r_speeds limit

Under how high r_Speeds should mappers limit themselves if they want a good map.

[size=13]Think carefully since most of you will go for the lowest , but dont forget that lower r_speeds means less eye-candy![/size]

I figure 1500 is a decent number to playability and visuals. That's around what some dod maps are, and they play great.

it might be interesting to see , if there are enough "new kids" to have this poll go askew :smile:

this topic has been debated by the best here ages ago.. and resolved i might add :biggrin:

and no, i wont post the upper limit number cause i wanna see how this poll plays out.

i would ask, that the other old timers not either, let this play out a bit 1st, then we can do our magic :heee:

and andrei i think you should lose the red text, it makes you look like a n00b, we all know what causes r_speeds :wink:

I voted for 1500. I say that r_speeds shouldnt be higher than that in frequented areas if you want a smooth fight.800 would be perfect, but im a sucker when it comes nice shiny eye-candy :biggrin: .

well, a discussion about the upper limit number for r_speeds "ages" ago would surely be out of date now, as the average computer gets better and better?

I voted 2000, but meh that's just because me and almost everyone i know has 2ghz+ 512mb ram and a something equivalent to a 9200pro or higher

R-speeds are a limitation of the halflife engine

yeah, doesnt matter what bloody processor/card you have, itl lag once you reach the engines limits anyway

1000 = acceptable.

dangit guys, i wanted the kids to talk a while :sad:

we know, let them sort it out.. i love to read all the mistakes, re-made, over and over :biggrin:

R_speeds come down to how good the mapper is. A good mapper will have great visuals yet the r_speeds will remain low because he has planned his level well...

As Orph said we resolved all this long ago, but I feel the results will be different this time, most people have better PC's now.

Myrk- said:
As Orph said we resolved all this long ago, but I feel the results will be different this time, most people have better PC's now.

actually, PC size, is not a real factor myrk, sadly, few people realize this, but the main issue is one of tolerances. if you make a map, and can tolerate what 2000 wpolies does, then thats your limit. if you can only tolerate what 1000 is, then that is your limit. the halflife engine can ONLY draw 1000 wpolies tops, from that point on, its entirely hardware related, but no matter how much hardware you have, there will always be some noticeable issues.

the main thing about r_speeds is, no matter your pc specs the same results occur, because the engine itself is determine them, so if you have an old p3 450 and its 2000, it will still be 2000 on a brand new p4 3.0

the question this poll will determine, is exactly how much deterioration you are willing to endure.. i have a 2.6ghz with an ati 9000, not a massive machine, but most assuredly, more than HL requires, and i cannot accept anything over 1000 very well.. oh it draws it ok, but it still doesn't flow as it should.. the HL engine is a bottleneck, if the engine is retarding the map to 1000, and the author insists on making a 2000 map, the results are slideshow fragging, and i cannot accept it.

as i said, this issue has been hashed, and resolved..

i was truly interested though, i wanted to see, if the new kids posted the same old tired responses about machine specs.. and i was right, they did :biggrin:

I think its a bit of a case by case limit actually, or at least it was with my map "Seneca". W_poly in that hits 1600+, and despite that it runs pretty much fine on all the PC's I've tested it on, not all of which were huge spec (duron 800, 256mb ram, gf2 mx 32mb). In general though, 1000 is the top you really wanna be seeing, and that is only acceptable IF the scene you have created needs that many. If through laziness a scene with no need for so many polys has 1000, then work should be done to get it as low as it can be. I've often been known to go significantly higher than this in the past, but I feel its through over-aiming with the engine, which is a better way to screw up than through technical inadequacies :biggrin:

No I know that R_Speeds don't change, I'm just saying the Hardware will tolerate it better. Saying theres no difference is bulls**t cus my Athlon 3000XP is noticebly better than my 2000XP...

