Morning guys ...
Oh Holepunch, Holepunch, Holepunch ...
Firstly guys, HP is _not_ the guy I was talking about; but he is one of the 5 people outside our office who has run it.
The guy I cited was actually someone who contacted us directly via info @ jawltd.com
So whilst HP is semi-right that he was a guy, he was not THE guy. Again though, HP has said he is running at around 90fps on his machine, sounds like a small victory I think.
Anyways ...
Things we've done and things we're doing to Stranger ...
Done:
1. Rendering performance:
This has been taken care of, we literally found 2 small steps in the rendering pipeline that were gimped. We were using an OpenGL extension that isn't fully ratified as a result on most machines it isn't supported in hardware, so defaults to doing the same process in software (= SLLLOOOOOOOWWWWW), this gave us a jump from ~20fps to ~45fps on my 4 year old DELL nvidia 8400 laptop. Then we discovered we were actually doing the final draw to screen TWICE (yes dumb mistake) but that then gave me an increase from ~45fps to ~60fps on my laptop again. So yeah right now I'm pretty happy with the performance now.
But we're still looking at some memory usage speedups too, as there is a couple of little bottle necks.
2. Save Games:
In Vista/Win7 the "Program Files" folder usage permissions changed, we WERE saving save games to the install folder, this caused problems, as a result we're now using the users "roaming" folder, which resolves this issue.
3. We have REMOVED (as HP mentioned) the joypad auto-detect. Now you need to chose your input device of choice via the launcher app.
4. First Person mode = broken on nvidia chipsets, this is now fixed. To get this to break you need the latest nVidia drivers, which were released in Early December, you'll have to forgive us there as we last updated internally in November so didn't see the issue until everyone said "hey assholes, this shit is broken!". Anyway it's fixed.
Being Done:
1. Screen Resolutions:
We are going to "quiz" the machine and say "What resolutions can you run at" and offer those options to the user in the Launcher App. No more "Low", "Medium" and "retarded". We will also be looking at PROPER widescreen modes, not just stretched.
2. Controls:
So you guys want to be able to set your own keyboard/joypad config... Ouch. The hardest part of doing that is NOT the actual input itself, but making sure any onscreen messages that cover input display the correct key, EVEN if you change it. Right now the language files have fixed tokens for the buttons/keys; but we will get to this.
3. Fixing a couple of broken achievements, and adding some more for fun
4. Audio problems - As most of you know it's hard to fix something if you can't repeat it, and so far the ONLY audio glitch we've managed to repeat is in the intro movie, and as it happens that glitch is ACTUALLY in the movie itself.
If anyone has any REPEATABLE audio bugs (IE audio stopping or corrupted sounds) can you email them to us at info AT jawltd.com
5. Crashes - This is a tricky one, as the only crash we've repeated is the exit one. So for those that are having crashs in Stranger, again, please email us full details, and if possible, if you have a save game from just before the crash that would be helpful too, send them again, to the usual address of info AT jawltd.com
ATI Users:
Ok so people are seeing "corruption", "little black boxes", "stuff not animating", "characters in t-position" etc.
You may also have seen via the thread over on the Steam forums that these issues come and come with different ATI Drivers.
The ONLY problem that exists with the latest ATI drivers is the "corruption" or "little black boxes"... These are related to transparencies. We know this as we've looked into it pretty hard and the areas in the game this issue is, is when alpha blending etc is used.
Firstly we looked at our shader code, which works on other OpenGL cards, but that was fine, then I thought I'd play one of Mr Carmacks games, so I fired up Quake3, which I still play, on the new machine I bought at xmas with an ATI 5470 chipset and as it turns out, anything with an id shader in it, that uses transparencies is just BLACK.
So I fired an email to an old friend of mine who works at AMD now, who used to work at nvidia, and before that used to work at 3dLabs (remember those guys), Richard is part of their driver/developer support team; he's put me onto one of their guys in the driver team itself and they now have the game, and have told us ...
"We were able to repro the issue and are now going to look at what maybe the cause..."
So ATI are aware of the issue, and either they'll come back and say "actually you've not initialised this correctly" OR "oops our driver is broken we'll fix it."
So as we stand right now, performance is fixed on all cards, nVidia has the first person mode fixed, and ATI still has issues with transparencies.
What I would like however is to hear from anyone with an nVidia GeForce 103(m) chipset. If you have this board/chipset please send me a DM.
Thanks guys, and a Happy New Year!
Stewart