2012-12-27, 07:55 AM
PS: I've noticed some twitching due to the walk effect provided by Ex. There's no reason to account for it beyond the frame rate being irregular. In theory it should go away if your PC (probably your CPU) is powerful enough. It doesn't happen with my (miniature) testing project anyway. Unfortunately SOM is not really cut out for low-end PCs. If your game is very basic like the KF remake it may stand a chance, but authors tend to be much more ambitious/irregular in terms of map layouts.
Without Ex the performance would be even much worse, and there are no extensions that weigh on the CPU with the exception of do_lights / do_fix_lighting_dropout without which SOM's lights don't really work well and go out as soon as you change the Options.
On the bright side,
Very shortly it will be possible to optimize MDO files, many of which (especially custom files) are unnecessarily broken into many many pieces which could very well be having a very negative impact on communication between the CPU and GPU. That may make a big difference CPU wise and would take a large load off of do_lights as it would have to deal with a lot less model pieces.
EDITED: SOM's MDL files are also probably broken up into pieces. However the custom models produced by x2mdl.exe are not. Optimizing SOM's MDLs will be possible to do too.
Without Ex the performance would be even much worse, and there are no extensions that weigh on the CPU with the exception of do_lights / do_fix_lighting_dropout without which SOM's lights don't really work well and go out as soon as you change the Options.
On the bright side,
Very shortly it will be possible to optimize MDO files, many of which (especially custom files) are unnecessarily broken into many many pieces which could very well be having a very negative impact on communication between the CPU and GPU. That may make a big difference CPU wise and would take a large load off of do_lights as it would have to deal with a lot less model pieces.
EDITED: SOM's MDL files are also probably broken up into pieces. However the custom models produced by x2mdl.exe are not. Optimizing SOM's MDLs will be possible to do too.