Free Allegiance Forums

I don't intend to play down the Devs effort in R5, but I need to say this.

Playing native Allegiance R4 on my 1600x1200 display is completely OK with me. I'm not a graphics nerd, and having 2x2 'pixels' doesn't hurt my aesthetic feeling that much. Hey, I'm playing NetHack, and it's 80x24!

However, the R5 worsens the things quite a bit.
* In 'old-style' 800x600 some of the GUI elements are semi-transparent, and thus EXTREMELY hard to see. For example, the minimap symbols for ships, the target rectangle in F3 view and something else I don't remember now. The F7 minimap is completely unreadable, with semi-transparent ship symbols, large semi-transparent circles for sectors and undeterminable sector ownership marks.

* The higher resolutions, in addition to the above problems, do not scale all the GUI elements. Most notably, the text, which becomes virtually unreadable at higher resolutions. Also the bug noted before, concerning large black areas in the station view. Having different resolutions in the lobby and game do not help either.

I realize that, probably, Allegiance is written in such a way that any scaling is hard to accomplish. However, these display issues make Allegiance unplayable for any other purposes than small beta-testing. These are only my feelings, but I heard some people shared these feelings with me too.

I don't even consider the possibility of the current R5 client being released. It won't attract any more players (since the game would look even WORSE than it is now), and it may fend off some old players because of the visual glitches.

My point:
1. Unless the R5 client looks at least as good as the R4, we won't get any significant testing.
2. Something SHOULD be done about the visual look at higher resolutions at some moment, or it would be a degrade in game presentation.
3. Thus, the development effort is mostly needed in this area.

I'm a computer programmer myself, but I have no experience in C++ programming nor in graphics engines. Reading third-party sources in a non-native programming language is of course not the way I like to spend my free time. However, I'm willing to contribute in some way, if I can.

Being a young member of the community, I don't know a lot of things others know well. So, please, don't bash me too hard. Here are the questions I'd like to ask:

1. Is the GUI scaling difficulty that, well, difficult? What are the problems with it?
2. Did you consider migrating Allegiance to an available (open-source or commercial) modern graphics engine?

Zruty wrote:QUOTE (Zruty @ Jul 2 2009, 09:42 AM) 1. Is the GUI scaling difficulty that, well, difficult? What are the problems with it?
2. Did you consider migrating Allegiance to an available (open-source or commercial) modern graphics engine?

1) I get the impression it's not really the scaling, its that the dx code is spread all over and isn't straightforward, if it wasn't time consuming and/or difficult I expect it would have been done.

2) It's been mentioned, but it's probably impossible with the size of the current dev. team




I know C++, but my DirectX experience is limited to drawing simple 3D objects in c# (and that was a $#@!ing pain).

DirectX is a funny beast to get decent performance out of as far as I can tell, also taking into account the many hardware platforms it will run on - this is no easy task.

Edit : Oh - if you know of specific issues that are not mentioned here, please feel free to add them - this is probably the best way for us to accelerate dev.

The dev team as only just appeared to restart work on R5 after a pause - try to cut them some slack.....

notjarvis wrote:QUOTE (notjarvis @ Jul 2 2009, 02:31 PM) DirectX is a funny beast to get decent performance out of as far as I can tell, also taking into account the many hardware platforms it will run on - this is no easy task.

I realize this, that's one of the reasons to use a ready solution provided by a graphics engine.

I haven't played with this recently, but is f7 still semi transparent with AA turned off?

Zruty, you are the first one to post that things look WORSE overall, aside from some posts of known issues (like some panels are transparent or there is a rendering artifact in certain cases).

So your feedback is valuable just don't get the impression we did the 'upgrade' from DX7 to DX9 to make things worse, it should improve things. It is my impression that it does improve things for most people.

What is your graphics card? and how much memory does it have?
What texture size were you using?
What anti-alias setting were you using?
Did you try toggling bi-directional lighting?

As far as the GUI scaling, there is no difference in behavior between R4 and R5 regarding this. We all agree it does not scale well in that it is too small at higher resolutions. The way they were made does not lend itself well to their being scaled.

The mini map transparency issues should be fixed. Are you using the latest R5 beta (released this week)?

