Projekt Urbanus v0.5

[Homer]

Hi!

We have just released the first Irrlicht-based version of "Projekt Urbanus". It's going to be kind of an adventure/quiz-like game with a 3rd person view, playing in a real city in the 1920's. Currently, you can walk through some city parts, see a tram in action and drive a car (very primitively implemented atm). Be aware that all texts are written in german and that you need a newer and well equiped computer to run the game (min. 1.5 GHz, 512 MB RAM, good graphics card).

The official website is located at http://www.projekt-urbanus.de.

You can download the demo here: http://www.projekt-urbanus.de/download/projekt-urbanus.zip

Feel free to give comments...

[niko]

Wow, nice! Another project for the linksection..

[Homer]

Someone asked for sourcecode in our guestbook. It isn't that impressive at the moment, I've just put some snippets from the forum together and added a few things like a small class for the car. The 3rd person camera is descended from boogles 3rd person camera class, I've just changed a few lines to achieve something more like the "Tomb Raider" camera.

What I totally forgot in my first post: Thank you deps for your animated human model, we're using this until we find/create a more detailed one

[Guest]

You already know it... but the requirements are way too high, almost ridiculous... :/ I cant walk (1 frame per 5 seconds or so, lol), and i can play all actual games quite nice... so i'say this demo is useless for now

[Homer]

Yes we know that. The problem is that our program needs over 300 MB of RAM (see my thread in the "advanced forum"), so if you don't own at least 512 MB Windows uses your hard-drive as a virtual ram and this is of course very very slow.

[guest1]

Why are the system requirements so high? When I ran the demo, I didn't see anything that would merit such bad performance...

[Homer]

When I ran the demo, I didn't see anything that would merit such bad performance...

That's the point. We don't know why our program needs over 300 MBytes when we just load in our level-mesh via SceneManager->getMesh("..."). Maybe this is a problem with our 3ds-file (converted from ms3d), maybe it has to do with Irrlicht's structure for saving mesh-data, I don't know. One curious thing I've noticed is that Milkshape also needs a lot of memory when the model is loaded (246 MB), although it consists of "only" 26791 triangles. We're currently doing some tests to find the reason.

[Flo]

hmm ... if i look at the mesh dimension in 3ds max, it says the whole mesh has a size of ~50000*~50000*~4000 units ... perhaps thats too much for one model ... you'd better scale it down

another prob could be that there are too much textures for one model or the textures are too big ...

edit: and you should decrease the far value too

[Peter Müller]

You should use LOD. Not all modells in one map.

[Tyn]

Include some fog as well, it will hide the things that are really too far to see properly anyway and should get some frame rate back. It seemed to work when I tried it.

[Homer]

Thanks for your suggestions! A LOD-system is truly important, but I think I'll need some more time learning c++ before I'm able to code that. About the fog: we wanted to avoid using it because of the city scenery, I think this wouldn't look that nice. For the moment I've found another solution for the memory problem (see my other thread here) and I've put a new demo version on our webspace (download link (7 MB)). Any comments on performance (or other points of course) are highly appreciated

We already know that the camera is a bit buggy and are working on this Someone asked for background music in our guestbook. We've already implemented mp3-playback using audiere, but I've disabled this in the public demo because of some copyright issues.

[ford prefect]

runs like a charm.
1.6 GHz Pentium M, 512 MB RAM, ATI Radeon Mobility (32MB)