Varium Info

[sponge]

[randall]

[(TSC)Bender]

[BurningSheep]

[sponge]

[Dan East]

Please don't take this as a commitment of any kind, but it appears that releasing Varium for MIPS devices is at least within the realm of possibility. I get 13 FPS on a Casio BE300 (without sound). We can sacrifice rendering quality (such as not running the renderer in full 24 bit color mode) to increase FPS on devices slower than what I allowed for.

Dan East

[damian]

[jont]

[sponge]

If your getting 13FPS on a MIPS with no changes, I'm very impressed. I'm sure some high end maps will choke MIPS devices though. Perhaps an unsupported build type situation, like the MIPS version of Racing Days?

[esw]

Wow, 13fps on MIPS is great. Better than Quake I certianally wouldn't mind turning off some of the features in order to run it, if a mips version is released.

Anyway it's nice to see a developer that doesn't completly ignore mips devices. They may be a few years old, yeah. But it's not junk, and I see no real reason to upgrade to a newer device at this time.

[James S]

And remember, that was on a BE300. Faster processor, but less memory.

[(TSC)Bender]

So it will probably be a little slower, with less stuttering. Wow, it only takes up like 4 megs to run? Snails takes 8 megs. Wonder how that happens

[Dan East]

Well, in some ways 3D can be more efficient than 2D. The same textures can be used over and over, and because they are wrapped around different shaped meshes, and have different amounts of light applied to them, the overall image can still have a lot of unique detail. Whereas with 2D, basically all of it is just huge numbers of bitmaps, and unless they are high quality you will not have high quality output. For example with Snails, each frame of each animation is a separate bitmap. In our case with animating a model, the exact same mesh and textures are used, and only the bone positions are different. So any type of pose or animation can be performed very efficiently memory-wise. We also interpolate between bone frames, so the animation sequence could be at a low FPS, but the engine will smoothly transition from one position to the other using all the output frames available.

Dan East

[randall]

This was one of the main reasons we chose to use 3D, it had nothing to do with the coolness factor (okay, maybe just a little).

We wanted to make a multiplayer game with an isometric view. To do this with sprites would require a huge number of frames of animation. Think about this: We would need at least 16 different angles/frames JUST to rotate a character 360 degrees in isometric view. A run sequence requires at least 6 frames, so multiply that by the 16 different angles the player can run. That alone is 96 frames of animation- it adds up fast.

Our characters can crawl on their belly, crouch, run walk, jump. multiple pain, death and idle animations are also added to the mix. The characters can also move individual parts of their body, like aim up or down or turn their head to look at the enemy. Consider the fact that we have multiple characters as well.

That is one reason why games like Diablo require 500 megs. We simply don't have that kind of storage.

At this time, Varium isn't really optimised- codewise and graphically. My textures are far bigger and higher bit depth than is really necessary.

I should also not that Peter has been optimising Snails for other platforms, which don't usually have alot of RAM. So Snails will have a much smaller footprint in the future.

[Afoxi]

Heh, hope there will be a free test. [/b]