Leadwerks Engine Evaluation Kit now available
BlitzMax Forums/BlitzMax Programming/Leadwerks Engine Evaluation Kit now available
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| Download (updated to 2.12): http://forum.leadwerks.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=822 Tutorials: http://www.leadwerks.com/files/Tutorials Forum: http://forum.leadwerks.com Documentation: http://www.leadwerks.com/wiki Minimum Specs: A graphics card with support for OpenGL 2.1 and Shader Model 3.0 is required (NVidia GEForce 6800, ATI Radeon X1500). An NVidia GEForce 8800 is recommended. Please note that AMD Drivers 8.8 suffer from a critical bug which will cause inverted images and other graphical anomalies. A full report has been made to AMD, and they are working to resolve the problem. See this thread for more information: http://forum.leadwerks.com/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=9   |
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| A lot of people downloading at once? i'm getting 20kb/s on a north american 10mbps connection =/ |
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| Must just be some bad ISP routing, I'm getting it at 350kb/s from Blighty. |
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| required? Whoa whoa whoa, wait a min, required? |
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| Just downloaded and installed it to satisfy my curiosity. Although the SDK Launcher thing starts and runs OK, whenever I click on any of the demos or the sandbox links, the windows flash up for a brief second and terminate almost immediately. I tried running them through the command prompt but I'm not getting any output at all from them... I'm running Vista Ultimate x86 with 2GB RAM and an nVidia 7600GTS Go. Never had a problem with any of the other demos you've showcased here using your engine... I've got to admit though, your SDK really is packaged extremely well. Nice work. ;-) |
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| The first thing I recommend you do is update your drivers. I have a GEForce 7300 I test with. The framerate is terrible, but it runs. |
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| Seb: Same here, model viewer kind of works but crashes on some models. XPSP2, ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 512mb, 2.5Gigs ram, and AMD 3800+. |
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| Both game demos crash randomly here, seemingly when physics are involved. Also, in the menu the demo launcher pops up randomly without being clicked. Otherwise its looking good! (and stable if I don't knock any barrels over) |
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| I was looking forward to having a play with this, but my experience with it wasn't great. With everything on minimum I can barely scrape 40 FPS on a Geforce 8600 GTS. There were some serious issues with shadowing, like large areas suddenly being shadowed when there was nothing casting a shadow there, and then the shadow moving or clearing again as I moved around. Also, even with the shadow quality on maximum, there is a very noticeable line in the shadows. I guess it's a border between parallel split maps? Anyway, it's very close to the camera, very noticeable and it sort of flickers so it's much more noticeable in motion than it is in a still shot. I tried a previous binary demo and the line was very much less noticeable then than it is now. The volumetric light scattering seems to work even when I'm facing away from the light, so it just leaves these weird black trails off of things. I don't like the water either. It looks fine from a distance, but up close there's far too much specular and it just has a very un-watery appearance. Physics were fine. I tried to repeat any crashes the other guys had, but it seemed rock solid. I like sandbox, that's very nice. I guess that comes off a bit negative overall, and I suppose it's not bad. I've certainly used worse engines, but all the screenshots I've seen are moderately impressive, and I had moderately high expectations, but they weren't really matched. I guess the water isn't a huge problem, as you could always write your own water shader. I'm sure you can fix the shadow and light issues. Speed would be a major concern for me though. I know how much a GF 8600 GTS can do. Even with indie engines like TV3D and Shiva, it can really throw a lot at the screen and keep a framerate of 150-200. I guess outdoor scenes don't really benefit from deferred rendering though? |
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| There's a sound/physics problem I am working out...not sure what is going on yet, but I will fix it. You realize that scene is rendering anywhere from 500,000 to 1.4 million polys? If you run it with a scene without so much going on it is a lot faster. |
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on my machine its slow, but there is no shadows artifacts..however, clouds seems to be all time in front of hills, when I turn camera in to clouds direction as it is on this pic.. |
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| 1. What GPU? 2. Update your drivers please. You turned on grass shadows and godrays...they look nice, but they will slow a GEForce 8800 down to 40 FPS. XD |
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| im sorry, I forgot to put info..it was on nVidia 7600GT, 256MB Vram, win XP Pro, 2 Gig RAM, 3.2 Gigs CPU, when i disable everything but fulllscreen, with shadow quality on medium, I got 12-15 FPS..Sandbox is nice, and running fine with no crash, FPS on island demo loaded in Sandbox are similar as i had in first try.. |
