Seaguard

[AsusX2]

I'm getting to the point where the som engine cant handle what i put through it. It's really getting frusterating.

[Holy_Diver]

Then put less thru it

[AsusX2]

Why should I put less thru it, then it won't be the way i wanted it. and if it cant be the the way i wanted, then why should i keep doing it? Dont get me wrong, I love som, And I love kings Field, But my storyline Requires some of the things Be in there. For example, I have made a bridge set that revolves. It has 3 sections that spin independantly (Thanks Dmp for the timer advice) ‎  but every time you get in visual range of them the game slows Waaaaaay down to almost unplayable And the walls of fire that your charector must pass thru stop the game engine altogether! I'm not giving up, Just frusterated is all. :sick[1]:

[Holy_Diver]

Well there are limitations in terms of what to expect. Everyone can probably help you if you give us some details / screens. What you describe does not sound overly ambitious. Some things like, if you want the bridge to spin with the player on it for example, Som does not have a physics framework nor does it understand moving platforms, but it does do collision well enough.

So if you put invisible rails around your bridge after the player is on it, then that can keep them from falling off.

[dmpdesign]

If you are using any custom models for the bridges, that may be a place to start being sure we arent overloading SOM with tons of polygons.

There are likely some tricks we can play to speed things up a bit in the area that is causing you grief.

I have a few spots in my game I need to fix as well and a majority of the problem is stemming from custom objects I put in the game that are just killer to SOM's capabilities.

If you want to send me your project info so I can take a sneak peek at the area, I may be able to help you out a bit.

[AsusX2]

if you want to see an xample of what i mean see the parts i've sent you already. What you need to do is take the moonlight sword out of the pedistal then walk back into town and youll see what i mean. P.s. be ready for a surprise after you take the sword. Things are slightly different, but the map is esentually the same. When you go into town, walk into the fires and you will get a perfect example.

[Madison Lastrega]

Aye too high of poly of poly is bad... However customs in meta can always be scaled down with out losing too much effect, Example I made some new goodies last week and polys were an issue as I was trying to make one object that had many objects in the model to save on the use of objects*See examples* So to make a long one short the model I made in blender turns out be have 141,693 polys , ‎  Som won't even load a mdo that size... And x2mdo cant swing it... I took the whole model not just pieces and now it's 30505 poly bouts the same as most trees and cause very little if any slowdown and still looks like the model I had in mind, the only draw back is it roughened up my edges of my ‎  text, but even that gave the text a 100 year old look so nice:)
I am an detail guy as well and if I can't have it done the way I want I will make it work , but I stress that som is only a platform is a platform built in 99 so we must build and create like a builder would have done in 99 is all the advice I have. Holy is right, if an object is stressing you let one of us give it a look:) Hope I can help ML

[Holy_Diver]

You actually have it a lot better than people back in 1999. If you understand what you're doing / make custom stuff, on modern hardware, even as inefficient as Som is (maybe we can help that some also) you should technically be able to make a game that will look "better" than most PS2 games.

[Holy_Diver]

I had a chance to talk to Asus and I think what is happening in his case is he's looking thru many sheets of fire with each one filling up more or less every pixel on the entire screen. Graphics hardware has two chief limitations, 1) how many vertices it can draw, and 2) how many pixels it can fill... no hardware is really geared to redraw every pixel many times at maximum resolution. That will cripple any game platform quick. If you lower the resolution to about a quarter of your hardware's max you might get better results, but this is generally not best practice scene design.

PS: I've actually been planning to try something / may take another detour before finishing translation work involving detecting when Som flashes the screen (ie. draws a swath of pixels over the entire screen) ...I have other reasons for being interested in this, however one think I want to find out is if the rgb flash events can be made transparent. If so I'll setup an extension so you can set the transparency level. And I will also setup the first extension that accesses the counters which will let you write a colour into a counter of your choosing which will be used instead of one or all of the R G B flash events. If possible that will even let you do a cheesy mesmerizing flame effect. Somewhere down the road I will add support for any number of screen effects, like underwater and desert-like heat-wave vision and some mechanism for letting everyone devise new effects of their own. Anyway, maybe Asus can do his flame walk that way yet.

UPDATE: I was successful in this. I was wrong in remembering the flashes being just opaque. They do actually fade in/out albeit very quickly.... culminating with a fully opaque frame -- or I'm guessing it's just one. It's the non-transparent frame that is pretty jarring I think. Theoretically you could mask an object transition like this, but I wonder if the timing would be even close. The RGB flashes are blended by colour intensity rather than alpha (though that could be monkeyed with) ...it's rather fortunate I guess there are not white/black flashes because that would be hard to interpret vs the w/b fade in/out events. I don't know if you could somehow blend the RGB flashes by using different instructions simultaneously (has anyone ever tried that?)

Probably the best way to soften them if that's what you want is to just clamp them before getting to full brightness. Anything much else tends to truncate/distort the curve. A soft clamp would probably be an improvement. I also played with changing the lightning in Thedeck's area in DD to white since Todd mentioned he wanted white. That's doable anyway, but some proper settings should probably be established first. I'm thinking having a 16bit colour stored in a counter to change the effect, which would be 4bits for each channel including alpha. That will let you do black flashes also and control transparency independent of intensity.

[darchangel]

ML, another tip:
I noticed that all your flat planes are using twice as many faces as they need, look at example below. I think that's a Blender thing, but if you could make them like A instead of B, you will have more room for the detailed stuff.

My A has 6 faces, your B has 12: