorities are higher for the near future. [Edit: It turns out my scholarship will be awarded a month from now. This will be 3 weeks into the semester so my computer system analyses will have to be repeated then at a slower pace.]

Just look at this to see the amazing Tesseract powers! http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FUYUNgr22m ... UYUNgr22m8

Ulukai,
Thanks for locating and sharing the video. The push in the video about the advantages of the the Tesseract lighting system is wonderful for people who want to know more. I love the radiosity hints in addition to what I already knew.
Cheers

[Leihens]

"I don't care.."

[RaZgRiZ]

While Tesseract is indeed shiny, perhaps it's not clearly yet understood just how heavy it is.

I just barely get 60 frames on complex, occasionally falling to 50. That is with an Intel i5 750 and an ATI HD 4890. The same map in Sauerbraten could easily fetch me over 500 frames.
It is quite literally a nose rise in quality and nose dive in performance.

There is also the fact that there's a rather important flaw present in the design, which causes incorrectly aligned and flickering shadows in any map of size 11 and above, the effect more prominent the higher the map size. If my memory serves me correctly, it had something to do about the lightmap cache not being able to maintain precision due to the scale of the map. There is currently no work being done to fix this problem.
Also, while you may think that shadows are always nice and sharp, think again. The shadow sharpness depends on the distance from the surface it is cast upon, thus a diagonal shadow on a wall would have one part blurry and one part sharp as you move away from it. Not so pretty when using simple textures that amplify shadows.

You may be thinking, "the water looks so cool and realistic now, i'm having an eyegasm!". Needless to mention much about it, the water is gonna make your computer beg to be put out of its misery. Of course i am exaggerating a bit, but when an empty map lands me 150 frames at most, and the water crushes that amount down to 40 with a simple puddle, you can sort of imagine that your measly dual core running at 2GHz and that nVidia GT 8600 you got as a present last decade won't cut it.

While the future seems promising, as the project itself states, Tesseract is still UNDER DEVELOPMENT, and if you really want to see RE hit the market one day, if ever, you best stay away from Tesseract for the time being until it can reach a state of stability and speed worthy of being incorporated.

Stay oldie, Red Eclipse.

[Julius]

I just barely get 60 frames on complex, occasionally falling to 50. That is with an Intel i5 750 and an ATI HD 4890. The same map in Sauerbraten could easily fetch me over 500 frames.

That's a bit of an unfair comparison, isn't it? I assume you took the figures will all settings maxed out, but Tesseract will obviously look much better then.
Much fairer are the minimum settings comparisons above, or if you would put medium settings Tessaract against maxxed out settings in vanilla Cube2 or something like that.

[RaZgRiZ]

Default settings that come out of the box. Not sure if "max" or "medium" or "rare". And i'm mentioning this comparison because people seem overly excited over Tesseract, and i don't blame them, it really is cool, but suggesting that RE port its features.. personally i find it outrageous, both for the state Tesseract is in, with all the running problems and more which will surely come, but also because RE is already a game which is doing relatively well, and forcing it to move on by dumping most of the supported lower end hardware will cost its playerbase rather dearly.

[Dratz-_C]

Hi RaZgRiZ, Julius and Others,
I just spent 5 hours engine and map testing and typing a corresponding post which crashed my browser on a preview when I was almost done. I shall summarize and conclude. The "Tesseract" maximum-number-of-descriptors shading problem, as I will call it, does exist, has no resolution in settings, and should affect the importation of large, >size 4095 "Red Eclipse" maps such as "Canals," "Suspended," and "Tribal." Possible artifacting in shading may occur in medium, <4096, >2047 size maps such as "Dropzone," "Ghost" and "Nova." Little to no artifacting should occur on small <2048 size maps such as "Dead Simple," "Dutility" "and "Vault." For a comparative example, the "Tesseract" map "The Complex" is size 10 which corresponds to "Red Eclipse" size 1024. I think we may want in the near future to ask for and facilitate a resolution to the problem of large visible surface area divided among a maximum number of shading descriptors. I give up on making this repost any longer. Hopefully it with capture someone's interest.
Cheers

[qreeves]

I have decided that the Red Eclipse first person shooter should continue to use the Cube 2 Engine. Our recent popularity is in no small part due to the lower system requirements of our game; this is important to many people, especially first person shooter fans. Red Eclipse is about community, and we must remember that, going forward. We can still make strides by polishing what we have, and imagining new possibilities; we will not fall behind but instead be appreciated by those who most need we have to offer - and that is a pick-up-and-play kickass game!

[Dratz-_C]

Thank you for your insight Quin!
Cheers