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| That's about what I would expect it to be. When I tried playing STALKER on a 7800, I got terrible performance. The only reason I even supported SM3 was for AMD cards, and they still haven't finished fixing their drivers. |
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| (edit). - should have read Josh's note at thread start. |
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| Please read the title thread. This is exactly the problem I was talking about. I have reported it to AMD and there is nothing more I can do for now. Unfortunately, the error is completely erratic. gl_FragCoord.y is only flipped when rendering to an FBO, with X2xxx+ series cards. So I can't simply detect an AMD GPU in the shader and flip the value, and even if I could, it would break again when they fix the error. A bug exists with sound, and it is kind of a nasty one. I spent all afternoon tracking it down, then finally realized I had used MemCopy on an array of objects (oops) so of course the GC didn't keep track of those. I'll have a patch and a new version up within a day or two. I don't recommend getting an AMD card, even the new ones. They are missing support for a lot of features, so even if the card has so much processing horsepower, if the drivers lack GPU instancing and linear shadowmap filters, it's going to be slower than an NVidia card. |
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| Ah - I was so eager to get my mitts on it I 'neglected' to read all of your original thread. Think I'll take those images down then. |
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| Almost like the engine hates anything AMD (for those that missed it, ATI=AMD.) |
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| I made a mistake due to something with sound I added right at the last minute...I will have version 2.1.1 out soon, along with a patch for the demo and a new installer. Sorry about that! Other than this sound error I brilliantly introduced right before release and AMD's driver error, everything seems pretty good. |
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| Yep, updated my drivers and it's working again now. If it were possible, it would perhaps be more useful if the engine could catch any driver problems/errors and throw an error message, instead of terminating the process. Just a suggestion. |
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| If it were possible, it would perhaps be more useful if the engine could catch any driver problems/errors and throw an error message, instead of terminating the process. Just a suggestion. It probably crashes when it tries something the driver can't handle, I doubt it is checking driver versions. |
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| Seems to all work pretty good. The only nit-picking comment I would make is probably an art related one: the big rotating fan thing in the tunnel scene seems to cast far too much light (and too far) considering how bright the area behind the fan actually looks. Also, there seemed to be some (rotating) light cast onto the tunnel earlier in the scene that was coming from nowhere. Not sure if it was bleeding from elsewhere or the light mesh was missing or something? |
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| With last drivers, the program crash without message, just windows blink. |
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| What GPU? |
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| NVidia Quadro FX 1400, i'll try tonight, to test the pack with my nVidia 8600M GS. |
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| To be honest the performance is terrible for whats going on, even in some of the examples in your forum made by a few people (one has a teapot and 3 cylinders) It is really not worth the effort unless you fix these issues, and this is on a top system. |
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| If you experienced the clouds on top of terrain issue, please replace the Example.exe file in your SDK folder with this one and tell me the result: http://www.leadwerks.com/post/Example2.11.zip I am unable to produce this error on my GEForce 7200 test card. I did experience the error on AMD test hardware, so the engine uses a different method internally for AMD cards, but I guess the 7xxx series has a similar problem? Depth blitting probably doesn't get used all that often, so it's not surprising a driver bug might exist there. |
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| I don't recommend getting an AMD card, even the new ones. They are missing support for a lot of features, so even if the card has so much processing horsepower, if the drivers lack GPU instancing and linear shadowmap filters, it's going to be slower than an NVidia card. However, keep in mind that nvidia is facing some pretty big issues too, at the moment -- apparently pretty much their entire GPU line-up has a massive design flaw that results in premature hardware failure: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2330198,00.asp Personally I wouldn't exactly run out and buy nvidia either at the moment... |
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| The hardware failures are heat related, keep your desktop pc cool and you should be fine. |
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| If you experienced the clouds on top of terrain issue... I can confirm the problem with a GeForce 6600gt (driver 175.19). I've got a problem with decals. But release 2.11 solved both the problem. Thanks. |
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| Thanks, I filed a bug report with NVidia here: http://developer.nvidia.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=2204 And I will leave the workaround in until they fix it. |
