Blitz Rally Demo - one last try
Community Forums/Showcase/Blitz Rally Demo - one last try
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| OK, this EXE works perfectly at 60fps with frame tweening on my crappy Athlon, so perhaps it'll be OK for other - http://www.jameskett.dsl.pipex.com/Blitz%20Rally%20Final.zip as before, it's just the EXE so you'll need the data from the first demo. PLEASE GOD LET THIS WORK!! If not, I am completely stumped. thanks James |
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| Works fine here. :) Now you can get to work on those infuriating collisions :D |
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| Same stutter as before :o/ |
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| works fine here would like to bounce of things instead of getting stuck to them...enjoyable stuff :) |
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| Fine here, though I join the 'make it bounce off the sides' petition... :P |
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| Works fine here now :) Yeah, bouncing of the sides would be more fun. |
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| Damn you Eric Thon!!! So, you other guys think it works OK now? Was it stuttery for you all before? If so, then hopefully that may have fixed it. |
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| Yes stuttery for me before, good work Vorderman :) |
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| hey guys, lets toss a few coins in the middle here for Erik to buy a decent PC! :) IPete2. |
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| Flickering problem well and truly fixed here. And I agree with James about the petition. |
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| If so, then hopefully that may have fixed it. The truth is brutal but denying it won't help. hey guys, lets toss a few coins in the middle here for Erik to buy a decent PC! :) This would though, come on let's cough'em :) |
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| Erik - what are the specs of your PC? |
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| P4 2.0 ghz 512 mb ram ATI Radeon Mobility 7500 with 32mb video mem It's a laptop, Dell Latitude 4300 to be exact, and chokes on many things. But blitz apps usually work fine. |
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| Works all good here. The only thing i would say is that when ever the car touches the edge of the barrier, it bounces off and makes your car face the barrier. And you just end up grinding to a halt without the chance to right the steering and carry on. |
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| I'm still getting flicker problems. The trees seem to flicker rapidly alot, and the car jerks forwards and backwards, although not as severe as before. Also, some triangles on the car when damaged appear to be transparent. Like I said, not as bad as before, but I never had the problem with flickering trees before either. Specs: Radeon 7200 32 bit 256 MB Windows 98SE Oh, and turning the smoke ON\OFF makes no difference. |
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| po and Erik - are you both using the latest Catalyst drivers? I seem to be using v4.9. Icecap - just modified the collision code so that it's not so vicious - now you just seem to bounce off a bit and carry on, unless you really stuff it off course. |
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| it works for me too :) Vorderman, What did you modify??? |
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| You are going to hate me for this,... the flicker on this one is as bad as the first one. :( edit: removed screenshots of bug This is what I get on the latest version, and also the very first version. All other versions were stable. On my 2nd machine I get the same problems, although not nearly as severe. (no blue bands, just jumpy/glitchy car) 1st machine: P4 3 ghz GeForce FX 5200 2nd Machine: Laptop P4 2 Ghz Geforce 4 mobile |
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| I can only assume it's a vsync problem, or perhaps something relating to the refresh rate of your video cards? I've changed FLIP to VWAIT:FLIP FALSE and vice-versa a few times, so it must be related to that - I'm doing nothing odd with Blitz, just loading and displaying meshes, so I can only assume it's something specific to certain PCs rather than my program. Do you get this problem with other Blitz programs? That corruption on the screen looks like graphics-card issue rather than something I could produce with what is effectively a very simple Blitz program (simple bar the physics routines - the rendering is bog-standard). |
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| Ummm... Vonderman, any machine that is a laptop or has a mobile-something 3D-card is a sure way to get in trouble, even with old/robust Blitz3D tech. I wouldn't mind too much if these are the only machines that cause you problems. I can try this on my laptop that has Intel's integrated 852GM with 64mb (shared memory) but I'm sure that it would be more or less waste of time :) |
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| @Vorderman - from the screenshots Pongo posted this looks like it might be similar to a problem I had a while ago. Its a Blitz-specific thing that causes problems with copied AnimMeshes (seems like the vertices get confused and lots of flickering occurs as random triangles are rendered over some frames but not others). Basically, if you're doing ANY CopyEntity() stuff, make sure you're not doing it to a mesh loaded with LoadAnimMesh(). OR - Having a second look, its possible that your CameraRange values are out. I found that I couldn't get any image at all unless my Far# value was at least 1000x greater than my Near# value on certain cards (namely GeForce!). So CameraRange(cam,0.5,500) was fine but CameraRange(cam,1,500) messed with the screen. |
