| 01:05.34 | seebs | Oooh. |
| 01:05.41 | seebs | The demo addon for dimensions is sorta sexy. |
| 01:13.35 | jmerlin | Got video? |
| 01:21.16 | seebs | No, but there is a post about it on the forums. It's a pretty early test/demo, but that addons can control dimensions has huge potential for fun. |
| 01:21.31 | seebs | I am very tempted to try to make a Jumping Puzzle Addon that includes moving platforms. |
| 01:21.50 | Imhothar | dimensions? |
| 01:22.04 | seebs | Player housing, including the ability to place and manipulate objects. |
| 01:22.07 | seebs | New in SL. |
| 01:22.11 | Imhothar | ah |
| 01:22.17 | jmerlin | But can the addon API manipulate the dimensions? |
| 01:22.24 | seebs | Apparently. |
| 01:22.28 | jmerlin | Minecraft time. |
| 01:22.41 | seebs | http://forums.riftgame.com/rift-general-discussions/addon-api-development/336030-dimension-test-addon.html#post3990046 |
| 01:23.14 | Imhothar | so, WoW gets Pokemon, Rift gets Minecraft, what's next? |
| 01:23.51 | jmerlin | How about we randomly generate a platforming world, and then we start bouncing projectiles around, and your goal is to finisht he platformer without being hit. |
| 01:23.59 | jmerlin | Basically, 3D mario with a little more edge. |
| 01:24.21 | seebs | And I am trying to shuffle objects so I can have two computers up for Extra Life. |
| 01:24.25 | seebs | So I can dual-box it. :) |
| 01:25.10 | jmerlin | Hey, why not just build Rift inside of it? |
| 01:38.07 | seebs | I had the idea once of making an app which lets you raid virtually. |
| 01:38.32 | seebs | Like, say, there's a bunch of green bars, and you click on them when they shrink. And every so often the app displays messages like "DPS ARE STANDING IN FIRE" and a bunch of bars go down really fast for a bit. |
| 01:40.17 | seebs | For extra fun there could be a part where you had to sit around waiting for chat messages and do stuff like click "1" every time the addon says "Raid leader asks people to say 1 in raid chat if they're ready." |
| 01:44.11 | jmerlin | It would be really simple to implement a 2D overview raid environment of Rift |
| 01:45.12 | seebs | I have been assuming that the coordinates are there to permit such things. |
| 02:04.48 | *** join/#riftuidev Noshei (~quassel@c-67-161-146-244.hsd1.co.comcast.net) |
| 03:16.54 | Imhothar | Oooh, so Rift 2.0 is all red now |
| 03:17.06 | Imhothar | does that mean we get RiftButton colors? ;) |
| 03:20.28 | Imhothar | hm so with ZorbaTHut working full time on rendering, who is the mysterious guy(s) who created the Dimension Addon and API? |
| 03:20.46 | Imhothar | does the boss have ghost writers after all? |
| 03:28.35 | jmerlin | "rendering" ? |
| 04:48.26 | seebs | Yeah. He is putting most of his time into the code that shoves pixels. |
| 04:48.32 | seebs | Well, that tells video hardware to shove pixels. |
| 04:54.39 | Imhothar | Tip of the day: don't pass NaN values to the Rift API |
| 04:57.22 | *** join/#riftuidev Imhothar_ (~miranda@ppp-88-217-50-221.dynamic.mnet-online.de) |
| 05:06.04 | jmerlin | Nobody handles NaN values gracefully. |
| 05:06.16 | jmerlin | seebs: Like to do what? |
| 05:06.34 | jmerlin | Actual game rendering engine or scaleform hackage? |
| 05:07.42 | seebs | Actual game rendering engine. |
| 05:07.59 | seebs | I think Zorba said the guy who was previously doing it decided to leave the game industry in favor of something with shorter hours. |
| 05:08.08 | jmerlin | Why not just port Rift to a sane engine? |
| 05:15.03 | seebs | Probably Too Large. And/or, at this point, they may have reworked this engine with enough local color to make it pretty hard to reproduce in finite time. |
| 05:15.43 | jmerlin | True, though I think I'd appreciate Rift about 100000x more if I was running it with better graphics at 200fps. |
| 05:15.52 | jmerlin | Even if my class always sucks, lol. |
| 05:19.03 | seebs | Yeah. Not sure how much of that would be fixed by an engine change; I dunno whether that's really the graphics engine, or some other aspect. |
| 05:19.17 | seebs | ... As I have said probably before, I would have a much better clue on this if the game had /demorecord. |
| 05:21.15 | jmerlin | Or if we could see the source and/or had access to testing/benchmarking tools. |
| 05:21.41 | jmerlin | I honestly think it's the engine though, because I've seen other games with this engine, and they ALL behaved just as poorly |
| 05:22.14 | seebs | Could be. I have been told that the Rift engine is now only tenuously related to the original engine. |