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| If you have any problems, please give this a try and let me know the results: http://www.leadwerks.com/post/Example2.12a.zip Thanks. |
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| You realize that scene is rendering anywhere from 500,000 to 1.4 million polys? If you run it with a scene without so much going on it is a lot faster. Yes, I realize what the scene is rendering. In fact, I've been running two very similar scenes on similar engines this week and got higher FPS values with everything max'ed out on those engines, versus everything on min with this. Still, if you'd care to point me to a more moderate binary demo scene which you think better demonstrates the speed of your engine, I'd be happy to try that. |
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| I updated the download to version 2.12. This fixes a few bugs that were introduced at the last minute, and makes it more obvious if OpenAL is not installed. |
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| The Underground demo is REALLY slow! I have got a GF 8600GT, AMD64 3200+, and 1GB Ram, and it runs with 2-3 FPS.. Crysis runs with 15 FPS in Very High graphics! |
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| You have something very wrong going on, because I get 200-300 FPS, and I have never heard of anyone getting those framerates on GEForce 8 hardware. You should be getting at least 150 FPS. Maybe you have very old drivers and a shader is falling back into software mode? |
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| There must be something really wrong with your config. Even if its not supported I was able to run the sandbox and the underground demo on a Radeon X800 (CPU: XP3200+, 2GB RAM) and it runs constantly at 3ß to 45 fps. (With shadows at high) The shadows rocks :) Good work Josh |
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| For me the Underground demo runs at about 17FPS with shadows on high. Pretty jerky, but just about playable. That's the 8600GTS again. I'd be interested to see what it was like with half a dozen 5,000 poly characters running around, with a bit of AI, and a few grenades exploding. It's not really going to be playable though, is it? And if your minimum spec has to be higher than an 8600 GTS, that's far, far too limiting for me. |
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| GeForce 9600GT, Intel Quad Core 3.2Ghz 4G RAM. All options checked, Shadow level max in 1280x1024 Average FPS Island : 30 FPS Underground : 55 FPS with around 50.000 poly |
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| Ok something really bad. I go in front of a rock in the Island demo. I still have +1Millions of poly... Why you draw poly that are invisible? When I'm in front of the hill I should display 100 poly. You must improve the dynamic tesselation of the objects and simplify them when they are far away, or no one will ever be able to run a game with this engine. For example object and terrain behind the user should not be counted, same for the ones hidden behind something. |
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| The renderer draws shadows each frame. That's probably what a majority of the polygons are. Grass shadows are the most expensive, and I don't recommend using them unless you have a really fast GPU. Lowering your screen resolution also makes a very big difference, since most of the processing is in the pixel shaders. The example scenes were meant to push the engine to show what it can handle on high-end hardware. If you make a simpler scene the framerate is much faster. |
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| if u guys have a dual monitor setup, it may be that the program is opening on the secondary monitor instead of the primary, try just moving the application to the other monitor if the framerate is low. |
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| Nope, no dual monitor here. I don't really see how you could get a much simpler scene than "underground". Most of it is just a tunnel. |
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| Btw I've purchased your engine, check your email. :) I lower the resolution but so far nothing changes. It is a lot slower than Torque for example, but the example with Torque are low in poly, they are smart:) No excessive foliage for example. I do not mean that the engine is slow, but it displays a lot of poly (1.5 M!!!) Also I've a problem underwater, it looks like fog. I've seen that there are some kind of shaders for underwater, is it possible that I've something wrong or the underwater part is not finished? The sandbox software is the most easy to use I've seen so far... |
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| I didn't put any effort into the underwater rendering. It seemed like it would have taken a long time to get it to look good, and I only wanted to make a demo. |
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| The demo looks good, did you received my paypal payment? |
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| Yes, and I processed your order yesterday. Please check the email address associated with your PayPal account. |
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| Got it! Thanks |
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| Btw 2 problems : 1- you can't resize an object in Sandbox. I think you should add this, it is very hard to work without. 2- when I try to load a mesh it displays without texture. The same mesh in b3d format display with textures when loaded with blit3d, filax mesh viewer or unwrap. I've sent you an email with the mesh and its textures. |
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| You just need a material file. I am starting a material editor tomorrow, and I think it will only take 1-2 days, so that will make things easier for you. |