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| Just to add to the record, I'm mostly devoid of jerkiness now (whereas I was plagued with it before), but it has a bit of a jerk now and then when the car is in the lower quarter of the screen (facing upwards) in the default 3rd-person view. Nothing nearly as painful as hitting the sides and having the rear-end of the car bounce out (what a subtle mention that was! I'm so clever!), but if you're looking for total jerklessness, look elsewhere. Still fun to play though (apart from having to stop and reverse when your car buries itself in the wall for every minor indiscretion)! |
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| I get the feeling you find the collisions a bit annoying... :) Don't worry, I've modified it and it's much better now. re. the camerarange thing - I believe my camerarange is set to 1,600, so that certainly could be the problem. How on earth can you hope to cover such an obscure bug that only occurs on some videocards???? Honestly, I am seriously considering switching to BMax and OpenGL when the windows version is released - B3D seems to have a lot of old and unsorted bugs. Anyway, I'll adjust the camerarange thing tonight, and I'll check for any copying of animmeshes (another stupid bug that I didn't know about and that should have been sorted ages ago), and I'll post a new version that should also have much more forgiving collisions, so you can all stop moaning! Seems like Nvidia cards throw up many more problems that ATI cards - ah, I love my Radeon! |
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| Works 'almost' fine on here. When you are driving VERY slowly, it stutters little, but once you hit the gas its all fine. I only noticed it at the start so it didnt bother me at all. AMD Athlon XP +2200 Radeon 9000 Pro Windows XP Oh, and Im not on laptop :O |
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| probably just caching the textures and stuff at the start - you can notice that sort of thing in loads of games (he says, making another excuse) |
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| i dunno... i'm not getting the flickering now... but something else is occurring... like the screen gamma pulsating... dark to lighter.... dark to lighter... this appears to be occurring only when the car is in motion... and only in the first person view... where there is no background screen, just color. the frequency seems to modulate with the speed of the car. this is just an off the wall guess, but try enclosing the entire track in a skybox or something... also... is there a sprite or something just out of view on the top? oh, that's the arrow... pointer... that may be the source of the problem too... run the game without that and see... i'll test it... radeon9200 video --Mike |
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| Are you using an LCD Red? They can be bad for that! |
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| yes... i am... one sony and a nec damn lcds... --Mike |
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| When i moved over from my CRT to my TFT, it stopped the light flickering but i found it useless for games creation as the brightness would change and motion blur. I moved instantly back to CRT. I would imagine a Sony/NEC would be much better by todays standards. are they new? @Vorderman; Sorry for the hijack a bit here, I will try this version when i get home a bit later :) |
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| Well, FWIW, I have never had difficulty with any other blitz program and the display, so the problem is unique to this app. I would say it is definately a refresh issue, since all the screengrabs came out fine. (I think a zbuffer or other problem would have been captured) Also, while it's true a lot of laptops ship with crappy cards, the newer models with ati/nvidia cards should perform every bit as good as their desktop counterparts. I have had no issues with mine up to this. |
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| yeah... both relatively new... but personally, i prefer crts for games... --Mike |
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| True... theyre better for clarity and effects.. |
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| Stuttering gone here now. Much better. ATI Radeon Mobility 9200 64MB Catalyst 6.14 I guess you know about the direction arrow not being visible in view modes 2 and 3 (?) |
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| but something else is occurring... like the screen gamma pulsating and... this appears to be occurring only when the car is in motion... and only in the first person view. Yep, that's the smoke sprites spawning right over the camera - try pressing F1 to turn the sprites off and you should find it stops. |
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| yes that was it... --Mike |
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| OK, so the only problem remaining appears to be the camerarange issue that Pongo has with an NVidia card. So, here is a new EXE with the camerarange set to 0.1,1000, and with VWAIT:FLIP FALSE put back in - http://www.jameskett.dsl.pipex.com/Blitz%20Rally%20EXE%20Only.zip and the original DEMO file with the required data (ignore the EXE in this file) - http://www.jameskett.dsl.pipex.com/BRDemo.zip |
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| I won't be able to try this at home for a few hours yet, but I just ran it on my work system. The original version glitched and the latest one did not. (although the real test will be my home system that has really been screwing with it) And for reference, this work machine is another Nvidia Machine. Dual 3.39 Xeon, 4 gig Ram Nvidia Quadro FX 3400. |
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| Dude this rules! |