Myrk- said:
No I know that R_Speeds don't change, I'm just saying the Hardware will tolerate it better. Saying theres no difference is bulls**t cus my Athlon 3000XP is noticebly better than my 2000XP...

ahh, but which maps?

will your new pc, make a crappy 2000 wpoly map look and run as smooth as a great 800 one?

now think before you answer, cause you will be inclined to say YES, in defense of your new machine.. but i suspect, if you are honest, you will say no, cause its the truth.

your new PC can prolly run circles around the old one, but defining better now thats another issue entirely. you convince yourself that a 3000xp is a massive machine, so you are sure that HL runs better. the fact is, the engine is 5+ years old, the technology now cannot circumvent this.. nor can the HL engine serious utilize the new hardware specs, its hard to explain but think of it this way, your car can do 100mph at half throttle, you have 1/2 a throttle left, but when you mash on it, there is only a slight increase in speed, you actually go 100 in the 1st half, but only about 110 in the entire second half.. your engine cannot exceed the designed specs.

course, someone will mention a blower in relation to speeds, but a blower is not a video card, we are talking software, NOT hardware.

the comparison holds if you remember this, the software is your cars engine.. the pc specs do not alter these much.

Think about it- if you have a huge, 2000 wpoly area, then presumably it's going to be crammed full of model epolys and sprites, and those are what will kill you.

Well it depends what area your in. As lep said the models and sprites are a killer, but meh, maybe your right Orph, maybe your right...

I say 1000. I've had my map go to 4000 once because I had a leak, but 4000 lags like s**ta

Myrk- said:
Well it depends what area your in. As lep said the models and sprites are a killer, but meh, maybe your right Orph, maybe your right...

i fear i am not right, but far from wrong.. cause i am not a software expert, but you must admit, i have critiqued 100's of maps... i have a tiny bit of experience in how maps play on certain machines.. albiet, much smaller than a 3000xp :biggrin:

I say 1500. My comp usually starts to lag around 2000, and most of my maps have an area of 1500 or greater...

wil5on said:
I say 1500. My comp usually starts to lag around 2000, and most of my maps have an area of 1500 or greater...

your comp, started to lag at 1000 sir, it becomes noticeable.. when ever, or what ever stage you find intolerable.. thats the whole point here. the point is, you find it intolerable, at a much higher level than some others do. but the threshold is 1000.

I remember the days Valve said 600max for most areas, 800max for unpopulated areas.

whats a polygone? :biggrin:

slap

the halflife engine can ONLY draw 1000 wpolies tops, from that point on, its entirely hardware related, but no matter how much hardware you have, there will always be some noticeable issues.

Software mode is limited to 800 polys. Once you get into a 3D rendering mode, no such limit exists. There is no set threshold at 1000. Once you get past about 60-75 fps most people can't even tell a difference in refresh rates, and most of those who claim they can are full of s**t anyway. :smile: Running 1200+ wpoly at 1600x1200 32bit color with multiple detailed models and high resolution skins also loaded and displaying at 100fps (essentially off the scale) leaves HL open to some serious power on high-end machines (at least for a game this old).

then, my pc is s**t, cause i notice choppiness, on almost any map over 1000 r's

you know what, perhaps its my limitations and not the games, cause i can't play much over a half hour anyways.

when i see slideshow, its crap, and most times crap happens at or about 1000.

in all fairness, there are quirks, cause i have seen a couple maps, over 1200, that ran perfectly.. makes me wonder if epolies play a much stronger role than we give credence to.

all-in-all, my line is drawn at 1000, i still say its tolerance to crap, thats the deciding factor.. i have heard people claim to play just fine at 2500 :rolleyes:

I tend to agree with the 1000 limit. I just cannot believe that the engine can scale it's capabilities infinitely with GPU power. It's practically impossible for anyone to code for eventualities that far into the future :/

there is always the possibility, that because machines are indeed so powerful now, that the r_speeds command is no longer accurate..

i mean i am positive that anything above 1000 causes choppiness, maybe when people say they are getting 75fps, the engine only says its 75.

i mean seriously, how could a 5 year old engine foresee 3 ghz processors.. wasn't the largest in the 500mhz area?

what if the code, that determines accurate fps readings, cannot handle the new hardware?

i just find it difficult to imagine my 2.6 as unable to cope.

epolys can be especially variable on video cards - the texture memory in particular can be killer on some custom models. We plan to release a low-resolution skin pack for NW at release to help alleviate these problems.

