Booyah! We worked through the spring break and we got the game out Saint Patty's night. We had several issues with lag but once we shipped it out and the debugger wasn't running, it played so smooth. I did notice though that once I saw the swamp level I had made in game it looked a little sparse. So this last week, besides finishing the new file path system, I brought the swamp level one assets a bit closer like I had done with swamp two. To add I also cluttered up some of the water space with smaller mushrooms and smaller cat tails. We had a large argument over the break about the lag being a Polygon count issue so I was wary at first to add much more since the swamp levels have much more than any others currently.
I researched the Poly count thing and found that we were so far lower than many of the other xbox standards and even Wii standards. Our largest character for the game is around 4600 polygons. After I researched I found that Marcus from GOW is 15000 with normal and bump maps, Link from the new Zelda is 6600. The lowest surprisingly was the Master Chief from Halo around 2200 if I remember correctly. That being said our character polys were not the issue. On the other hand with scenery we had at the most 45000 tris 22500 polys in our largest level. I found a site that told about system specifics and the OLD Xbox could handle 125,000,000 polys a second. All that being said I new it wasn't our issue and I wouldn't let the issues be handed off to the artists to spend hours and hours working to fix something that wasn't broken. As it turns out it was just a garbage collection issue as we now know and have fixed so I'm glad we didn't waste any time with trying to cut down the polys that we didn't have to. Even after that knowledge my new swamp is still only 33000 polys for the entire level so we are still doing great.
I still struggle to get much work from the other artists so I'm a bit stressed out about getting it done. I know that I can but this 7-8 hours a night till 3am is wearing on me since my boys wake up at 8. It makes me dream of a workplace with a nice desk and larger screen to work on =). I can't wait to have 8 hours of the day to do my work.
I have begun work on the Forest Two level (the one with the GREAT TREE). I have had a hard time coming up with visual justifications for some of Jon's wall barriers and platforms. at first I was going to try to do things with tree branches and leaves but the issue was that the tree wasn't big enough in the screen, and it is supposed to be the only large tree around - making it so branches could not come from random directions or look too thick too far from the tree. A fix came in the idea of making a type of Ewok village in the tree. Once I got some work done on a hut I tested it out and it works for a lot of the scene. I still am stuck on what to do for some of the large wall barriers but I'm going to run it by the other artists tomorrow and try to come up with something good.
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