The thing with scenario1 is actually just the nice skybox 
Many asteroids lead to more objects in the scene graph and to more collision calculations (which I have optimized the best I could). But it should still be playable on low settings with up to 12 bots.
Are you sure you downloaded the latest version? This should be displayed in the lower right corner in the main menu screen (latest version is 0.1.3).
What happens if you just don’t use bots (just disable the checkbox at “Enable Bots” in the Create Game menu) and load the map “fastscenario”? There you should get a lot more FPS even with higher settings.
Yes version number is 0.1.3
I tried disabling bots and running in fastscenario, it started out nice at 60 fps and then I reached some place with asteroids and a bunch of minibots floating around … then it dropped to an unplayable 6-8 fps. I then proceeded to leave that location and flew into an empty space, the fps gradually increased over time until it reached 60
And you tried this with low settings? I can fly through that asteroid field with all those “auto bots” (they are drones mining stuff from these asteroids g) with no FPS drop what so ever, even on high settings. I have really no explanation for that. The fact that you get high FPS in open space and low FPS around asteroids suggests that your hardware doesn’t allow to display a lot of objects at the same time, which doesn’t make much sense considering your hardware. This is really strange.
Does anyone have this kind of problem aswell?
I did some further testing, this time with all settings set to low. I noticed that the more I shoot and the more paticles are spawned, the slower it becomes. Although I couldn’t get it to be slower than 20 fps this time with all low settings.
Also another bug to report: When you spawn at the beginning, every time you shoot it explodes on your own ship, although you don’t get damaged.
If you shoot for some time and then stop shooting for some time, does the FPS recover to the level before your started shooting? This would indicate that at least the stuff is properly removed from memory. And actually these weapon fires aren’t particles on low settings, they are simple yellow cylinders. I figured out that they consume much less computing power that using these TrailMeshes at Medium to High settings and still look reasonable.
That bug is not quite a bug, more a design flaw of some kind. The weapon fire immediately explodes because it hits the shield of the mothership your are near. Every ship and SpawnStation has ball shaped shields, and every weapon fire collides with them, even friendly ones. But friendly ships can move through friendly shields and not move through enemy shields. Maybe I should enable friendly weapon fire to pass friendly shields, but then you could harm your motherships hull permanently because the hull doesn’t regenerate over time like shields do. Not that easy ^^.
I agree that this is somewhat strange. Another solution would be to set the spawn point at the mothership outside of its shields, but that would mean puting it quite far away since its shields are that big. What would you (and I mean all readers) prefer?
Since no one responded to the weapon fire shield issue I just kept it as it was
Nevertheless a new version is up. If you downloaded a file called “infinitewars0_1_4.zip” please delete it because this is not the right file.
Here are some of the changes in version 0.1.4:
- Changed the default settings to WASD controls and to low effects
- Network play is much more polished and should be playable (only in LAN, I have no idea how to enable online play yet)
- Server Browser is now fully functional (again only for LAN play)
- Minor changes in the selection of maps in the “Create Game” menu and in the selection of weapons in the SpawnMenu.
- again lots of minor bugfixes and improvements
I hope you can try out the network play. The “New List” button at the “Join Game” menu will scan all IP addresses in the LAN (it basically retrieves the IPv4 address of the local mashine and changes the last digits, so if your local mashine’s IP is 192.168.1.10, it will scan all IPs from 192.168.0 to 192.168.1.255). If you know the IP of the server you can use the “Connect to IP” button to directly connect.
Maybe you can also try to do this with multiple clients on one server, I was only able to test this with a PC and a Laptop.
Have fun
@Momoko_Fan: I didn’t forget about your performance issues, but I just can’t reproduce them
Could you try it on another mashine with a better a CPU and RAM (the graphics card isn’t the issue I suppose)?
And here we have version 0.1.5: http://infinitewars.googlecode.com/files/infinitewars.zip
This time I refined the usability and added tips. These tips are displayed when you create a new profile and play the first time. Tips are displayed in blue boxes and can be removed by simply clicking on them. I hope they guide you through your first play through
I also made online play possible, but you have to forward 2 ports (9140 & 9141, both TCP & UDP) to make it work. Please test ^^.
You can now also change the mouse buttons with which you look around (default right mouse button) and fire your energy weapons (default left mouse button). Just take a look at the options menu at Controls → Pilot and play around.
I hope this release is a bit more accessable to new testers, so give it a try 
I have tried it and it’s a pretty good project u have there, I just found a little bug, when u shoot at shield, and the shield blinks u will have to wait until it fades out completely, otherwise u wont get that blue effect.
You could also increase visibility distance, because on destruction I cant see enemy’s mother ship.
Thanks for trying it out!
The thing with the shield effect is the following: If you fire at the same position twice in a row the shield effect gets kinda ugly (especially on low shader settings where the effect is just a transparent quad with a blue texture), so I decided to not show the effect in the vicinity of another effect currently taking place. This could probably be tweaked a litte bit, but it’s not exactly a bug ^^.
