Need testers 3D Space Game's Engine (JNLP launch)

[Vorax]

Hi all,

I finally have a JNLP of the Exigent engine. Please give it a try and let me know how you make out.

Specifically, I am interested in:

• FPS rate (min/max)
• Engine rate (min/max)
• Your video card
• Your OS
• Your CPU
• Your RAM
• Were you running windowed or fullscreeen?

Please read the information on this page before you begin:

If your monitor can not support 1280x1024 at 85Mhz, use the windowed version

Exigent Engine Test

(Incase the page description isn’t clear)
To use cameras:

Press 1 to switch to 3rd person, then 2-8 to switch views of your ship.

… OR…

target a ship (press CTRL), then press 0, then use 2-8 to see different views of that. You can move your mouse to orbit when you are camera viewing yourself or a target.

Questions, comments, concerns, fears, beliefs, philosophies, quotes, etc. welcome.

[Hansdampf]

I got a mad screen and made a screenshot.
When I pasted it into WidowsPaint I saw an error box “Engine … could not be started” or so

p4 3000000000 Hz, 9200se, 768 ram

[Vorax]

[quote]I got a mad screen and made a screenshot.
When I pasted it into WidowsPaint I saw an error box “Engine … could not be started” or so

p4 3000000000 Hz, 9200se, 768 ram
[/quote]
That’s ATI card?

[Hansdampf]

windows says gigabyte radeon 9200se

[tom]

-FPS 40-62
-Engine mostly 62, but sometimes 30 something (I think) for a single frame.
-ATI 9500 Pro
-XP
-AMD 1800
-512 MB

A wirefrime mode would be fun. Then we could see where all those triangles are going

[Vorax]

Thanks for the info. Nice to see it runs on someones ATI

Did it still feel smooth when you were at 40FPS? The engine thread controls all the timing I am hoping for a bit of an illusion of still feeling very smooth even at low FPS.

You can hit F1 to toggle show bounding box calculations, it will give you a hint where the vertex are going (might be ships far off that you aren’t noticing)

Four things explain the vertex count:

• All ship models are pretty high vertex count (3000+ tris)
• The particles for each ships thrusters
• Your cockpit is around 5000 tris (switch to 3rd person via pressing ‘1’ you will see better FPS)
• No LOD yet

The planet has a pretty high triangle count also, the asteroids are pretty low.

How were the controls? Did you target anything? Manage to kill anything? Did you try any of the cameras out?

[Vorax]

I have added a Windowed mode at 1024x768 version incase anyone is having troubles with the fullscreen mode…or you just don’t like fullscreen

[erikd]

Fullscreen didn’t work.

It looks fantastic! Very stylish.
Although I had pretty good framerates (100-170 FPS), it seemed to drop frames quite often, making it feel less smooth than it could have been.
Sometimes the controls are odd and unintuitive (hard to explain, as if your ship starts turning out of control).

My system:
WinXP, 512Mb, GF4 Ti4200 (64Mb), AMD 2200+

[Vorax]

[quote]Fullscreen didn’t work.
[/quote]
Darn, I’ll need to add a log file to see what’s going on.

[quote]It looks fantastic! Very stylish.
[/quote]
Thanks!

Although I had pretty good framerates (100-170 FPS), it seemed to drop frames quite often, making it feel less smooth than it could have been.

Could also be the engine thread is a bit starved, I can adjust it. Also, I need to do some more pre-caching and VBO creation, up front, right now they are created lazily and can add frame drops.

Sometimes the controls are odd and unintuitive (hard to explain, as if your ship starts turning out of control).

The way it works, is their is an invisible mouse pointer that starts at the center of your HUD, as you move off in any direction, the ship follows. You have to play with it to get it centered again. I think if I make a visible cursor, or a bigger center target (an invisible area considered to centered), that might fix the problem.

My system:
WinXP, 512Mb, GF4 Ti4200 (64Mb), AMD 2200+

Thanks

[Malohkan]

I clicked the second link and got this:

java.io.FileNotFoundException: C:\Documents and Settings\Malohkan\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5\2XEHO1MX\Exigent_window[1].jnlp (The system cannot find the file specified)
      at java.io.FileInputStream.open(Native Method)
      at java.io.FileInputStream.<init>(Unknown Source)
      at java.io.FileInputStream.<init>(Unknown Source)
      at com.sun.javaws.jnl.LaunchDescFactory.buildDescriptor(Unknown Source)
      at com.sun.javaws.Main.launchApp(Unknown Source)
      at com.sun.javaws.Main.main(Unknown Source)

Did I catch you in the middle of an update or something?

[Vorax]

[quote]I clicked the second link and got this:

java.io.FileNotFoundException: C:\Documents and Settings\Malohkan\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5\2XEHO1MX\Exigent_window[1].jnlp (The system cannot find the file specified)
      at java.io.FileInputStream.open(Native Method)
      at java.io.FileInputStream.<init>(Unknown Source)
      at java.io.FileInputStream.<init>(Unknown Source)
      at com.sun.javaws.jnl.LaunchDescFactory.buildDescriptor(Unknown Source)
      at com.sun.javaws.Main.launchApp(Unknown Source)
      at com.sun.javaws.Main.main(Unknown Source)

Did I catch you in the middle of an update or something?
[/quote]
Could be, give it a refresh and try it again. Do other JNLP’s load for you without problem? That is an odd looking error.

