Joined: 22 Nov 2010 Location: Iszkaszentgyorgy, Hungary
Posted: Tue Feb 14, 2012 10:16 pm Post subject:
What Allen said.
Only the output is 16 bit, every asset (be it shp, pcx, vpl, vxl) uses 256-colored palettes. And tbh, this is relatively simple in the case of vpls... I guess they did that for the lookup table. _________________ "If you didn't get angry and mad and frustrated, that means you don't care about the end result, and are doing something wrong." - Greg Kroah-Hartman
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Past C&C projects: Attacque Supérior (2010-2019); Valiant Shades (2019-2021)
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WeiDU mods: Random Graion Tweaks | Graion's Soundsets
Maintainance: Extra Expanded Enhanced Encounters! | BGEESpawn
Contributions: EE Fixpack | Enhanced Edition Trilogy | DSotSC (Trilogy) | UB_IWD | SotSC & a lot more... QUICK_EDIT
Using palettes would have allowed considerably smaller sizes for the images, at any rate. _________________ Dawn of the Tiberium Age staff member QUICK_EDIT
1998/9 wasn't year of shitty cards anymore if that was a problem...
I remember reading (can't recall the source right now) that WW wanted TS to be able to run without a seperate graphics card, or at least on the low-end cards. Also what Chronoseth said, less disk space and less RAM used. _________________ CnCNet Client | CnCNet TS patches | Vinifera | World-Altering Editor (WAE)
as Rampastein said, I think they were catering to lower end systems of the day
I also remember WW saying/advertising that TS would not need a gfx card to run _________________ QUICK_EDIT
Taking all this into account
I don't understand why TS still has occasional slow downs even on systems that are WAY higher than required/recommended spec _________________ QUICK_EDIT
From what I've learned from Hyper's quest, the engine is obnoxiously inefficient when it comes to memory usage. It even checks and reads some animations a dozen times for no reason, wasting memory and time. _________________ QUICK_EDIT
On the other hand RA2 seems to run slower than TS on some systems, at least on mine. AFAIK the main reason why TS can be unplayable on some modern systems is that it doesn't have VideoBackBuffer. _________________ CnCNet Client | CnCNet TS patches | Vinifera | World-Altering Editor (WAE)
Ra2 loads a horrible huge amount of unnecessary big SHPs and other game files which clutter up the RAM. The 25% bigger ingame art isn't only visually but also disk-space wise 25% bigger.
If Ra2 would use the much smaller TS graphics, i guess it would run also a lot faster. (The same way DTA runs a lot faster than vanilla TS, because it uses the even smaller TD graphics) _________________ SHP Artist of Twisted Insurrection: Nod buildings
If Ra2 would use the much smaller TS graphics, i guess it would run also a lot faster. (The same way DTA runs a lot faster than vanilla TS, because it uses the even smaller TD graphics)
If it used TS-size graphics it'd just have to draw more of them to fill the size of the screen. In addition I don't think DTA 1.11 runs much faster than TS anymore. Previous versions of DTA did, but the maps were very small and undetailed, the AI was simpler (and built less units), the amount of animations was much smaller etc.
The amount of RAM reserved by TS or RA2 shouldn't be a problem at all nowadays, so it definitely isn't that slowing RA2 down on some systems. For me RA2 is still properly playable and all, I mostly notice it in the movement of the camera being less smooth than in TS and the game slowing down slightly when there's a lot of explosions and other effects on the screen, which I can't reproduce even on TI. _________________ CnCNet Client | CnCNet TS patches | Vinifera | World-Altering Editor (WAE)
@m7: I've long ago removed everything from Ra2 and stripped it down to the smallest possible size by giving each side only one unit of each type and the default buildings (all civil stuff, unnecessary terrain and animations etc removed).
The result was, the game, menu and map loading times where 2 to 10 times faster (it even beat TS, which has already almost no loading times) and ingame the speed was 3-5 times faster. (it was a perfect testing platform, as it didn't takes you a minute from windaft until you're finally ingame to test the changes; unfortunately i removed it again when i stopped modding Ra2)
So the bigger Ra2 files and the higher amount of them compared to TS really do have a negative effect on the performance. (just compare the 70 MB of TS with the 300 MB of Ra2) _________________ SHP Artist of Twisted Insurrection: Nod buildings
LKO does have a point this time but it's pretty much stating the obvious - loading more files takes more time.
Altough who gives a shit about loading times as long as it does not take forever. What really matters is how fast it runs in-game, where amount of files is hardly the most important factor to consider, altough common sense would be to get rid of any truly unnecessary stuff. _________________ Last edited by Starkku on Fri Feb 17, 2012 9:46 am; edited 2 times in total QUICK_EDIT
You're saying that you removed nearly everything - of course it loaded faster.