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| I must give you justice: 1- excellent support 2- fantastic Sandbox - and of course 3d-engine. Here is what I've done in 2 hours, tweaking the island demo!      |
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| It seems that the GF 86xx cards has got some trouble .. Hmm .. Thats mainly the problem with OpenGL, all these vendor-specific problems :( |
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| I don't think so. The 8600 isn't the fastest card, but should still run well with low-detail shadows. If you are getting 2 FPS you need to update your drivers, because my GEForce 7300 is faster than that. |
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| But still .. I can run Crysis with 30 FPS in medium graphics .. And that is including some advanced AI too .. |
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| No sound in vista x64. |
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| You need to run the OpenAL installer if you do not have OpenAL installed. It's included. |
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| fixed |
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| Got it to work :) But, when you turn the camera fast, its like the culling is a little slow, so that some objects suddenly appears? |
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| What was the problem? Did you not have OpenAL installed? But, when you turn the camera fast, its like the culling is a little slow, so that some objects suddenly appears? That can happen sometimes with hardware occlusion culling, but the benefit is dynamic per-pixel culling with no pre-processing. It's an acceptable tradeoff. |
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| Maybe it would be possible to perform the occlusion culling before the frame gets rendered or something, so you could prevent that? :) |
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| That would require syncing the CPU and GPU. The results of the occlusion culling are not immediately available to the CPU, so there is a slight delay in the feedback. I reduced this effect a lot, and it should be barely noticable. Of course you can always disable occlusion culling per entity, or disable it entirely. |
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| But doesn't your engine have some kind of frustum culling? |
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| Yes. But occlusion culling is what makes it so if there is a wall in front of you, a character or light behind it won't be rendered. |
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| What support does this engine have for skinned meshes? All the demos seem to focus on scenery. |
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| The demos actually use a skinned mesh for the visible hands and weapon, but here is a tutorial on skinning and animation: Article: http://www.leadwerks.com/files/Tutorials/CPP/Introduction_To_Animation.pdf Video: http://www.leadwerks.com/files/Tutorials/CPP/Introduction_To_Animation.wmv |
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| Presumably this is Windows-only right? I mean, that seems apparent from the fact that the demo download is an exe, but you never actually specify anywhere (eg. the only place System Requirements are listed is on the wiki, and even there it only mentions videocard.) |
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| I have try the last leadwerks release :) Before, i had many problems to start with the engine (complicated compilation , meshes and textures problems, no valid documentation). So i left the engine for 6 months / 1 year. But the latest release finally works on my machine ! I am quite impressed by the management of shadows ! Even with complicated structures the display does not bug. An effort was also made on documentation, now there is a wiki, which is very good. The engine run smooth on a NVidia 9600, but i get framerate problems on graphics cards style 7800 and 8600. I hope josh fix the problem :) For fun, i tried to view my level "egypt" with the engine, without calculate my lightmap with Giles, and i get this. I like :) There are still some problems in materials and meshes, because the B3d => LWE converter do strange things with the objects sizes and textures are not converted correctly. But Josh told me about a converter FBX => LWE in a future version... But it's a good release :) PS: But i'm sure that the LWE need absolutly a real plugin exporter (3DS Max , maya) to get the better of the materials, and to simplify the graphics artist/coder life :) Because the external converters add an unnecessary step in the chain of production. PS2 : Josh , if you see this, i understand nothing for the terrain mapping ? I want to do this with code and not with sandbox. But the mapping seem flipped ? Any idea ?  |
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| That looks nice. There's a lot you can do to scale the performance. The shadow quality, shadowmap size, and screen resolution are probably the best settings to adjust. You can also create an RGBA texture and set the gbuffer's normal texture to this, to save bandwidth. By default, the engine tries to create a 64-bit normal buffer for better precision, but if you use an RGBA texture, you can cut this data in half. The only consequence is a white wall with a high specular level will exhibit banding, but in most cases you won't even notice it. The terrain mapping can be rotated and scaled per-layer. Most people just load the terrain from Sandbox, but there are commands to handle the whole thing programmatically, if you choose to do so. |
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