Questions

[Ammid]

Im just kinda curious as to why you guys made all the player models have such low poly counts? Your using the Q3 game engine and your player models dont go anywhere near the maximum amount of polys it alows per player models, which happens to be 32000. I only know cause I model and mod and map for other Q3 Engine based games and so Im juts sorta surprised at how low detail all the models are. Any reason behind it?

[shaggy]

My hypothesis:
I makes the game run smoother etc.

[torus]

There is a difference between low detail and low poly. The current models have around 3000 tris, which is actually quite high (please don't try to tell me you have ever seen a quake engine game with a 32K poly player model). The problem is that the models are terribly optimized, and therefore look like shite. Increasing the poly count would be counter-productive, and only slow down the game.

We need lower poly models, but ones with tricks like tangent-space normal mapping applied to make up for the loss.

[Urmel]

Q3 engine? You must have misunderstood something my friend. Darkplaces is based on the Q1 engine.

[Mustelidae]

Q3 engine? You must have misunderstood something my friend. Darkplaces is based on the Q1 engine.

Yeah, DP's a heavily modified Q1 engine.
Although the Devs are probably flattered that you thought it was Q3!

[Shoe]

My hypothesis:
I makes the game run smoother etc.

Actually, no. It's been stated many times that they're poorly optimised, which is part of the reason why the team has looked a lot for modelers. Unfortunately most character modelers never got very far because of the exporting pipeline being hard to do for .zym.

[Ammid]

why on earth would you use a modified version of the Q1 engine??

And no, I havnt seen someone make a player model thats 32k polys but I know how the Q3 engine works, and I guess it doesnt matter since your not using the Q3 engine..

[Shoe]

why on earth would you use a modified version of the Q1 engine??

And no, I havnt seen someone make a player model thats 32k polys but I know how the Q3 engine works, and I guess it doesnt matter since your not using the Q3 engine..

Saying "modified Q1 engine" is a pretty big misnomer. DarkPlaces was originally based on Q1, true, but the code has been expanded upon so much with so many improvements that it's much closer to modern engines - especially moreso than Quake 3 (though I'm sure some ioq3 spinoffs have added functionality similar to DP).

I can't say the specifics but I'd imagine that the player model count is close if not in excess of that for Q3.

[:)]

why on earth would you use a modified version of the Q1 engine??

That makes Darkplaces sound worse than it is
Realtime volumetric shadowing, HDR, gloss, bumpmapping and all sorts of nicies are in Darkplaces.
It's heavily modified, more like a Q1 derivative than a modified quake engine.
It's more powerful and modern than Q3, using the latest libcurl and libsdl for fast content downloads, 5.1 surround sound, and support for a wide range of modern hardware. Someone once made an enormous scale model of the Earth and Darkplaces was able to run that


As the others have said, the current playermodels are one of the bigger performance bottlenecks for clients; they're 2000-5000 tris if I recall correctly.
In addition to being a monster to render in large numbers, 32,000 poly playermodels would be useless. The upper limit for making player models should be 5000 polys, any further detail should be done with bumpmapping.
FPS games just do not need so many polys in their models. For example, Crysis, which is considered one of the most graphically-intense games currently, has 8000-9000 polys maximum, including the body, head, and attachments belonging to player models.

[shaggy]

My hypothesis:
I makes the game run smoother etc.

Actually, no. It's been stated many times that they're poorly optimised, which is part of the reason why the team has looked a lot for modelers. Unfortunately most character modelers never got very far because of the exporting pipeline being hard to do for .zym.

Oh, I see. I just assumed it was a that it be the simple thing.