1.4 letdown

fireside · Post by **fireside** » Mon Dec 17, 2007 4:20 am

I'm kind of let down by 1.4. Maybe I got too excited or something, but the colors look faded and there are some artifacts, now, that weren't there before. The new animation system turns out to only work on one or two formats. The dll is about 40% larger. It went from 2.83 mb for version 1.31 to 4.83 mb for version 1.4. Maybe it's just new things that have to get worked out, I don't know.

BlindSide · Post by **BlindSide** » Mon Dec 17, 2007 8:53 am

Are you kidding me?! Its great! You get:

- Clipping planes.
- Animation system works on THREE formats, and its easy to add more. (very easy).
- Newest SVN has OpenGL VBOs (Yay)
- Custom "OnSetMaterial" function in shader callbacks for setting shader constants based on material params.
- Alot of bug fixes etc.

hybrid · Post by **hybrid** » Mon Dec 17, 2007 8:54 am

Ok, one of the very informative posts. Do you see any chance to make one of your statements more vague?
Anyway, colors and artifacts, why don't you post screenshots? How can we tell what's happening without really knowing what you do? And even having it working somehow in earlier versions is no reason to declare that behavior as correct. Maybe the problems were just not visible.
The new animation systems works for three formats: .x, .ms3d, and .b3d. It's a skeletal based animation system. Since none of the other animated formats do use skeletal animation this is what you should have expected.
And speaking of 40% is maybe a little drastic when we talk about 2MB. Even if you could not decrease the size by compiler settings or by excluding some features (mesh and image loaders or writers, the GUI, ...) it would be just one texture which you have to convert from bmp to jpg, or increase the compression sizes, use zip files for meshes, ... Did you recompile on your own?

fireside · Post by **fireside** » Mon Dec 17, 2007 9:51 am

How can we tell what's happening without really knowing what you do?

It's the castle that looks faded and has artifacts in it. I know, it's subjective, but the colors just look more washed out with the same settings I had.

Did you recompile on your own

It's the dll when I click on properties from the download. Two meg might not seem like a big deal unless you do a small game. It's still not that bad, but now there's about 5 meg of dead load, and there's still sound to worry about.

The new animation systems works for three formats: .x, .ms3d, and .b3d.

I read a post that it didn't work for .x and we had to use .b3d. At least, that's what I thought it said. I guess that's one thing I can use then.

hybrid · Post by **hybrid** » Mon Dec 17, 2007 9:59 am

If you mean the bsp castle the only change that I know of is that the lightmaps have changed from the bright ones to darker ones in 1.1 or 1.2. I don't know of any other changes. But you could do screenshots from the initial scene and compare them using e.g. Gimp.
Well, calling the whole lib "dead load" is not really a proper way of handling this. As said, the lib has become much better adaptable, so you can choose from all the things you need or don't need. Also, recompile it on your machine, with your compiler. You never know which settings Niko used.
The .x support might even be better than the ms3d one. At least I did test more .x meshes with the new animation system. If you have problems that you cannot fix by reexporting with different settings you should post a bug report.

fireside · Post by **fireside** » Mon Dec 17, 2007 10:29 am

The .x support might even be better than the ms3d one. At least I did test more .x meshes with the new animation system. If you have problems that you cannot fix by reexporting with different settings you should post a bug report.

I guess when I thought the animation didn't apply to .x, that's when I felt the most let down.
I'll give recompiling a try eventually, but I'm still trying to learn the basics really. It still looks good, just a little more washed out. I'm using just Opengl.

- Newest SVN has OpenGL VBOs (Yay)

That's cool.

rogerborg · Post by **rogerborg** » Mon Dec 17, 2007 9:42 pm

fireside wrote:I'm kind of let down by 1.4.

Use 1.3.1 then. Problem solved.

fireside · Post by **fireside** » Mon Dec 17, 2007 10:02 pm

Use 1.3.1 then. Problem solved.

Actually, I'm going to hang on to it for smaller games, but you get code out of sync with everyone else if you stay too far back.

bitplane · Post by **bitplane** » Wed Dec 19, 2007 6:14 pm

I guess you should have used the beta then, and provided bug reports and screenshots of any problems. Maybe you'll learn your lesson for 1.5

christianclavet · Post by **christianclavet** » Mon Dec 24, 2007 10:48 pm

I'm sorry Bitplane. But I reported for visual problem I switched to 1.4alpha then beta; and did not get answered (I know I can get annoying sometime!

)

There is some visual diffence between 1.3.1 and 1.4. Mostly in surface that have dynamic lighting defined (lighting flag applied) and the transparent/reflective problem. I reported those 2 problem in november. I provided my demo level for checking.

Is there any progress on this?
Also have you fixed (or started something) the problem with converting a mesh to OCCTREE that have colored vertices (Vertex Lightmapped) corrupt the OCCTREE?

Hope I'm not too hard on you, the team was so busy implementing new features and fixed them to work, that I'm not there to push anybody. Just would be nice if someone can confirm a problem and give some updates sometime...

hybrid · Post by **hybrid** » Mon Dec 24, 2007 11:36 pm

christian, all your problems have been acknowledged already, and we are trying to fix them. But no success so far. We are currently trying to catch up with existing solutions for other things, debugging open problems will take some more time.

christianclavet · Post by **christianclavet** » Wed Dec 26, 2007 6:50 am

Ok. Thanks for the update Hybrid!

Nice to see that the dev team see it also.

Is there a possibility that the team post messages for example on the BUG report forum (perhaps even create a sub-forum), that they are working on a specific problem. So users could also give you some hint (If they have) and see the progress. Everybody would know that theses problems are acknowledged and are being worked on.

I know that you are working really hard on it, but don't know what. I'm really curious.. Sorry!

Irrlicht Engine

1.4 letdown

1.4 letdown

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