[tom]

Did it still feel smooth when you were at 40FPS? The engine thread controls all the timing I am hoping for a bit of an illusion of still feeling very smooth even at low FPS.

Did not notice any big difference when the fps was low. But it stutters slightly whatever the fps I get. It is probably caused by the engine running at different fps. If it is rendering at 65 fps and updating at 62 fps, two frames will be rendered that is indentical? Then everysecond there will be a frame that is on screen twice as long as the rest, and this feels like stutter. Can this be true. Have you noticed this yourself?

How were the controls? Did you target anything? Manage to kill anything? Did you try any of the cameras out?

Actually I did not, so I tried it again Got some better fps aswell, sometimes reaching 100fps.

[Vorax]

Did not notice any big difference when the fps was low. But it stutters slightly whatever the fps I get. It is probably caused by the engine running at different fps. If it is rendering at 65 fps and updating at 62 fps, two frames will be rendered that is indentical? Then everysecond there will be a frame that is on screen twice as long as the rest, and this feels like stutter. Can this be true. Have you noticed this yourself?

It’s very smooth for me, except when it is first started because of the lazy VBO creation (this will be removed).

I think you may be getting some engine thread starvation (I can tweak that quite a bit), or seeing the lazy creation of VBO’s. If it’s the VBO’s, then it should go away after playing for a minute or so or as you have had a look at everything (which at this point isn’t to much ).

[tom]

Don’t think it is the vbo creation. I get that too but then it pauses for a longer time and is more noticable. Stutter might be the wrong word. It just don’t look completely smooth.

[c_lilian]

Full screen didn’t work : invalid display mode.

Why did you create 2 jars ? you’d better use a single jar with a system property switch to select between FS and windowed mode (it would save 4MB of bandwidth).

Runs fine on windowed mode (100-106 fps) but i got lost and couldnt find my way back… (don’t have much time to play today).

will try to give you better feedback later.

PC : windows XP/ P-IV 3.2GHz /1Go /NV6600

Lilian

[Hansdampf]

windowed mode works fine
45-60 fps
Would like to be able to hunt the ships and kill the asteroids!

[Vorax]

It will have properties later, etc. later on. I just couldn’t be bothered making it. For the next version i’ll add a switch on startup for full screen or windowed.

So you don’t get lost and can hunt the ships, hit CTRL to get a target, then follow the arrow below your HUD.

Thanks for testing!

[jojoh]

Looks really cool! I especialy like the HUD.

I got modest fps on a midest rig ~ 15 and 11 fps on a 800MHz with GF2 MX200.

I think the problem with the ctrls are two things.
1 You dont really know where you are turning to, that might be helped by showing mouse cursor.
2 You control the ship from world coordinates. When you move the mouse to the left in the very begining you will see the stars move from left to right. If you however then rotate the ship so that it points striaght up (Should be not up at all since we are in space!), and then stop all the spinning/moving. Then you move the mouse to the left, you will see the stars rotating around a point straight ahead, instead of the previous left to right.

The ship should be rotating around its own axis rather than around the world orientation axis! Otherwise things get very confusing…

Still looks very nice and was fairly smooth despite low framerate on this old rig. Will test it on my gaming rig later.

[Vorax]

[quote]Looks really cool! I especialy like the HUD.
[/quote]
Glad you like it

I got modest fps on a midest rig ~ 15 and 11 fps on a 800MHz with GF2 MX200.

As more optimizations are added, that should improve. The main point of the test was to see if it ran at all

I think the problem with the ctrls are two things.
1 You dont really know where you are turning to, that might be helped by showing mouse cursor.
2 You control the ship from world coordinates. When you move the mouse to the left in the very begining you will see the stars move from left to right. If you however then rotate the ship so that it points striaght up (Should be not up at all since we are in space!), and then stop all the spinning/moving. Then you move the mouse to the left, you will see the stars rotating around a point straight ahead, instead of the previous left to right.

The ship should be rotating around its own axis rather than around the world orientation axis! Otherwise things get very confusing…

Good suggestions. It is rotating on it’s own axis, but it is suffering from gimble lock. Hopefully i’ll get it worked out eventually. It’s actually pretty tuff to get 6DOF working properly and it needs a bit more work.

Still looks very nice and was fairly smooth despite low framerate on this old rig. Will test it on my gaming rig later.

That’s a great comment considering your FPS and specs of your computer.

[monkeyget]

Got an error with fullscreen:
java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Invalid display mode
at sun.awt.Win32GraphicsDevice.setDisplayMode(Unknown Source)
at com.vorax.VoraxEngine.initialize(VoraxEngine.java:303)
at com.vorax.VoraxEngine.start(VoraxEngine.java:335)
at Exigent.main(Exigent.java:18)
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(Unknown Source)
at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Unknown Source)
at com.sun.javaws.Launcher.executeApplication(Unknown Source)
at com.sun.javaws.Launcher.executeMainClass(Unknown Source)
at com.sun.javaws.Launcher.continueLaunch(Unknown Source)
at com.sun.javaws.Launcher.handleApplicationDesc(Unknown Source)
at com.sun.javaws.Launcher.handleLaunchFile(Unknown Source)
at com.sun.javaws.Launcher.run(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)

In windowed mode it’s pretty smooth:
the engine rate is stuck at 62-65
fps rate: 60-80 in first person, 100 or mode in third person
my config. :
Geforce4
Windows xp
2.4Ghz
738MB RAM