| 05:23.46 | jmerlin | If Trion plans to do another MMO, it might be worth porting their tools etc to a base with a much better engine now that they have the money to spring for the best that money can buy. |
| 05:23.51 | jmerlin | And maybe one day port Rift, maybe. |
| 05:25.01 | seebs | I think they're doing two other MMOs as we speak, although I don't know that the teams share much stuff. |
| 05:28.41 | seebs | Looks like the trimancer is at least still perfectly viable for newbie level 50 stuff. |
| 05:29.44 | jmerlin | I hope then that they are making good decisions. It's really unlikely that Crytek-level, Valve-level, id-level, or Epic-level rendering engineers are staffed at Trion, and a consistent 20-30 fps really does impact the experience. |
| 05:30.18 | jmerlin | I just found some really interesting benchmarks, Skyrim -> Gamebryo, it has a bigger FPS increase from CPU change than from GPU change, most other games are the inverse. |
| 05:32.23 | seebs | I do not know to what extent the issue is "rendering engine sucks" and to what extent it's "problem to be solved is harder in some ways". |
| 05:32.27 | jmerlin | Hm, well they're talking about this Creation Engine (maybe a modified Gamebryo) |
| 05:32.47 | seebs | A whole lot of games have a heck of a lot less to render than MMOs. For instance, they often have a reasonably small selection of active models. |
| 05:33.05 | jmerlin | Because the same trend occurs in ES and and Fallout, cpu >>> gpu |
| 05:33.20 | jmerlin | I don't know man, I've seen some ridiculous stuff in Gary's Mod |
| 05:33.33 | jmerlin | And some massive scale battles in Unreal |
| 05:33.49 | seebs | Could be. In any event, my guess is that gutting or replacing the rendering engine would, at this point, be a multi-year task. |
| 05:34.09 | seebs | Refactoring by bits and pieces might take longer, but it'll break less along the way. :) |
| 05:35.23 | jmerlin | lol, maybe if we beg Zorba, he can convince the bosses to put some time into performance |
| 05:36.21 | Imhothar | it's not *that* simple, there are many factors involved. it's not just the eingines but also in which kind of environment they're used. a mainly open outdoor worlds like fallout have different requirements than closed dungone-like environments. then there's other stuff: are there many individual moving objects which have a higher cpu overhead or are there fewer more detailed objects which are more gpu-bound. is the environment |
| 05:36.22 | Imhothar | ore texture, geometry or shader intensive etc etc bla bla and so on |
| 05:37.33 | jmerlin | I understand, but when I'm staring at a wall in the least populated place I can find and my FPS is 70 with $1300 worth of GPU hardware and an overclocked CPU, something is .. wrong. |
| 05:37.44 | jmerlin | Min rendering settings, too |
| 05:40.15 | Imhothar | maybe |
| 05:41.16 | Imhothar | and just as a side note: low settings may worsen performance |
| 05:42.51 | jmerlin | It's a linear increase from min fps to max fps when switching things off, it's just it feels like something at a fundamental level is just dominating the CPU thread, or that they have some embarassingly parallel things that they aren't appropriately multithreading |
| 05:52.37 | Imhothar | you made a graph? |
| 05:52.49 | jmerlin | Always. |
| 06:24.57 | seebs | Everything I've seen makes me think that there is a single main thread which is WAY too busy. |
| 06:25.10 | seebs | But there may be some underlying reason for which it is harder than it looks to parallelize it. |
| 09:18.11 | *** join/#riftuidev Wildtide (~quassel@host86-174-70-33.range86-174.btcentralplus.com) |
| 09:19.24 | Wildtide | mornin' |
| 09:22.13 | jmerlin | Almost time for bed for me |
| 09:26.52 | Wildtide | :) |
| 09:36.50 | Noshei | morning Wildtide |
| 09:37.16 | Noshei | so Wildtide it seems either I was wrong or ZorbaTHut has some helpers |
| 09:37.17 | Noshei | http://forums.riftgame.com/rift-general-discussions/addon-api-development/336030-dimension-test-addon.html |
| 09:38.30 | Noshei | I'm guessing more on the helpers side, in that the dev or devs doing dimensions also added in the addon API for it |
| 09:38.31 | Wildtide | yeah, i was going to ask Zorba about that |
| 09:39.00 | Noshei | that would make the most sense, imo |
| 09:40.07 | Wildtide | yep |
| 09:41.14 | Noshei | well im off to sleep for a few hours before Extra Life starts, c you all in a bit |
| 09:41.32 | Wildtide | nn :) |
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