The view distance is another issue. If you set it too high you display a lot of objects at once which will decrease performance significantly. If you set it too low it will decrease the gameplay since you see enemy ships very late. Making the view distance configurable is an option, but consider this: Players with better hardware will have a gameplay advantage to players with other hardware because they can increase the view distance and so see more important stuff. So it’s a hard line to draw here. How does it run on your mashine? Do you experience similiar performance problems as Momoko_Fan? And were the tips actually helpful?
Again thank you for your testing!
Wasserleiche said:
The thing with the shield effect is the following: If you fire at the same position twice in a row the shield effect gets kinda ugly (especially on low shader settings where the effect is just a transparent quad with a blue texture), so I decided to not show the effect in the vicinity of another effect currently taking place. This could probably be tweaked a litte bit, but it's not exactly a bug ^^.
Ok now I get it, but could you make previous shield effect to stop and new effect start if you shoot again at the same spot?
Wasserleiche said:
The view distance is another issue. If you set it too high you display a lot of objects at once which will decrease performance significantly. If you set it too low it will decrease the gameplay since you see enemy ships very late. Making the view distance configurable is an option, but consider this: Players with better hardware will have a gameplay advantage to players with other hardware because they can increase the view distance and so see more important stuff. So it’s a hard line to draw here.
Maybe you could make motherships and capture points visible at higher distances than other ships, or something like that?
Wasserleiche said:
How does it run on your mashine? Do you experience similiar performance problems as Momoko_Fan? And were the tips actually helpful?
Well, I'm using Ubuntu 32-bit with Unity so my fps doesn't get higher than my refresh screen(I don't mind it, but maybe I'll switch gnome with xfce).
I didn't experience any problems, my fps was always 60 if graphics are low, but if I set it to high fps drops and it's pretty bugy.
I didn't need any tips, just un-zip and play :)
I’ll change the shield effect as you said, it makes much more sense like that. I think increasing the visibility of motherships and spawnstations will also help, since there are only a few of them on a map. Thanks for the ideas
Good to know that you can run this with 60 FPS on a linux mashine. Please try setting everything except Effects, Shader and Anti-Aliasing to high (Effects remain low, Shaders can go to medium and Anti-Aliasing should remain off). How does the performance behave?
The thing with the graphics is that effects is the main bottleneck, then Shaders (on high Specular Mapping is used which will also decrease performance and introduce some nasty slowdowns). Could you play around with the graphic settings and report how it runs on your mashine? This would be great
Another question: What do you think of the AI? The default AI difficulty is Normal, have you tried out Hard?
I have tried to set graphics as you said and it was working flawlessly, and I played with graphics and I realised that shaders to medium did the trick. I was playing with everything high(AA x8) and shaders medium and it was working with max fps.
And yes I tyred hard AI and I was getting pretty owned…
And yes another thing I found out: I can see MY mothership(even the comets around it) and MY spawnpoints from anywhere on the map(it may be because they are spawnpoints or there are allies building or something like it, I don’t now…).
Wow, so you played with graphic set to high except Shaders? Effects were also on high? And you still get good performance? Cool, I wanna have your hardware
About the AI - on hard they kinda predict your movement and aim a litte bit ahead (which you can also do if you fire at the red point at your current target), so keep changing direction to avoid them and use countermeasures if the heatseeker alarm signal (right side of the screen) pops up
You indeed see your team’s mothership and conquered spawnstations, this is intended. But now I always changed the visibility range of these two objects classes, so in the next version you’ll see them much sooner. Thanks for your feedback again!
A new version is out now. Here are some changes:
- You can now select the mousebuttons with which you look around with your hunter and fire energy weapons.
- By pressing the R key your hunter will point to the location of your current mission and automatically update this if you change your mission.
- Neutral SpawnStations are now marked grey in the HUD.
- At the login screen you can now choose to login automatically at the selected account (this will be saved when you click the login button) so the next time you start the game you will see the menu right away.
- In the menu all options now have tooltips which will show up if you hover your mouse over the labels of the options. They often contain some explanations and details. These tooltips will popup at all options in the option menu, all settings in the create game menu and all filters in the join game menu. I hope they help understand those settings better.
- I managed to fix a lot of memory leaks. So if you now finish a game (e.g. by leaving it via the menu) and start a new one the application won’t grow bigger and bigger. But here is a strange thing: If you watch the memory via the task manager on windows and you leave a game, the process will not free up any memory what so ever, not even after a minute or so. But if you then start a new game, the memory consumption goes lower and then starts to grow again. It seems as if the memory is only freeed up if new allocations are performed. Is this normal Windows Java 6 memory behaviour?
- Now also a short readme is contained in the package.
- The start file for linux has been renamed to start.sh
Have fun with it and feel free to post any feedback