lol, not really a chance of that happening.
This project is being done "on the side," and as I own a Sunburn Pro copy, I can't release a commercial game on the XBox. $300 when I already own Pro feels.. excessive for a hobby. >.>
Though maybe I could make it back on the marketplace. :p
Looking good. :)
andorov:dissapointed by XBox performance w/ the .NET Compact framework. It just doesn't cut it. Even with utilizing all 4 available threads to near-peak potential, I'm still only getting 30 FPS. :| And that included reducing the zombie horde to 25 zombies.
Yeah, the .Net performance on Xbox is not great - usually related to floating point processing.
It seems like processing animations on the Xbox is very slow - even the official Custom Avatar Animation sample is slow. For our GameFest Avatar Club demo we shared only 7 animation threads (separate running animations, not really threaded) among 30 avatars. This gave us a huge performance boost.
It might be worth disabling the animations to see how many zombies you can push on-screen without the animation overhead.
andorov:This project is being done "on the side," and as I own a Sunburn Pro copy, I can't release a commercial game on the XBox... Though maybe I could make it back on the marketplace. :p
If you're interested in publishing the game on XBLIG send me an email. Zombie games are very popular on the channel and can net a nice return - which is more money to fund your full-time game. :)
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What is your email address.. looked around a bit, couldn't find it.
It won't let me update my post, so I'll spam. ><
It may be interesting to some that I'm not *at all* limited by my Update method.
My UpdateLogic method is done entirely on thread 3. At the end of the draw call, the program signals the thread to do exactly 1 update. This update taks approximatley 6 ms.
BUT, the framework (Game.EndFrame) takes a whopping 13 ms to finish up the draw. While that stuff is going on in threads 0, 1 and 2 (by default design), my Update is already finished on Thread 3. When the Game.Update is called, my update method checks if the thread is done working, and since it always is, it just goes directly to the next draw.
I'm currently limited to Sunburn (17 ms) and Game.EndFrame (13 ms) which gives me ~33 FPS 95% of the time.
Hi andorov,
You can respond to the email notification from this thread, just add something in the body like: "For JohnK" and the email will make it to my inbox.
Looking at the stats from your profiling thread it looks like there are a lot of materials being rendered, which is increasing the batch count (122 batches - usually we try to maintain < 50). Are all the zombies unique models with their own materials?
There are also a lot of effect commit changes, which are likely from all the zombies.
Is the render manager DepthFillOptimizationEnabled option on? If so try disabling it - this should reduce both numbers, as well as the rendered mesh count (at the cost of greater fill rate consumption).
Let me know if this helps!
I this may have to do with a slight hack I did.
The models are all the same, but use different textures. What I do is this.
Load up the model once. Rip out its effect. Clone the effect using .Clone(), and then I change the texture on the clone. The result is 14 different materials. But with a limit of 30 zombies, even if they were all using an individual effect, I'd still get ~30 changes, no?
It depends on the options selected in the render manager. Deferred rendering requires a minimal two passes; one for generating the g-buffers, and another for image composition.
If enabled occlusion querying requires a base z-pass, and depth fill optimization (if enabled) requires two (though one is shared with occlusion querying if both are enabled).
With 30 materials you could see 60 - 120 batches depending on the render manager options.
If the scene is batch heavy it helps to disable both occlusion querying and depth fill optimizations.
I'd figure it would be about time for another update...
Below are a few images of the first textured models and initial light setup. I'm currently working on a video, once it's uploaded I'll post a link in this thread...
These are the very first screenshots of our textured room. We're still experimenting with lighting settings and the specularity of the metal casings are still VERY coarse and untweaked. HDR/Bloom postprocessing was enabled in these images.
Like I mentioned, a vid is on it's way, looking for some interesting stuff to show before releasing it :)
Contributor on the SunBurn sgMotion Animation Library open source project.
As promised, the vide is online:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83mLsbXwk9U
Feedback is greatly appreciated ;)
very nice metal flaking
Nice work Tom, that looks awesome. I particularly like the product names on the boxes, very creative! :)
Thanks :) Our first prototype is due next week. We should have most of the critical features and mechanics implemented by then. I'll make sure to post a video link here as well :)
Very cool, looks great!
Currently...
Game Modes: King of the Hill (shown), Capture the Flag, Deathmatch and Survival
Multiplayer: 1-6 players over LIVE
Graphics: Full 3D w/ shadows, foliage, particle effects and well-animated characters with solid 30FPS on the XBox
Looks awesome - I like the new title too!
How do the game modes work, are there a fixed number of zombies you need to kill for the levels to end?