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| I'll post a new version that should also have much more forgiving collisions, so you can all stop moaning! lol, you do want folks to enjoy it don't you :) I've tried the latest exe, there was no stuttering and the collisions against the sides of the track were MUCH better. I did come across a strange bug though... I was driving down a long straight with a dip towards the end, as I started to go over the dip, the car got stuck in the side of the track. When I changed the camera view, the first cam (heli cam) showed only the cars shadow and the arrow towards the middle of the track but the car was nowhere near it. I wasn't that close the the edge of the track when this happened, it just suddenly jumped into the side and was higher up than the car could jump normally. I wasn't able to reproduce it afterwards... weird. |
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| The touch-the-sides stuff is better, but it needs to be losing a lot less speed, as it now jerks fairly violently if the car so much as touches the sides. I think it should just bounce and lose a fairly small amount of speed. It's playing pretty nicely now though! |
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| yes... eerything seems much smoother... --Mike |
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| good to hear it's working better. I'm switching to rallycross-style circuits so the track will have more run-off room and therefore should be a bit more forgiving - if you manage to hit the barriers on these wider tracks then you'll generally be way off course, and so you deserve to crash and stop! |
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| Just an update. that latest version worked fine on my system (the one that had the blue screenies posted above) |
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| BTW You mentioned ditching the jumps, but I think they're fine... |
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| camerarange set to 0.1,1000, and with VWAIT:FLIP FALSE put back in Also, What mode are you using? I found yesterday that Wbuffer false Cleaned up my screen alot. My original camerarange was .1 to 500 and the "zbuffer" was totally trashing. When I disabled Wbuffer, the whole thing came out much cleaner. What has Nvidea done to their drivers though, because the camera range i used (.1 to 500) worked just dandy on older drivers..... |
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| Is the wbuffering enabled by default then? I thought it was an option that you could switch on if the zbuffering wasn't working, for example in 16bit color? If I switch to 16bit the trees and the car polys all sort badly and flicker, so I've left it as 32bit. However, I shall try out the wbuffer thing tonight and see what happens. I suppose I can make all these things options anyway if necessary, although it would be nice not to have to, but I suppose that's the down-side of the PC compared to consoles. |
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| Turning of the smoke made the flickering go away. |
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| BTW You mentioned ditching the jumps, but I think they're fine... do you think so? I thought they felt a bit false (which they are!). The top-down camera shows them off better - from the in car cam they look totally wrong, but seeing as I'm reverting to the top-down cam only perhaps I'll leave a few jumps in and see if I like them. I shall certainly be removing the dip-in-the-ground though - the car gets very confused if you drive in slowly or crash in the dip. Being single meshes I can make the entire track have slopes and hills, which should work just fine with the ground-following system - it's just jumps that are faked. Turning of the smoke made the flickering go away. excellent - I should have disabled it in first person anyway, but because I knew what the flickering was I got into the habit of ignoring it...oops! |
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| in 16-bit, wbuffering is enabled.. disabling it might sort out the problems.. problem is, older cards will dislike this even more. I think in 32 bit, w buffer is disabled naturally. With the above also, are you using blitz 1.89? it might also be that "fixed bug" that got "moved somewhere else" with the vertex corruption stuff. Theres alot to try. |
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| I reverted to Blitz 1.88 for that last EXE, although I suppose I might as well use v1.89. However, I had been using 1.87 for ages until last week, when I updated to 1.89, and I did notice that the frame rate dropped right off - my fast PC had problems keeping at 60fps, whereas before it was silky smooth. I think I might go back to 1.87 (or stay at 1.88 if it keeps the fps up) - I think there is something wrong with 1.89. |
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| Theres alot wrong with 1.89. I'm using 1.88 :D By the way, i still havent tried the Last EXE as ive not been home. Just throwing Ideas around :) |
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| Finally! Firstly, this is much better. HOWEVER... Are you sure you have removed the tweening code 100%, and is the camera ALWAYS updated, EVERY frame? 1) The front wheels when turning, they shiver to the left/right. DOesnt affect handling. 2) When my system does its "im going to hang for a bit of a sec for no reason", the game continues but the car has moved but the camera hasnt... This will be the flickering. Perhaps you have coded some "delay" fixing code that catches up? (great for networking...) |
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| I think I might go back to 1.87 (or stay at 1.88 if it keeps the fps up) - I think there is something wrong with 1.89. Didn't they fix a pretty major shortcoming in the latest version? If I recall correctly, the older versions weren't compatible with DEP (Data Execution Protection) meaning that executables generated with them won't run on newer CPU's (& operating systems) which support DEP... For future compatibility, you'll want to make sure your program complies with that. |
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| Dep support was update 1.88. The "major shortcomnig" was vertex issues in 1.89. Sadly, there seems to have been more side effects than fixes.... |
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