If you'd only reduced the sizes of SHPs, perhaps you'd get more reasonable results? QUICK_EDIT
I wasn't nitpicking with the removed files. Of course a start would be to remove all the building destruction anims, especially the civilian ones where many of them can be already several MB big.
It was just a test back then to see if it's the engine that makes the game slower or the bigger mix files.
You shouldn't obsess too much about it.
@Starrku: when testing stuff, i want to be immediately ingame and not wait for the game loading the mix, menu and a map. Regarding this, TS is much more modding friendly as i can go up 5 times ingame and change the ini in 1 minute, while in Ra2 it would be possible to test a change only 1 time. It's simply faster to test stuff in TS and if you want to find out the true functionality of a key, you are often forced to set it to at least 3 to 5 different values and check out the difference ingame.
If i imagine doing my tiberium debris tests in Ra2, i probably would've gone mad from the long loading times, as i had to start the game about a hundred times (testing the effect of the power key for values from 1 to 50 and see which warhead animation is used, creating 26 different animations with debris, testing if the debris are shown correct and not mixed up between different tiberium types etc etc). Last edited by Lin Kuei Ominae on Fri Feb 17, 2012 10:13 am; edited 1 time in total QUICK_EDIT
It was just a test back then to see if it's the engine that makes the game slower or the bigger mix files.
Or the amount/size of objects actually used ingame? Having more assets makes loading times slower, but it shouldn't really affect ingame performance if those assets are just loaded in RAM but aren't used in the map at all. If you leave only a few terrain objects, unit types and animations and detail a map properly with them, I think it should be slower ingame again despite loading times being very fast. _________________ CnCNet Client | CnCNet TS patches | Vinifera | World-Altering Editor (WAE)
It's simply faster to test stuff in TS and if you want to find out the true functionality of a key, you are often forced to set it to at least 3 to 5 different values and check out the difference ingame.
Oh look, more of your 'my opinion is fact' bullshit. Not only does it take approx 30 seconds to load up RA2/YR/Ares on my system, but I can also have a directory full of files and a 1mb rules file. Seems like this claim of yours is pretty much moot. (lol moot) QUICK_EDIT
@m7: it might be my system only, that RA2 runs a lot slower than TS, but it is a fact (in TS i'm from windows in exactly 7 seconds ingame; in Ra2 exactly 43 seconds). And it would be nice if you wouldn't become personal or obsess about such a trivial thing. _________________ SHP Artist of Twisted Insurrection: Nod buildings
both TS and RA 2 Run perfectly on my old notebook, the load times are reasonable and pretty short and both of these games run pretty much as intendet, on my normal PC however both game suffer horrible slowdowns and RA 2 has long load times, longer than TS. whatever it is causing, it is not the Shp's nor the voxels, it's the engine itself.
on my notebook both games run not nearly but perfect. perfect performance, perfct load times, perfect animations without slowdowns, particles having no lags at all, scroll speed is at all times stable and smooth.
on my normal PC all these factors are suffering. _________________ Hydraw Art on Facebook QUICK_EDIT
I do believe the loading time is more of a factor due to RA2 getting rid of demand load feature, which for those not in the know meant that in Tiberian Sun, some assets were only loaded on "demand" from the hard disk and fetching from hard disk is slower than RAM while RA2 by my understanding loads mostly all to RAM and handful of things are streamed such as audio.
Performance wise, both present same laggy routines and same ailments, it is just that in Tiberian Sun, the lag is less obvious in general gameplay due to set of pace being far slower ingame while RA2 faster speed shows the lag spikes far more clearly while TS it is apparent when you exceed the lag threshold to notice everything running slower than it should.
As for me, I can't play TS as ingame it crawls slow making it rather non-pleasant and lack of videobufferthing disable doesn't help either while RA2 I can enjoy smooth run if its modded, in retail it runs shit.
From core point, both retail TS & RA2 are horribly unoptimized and without modding, they won't run to anywhere near good and even so, some fixes merely disable or reduce the bad points like trailers in debris which is actually most severe lag offender...actual debris is less severe, just points out the drawing code for such intensity draw is not well suited and you think only art is laggy? wrong, thanks to ingame detail slider and coding adjusted tests, you can tell that even AI pathfinding on some maps is plain terrible and causes huge lag even if you turned off about all anims and stuff and still no improvement, lag remains the same, big shocker.
In any case, LKO you won't like modding C&C generals and any later games then that all run on 3D engines as load times are much more pain QUICK_EDIT
I have a feeling that the copy protection is slowing me down a lot in TW. It takes about 30 seconds before I even see the main menu, while a friend of mine with almost identical hardware gets there in just a few seconds (and he has circumvented the copy protection).
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color depth