As far as 'ripping out the old graphics engine and replacing it with a new one', two comments. One, one of the things people like about Allegiance is its 'feel', replacing the engine entirely might take away from that. And two, it is a lot of work and no one has given it a try yet (that I know of). A few people have looked into some of the modern engines but I think most concluded if they were going to use them they would likely just do a complete game overhaul and call it Allegiance II.

One of the reasons for going to DX9 is a lot of the newer card's drivers are having issues with the older DX7 code. This leads me to believe you have an older card or older drivers. Frame rates for R4 drop into the teens for cards like an nVidia 8000 GT with drivers least in the last 6+ or so months. There have been similar reports on ATI cards.

Dog

QUOTE So your feedback is valuable just don't get the impression we did the 'upgrade' from DX7 to DX9 to make things worse, it should improve things. It is my impression that it does improve things for most people.[/quote]
Of course I don't blame you of worsening things intentionally

QUOTE What is your graphics card? and how much memory does it have?
What texture size were you using?
What anti-alias setting were you using?
Did you try toggling bi-directional lighting?[/quote]
ATI Radeon X1950 (forgot the momory size, but I think it should be about 128 Mb)
Most recent texture settings were 1024x1024
6x anti-aliasing
No, I didn't try changing any display settings.

QUOTE As far as the GUI scaling, there is no difference in behavior between R4 and R5 regarding this. We all agree it does not scale well in that it is too small at higher resolutions. The way they were made does not lend itself well to their being scaled.[/quote]
Well, I tried out the R4 DX9 Alpha and I didn't use it exactly because of the scaling. So I agree that the matters didn't worsen there
But community agreement is not a sufficient excuse not to handle the issue somehow: the GUI scaling lack is the most annoying 'feature' there.

QUOTE The mini map transparency issues should be fixed. Are you using the latest R5 beta (released this week)?[/quote]
I was using build 09.06.25, so, probably, yes.

QUOTE As far as 'ripping out the old graphics engine and replacing it with a new one', two comments. One, one of the things people like about Allegiance is its 'feel', replacing the engine entirely might take away from that. And two, it is a lot of work and no one has given it a try yet (that I know of). A few people have looked into some of the modern engines but I think most concluded if they were going to use them they would likely just do a complete game overhaul and call it Allegiance II.[/quote]
I was expecting the 2nd argument of course As for the 'feel' I think the engine switch may not affect the display in such a radical way that this mysterious 'feel' disappears
Anyway, my thoughts about the graphics engine are the direct deduction of my original statement: "GUI scaling must be done properly!"

QUOTE One of the reasons for going to DX9 is a lot of the newer card's drivers are having issues with the older DX7 code. This leads me to believe you have an older card or older drivers. Frame rates for R4 drop into the tens for cards like an nVidia 8000 GT with drivers least in the last 6+ or so months. There have been similar reports on ATI cards.[/quote]
Well, I'm probably in the happy minority of people who don't have Allegiance display issues I wouldn't call my graphics card that old, but it's of course not in the mainstream now.
Switching to newer DX is not something I oppose anyway

Use a more reasonable texture size, say 256x256, turn the anti-aliasing down to 2 and then compare R4 with the R5 beta and see if the graphics are 'better' or worse. At 1024x1024 your 128 MB graphics card can only hold 8 16 bit textures.

I think you misread my comment. We all agree that part of the GUI do not scale well as in we all (or most) think it is a problem and we would like to address it but to date no one has been able to.

Dog

Dogbones wrote:QUOTE (Dogbones @ Jul 6 2009, 05:53 AM) Use a more reasonable texture size, say 256x256, turn the anti-aliasing down to 2 and then compare R4 with the R5 beta and see if the graphics are 'better' or worse. At 1024x1024 your 128 MB graphics card can only hold 8 16 bit textures.

Well, it seems my graphics card got at least 256 Mb (or 512) of memory.
This Sunday I ran the R5 client again, this time with 256^2 textures and no anti-aliasing. The graphics looked basically the same as in Allegiance (I didn't see the difference). I's stuck with 800x600 because of the text size, which is painful to read when it's this small.

2 Adaven: Yes, the semi-transparent HUD elements stay semi-transparent with AA off, which is an annoyance. ImmZ confirmed this annoyance in-game too

One more little thing: while the allied SPuG was fun to play, I'd suggest to consider using one of the 'main' Allegiance servers for the events like this, if it isn't very hard. This Sunday average ping was about 200, and I personally experienced some 500-600 lag spikes, which made it impossible to do anything but probe.