Things such as regular entities can even affect this. While I'm not exactly for sure on performance hits as a result, overdraw could be one concern - overdraw being what happens when faces are drawn over each other, which is more expensive than drawing just individual faces (this would likely be a sufficient explanation as to why a map with 1000 wpoly and with no vis run would perform worse than a map with 1000 wpoly and a full vis - the no vis version would have a ton of stuff overlapping). With texture, additive, and solid render modes this of course is expected, but any brush entity will cause overdraw over whatever is behind it, which can be reduced by nulling not just entity backfaces, but the actual geometry behind brush entities (if it is reasonable to do so) - the way caulk actually was designed to work in the Quake 3 engine.

Intelligent design is still going to make a higher wpoly map better than it would be if it were poorly designed, and the optimizations and general construction techniques used by a more experienced mapper will keep things better in line. The key is being able to use the polys well, however many you're using.

I do really look forward to getting away from the HL engine entirely, though, the set poly limits and guidelines are really annoying :smile: Things like the Unreal engine's complexity view feature (which colors the scene from green to red based on complexity) and target framerate values (in HL2, for example) instead of target poly count values take all these other variables into consideration, and despite seeming more arbitrary, are far better at defining what will and won't perform well within a game engine.

I just cannot believe that the engine can scale it's capabilities infinitely with GPU power. It's practically impossible for anyone to code for eventualities that far into the future :/

Well, it doesn't scale infinitely, but there's still more than enough power to display some hefty counts with newer hardware. It won't run as efficiently as the same polycount would in a newer game designed for those numbers, but it's still more than enough to get more than was originally designed out of it.

Long live VIS blocking :smile: .

800 is the max. It's not really that hard to make good looking stuff at that liimit people. Anything beyond that and you're probably adding unnecessary details that no one will give a rat's ass about in the middle of a firefight.

I look at it this way: If you wanted a lot of detail and polys in your maps, then you wouldn't be mapping for Half-Life (a glorified 4+ year old Quake 1 engine?) R_speeds are always going to be a major part of Half-Life maps, and it's just plain laziness to discard them. I voted for 1000; that's really the absolute limit in my eyes. Believe it or not, I actually somewhat enjoy the challenge of creating as much as possible within the limits. :razz:

I try my best to stay below 1000, though inevitably my r_speeds sometimes creep above it a touch. 1000 is definitely my ideal limit though - especially if I want my maps to be played regardless of what system people have :smile:

the fact, that some dingbat (wonders if dingbat is another UK cussword :rolleyes: )wasted a vote, by selecting the 5000 option, tells me we have little real use for a polling system :wink:

seems to me, that if its that unimportant to someone, why bother :/

Hah, a dingbat just means a fool here. It looks like that's what it means over there too :smile: I think it's an australian word?

scary_jeff said:
Hah, a dingbat just means a fool here. It looks like that's what it means over there too :smile: I think it's an australian word?

isn't it cool in a way, that a word, that is as semi-obscure as dingbat, works on both sides of the pond :smile:

someday, we, all of snarkpit, needs to post words.. not common ones, but words like dingbat, and compare notes.. i think that thread could be very informative :smile:

Hah, I've got one, I was watching a film and this new york cabby called someone 'mac'. I laughed so hard, I had forgotten that anybody said this... is it something people in other parts of america would say? Do new york cabbies still (did they ever) say that in reality? I know how easy it is to get a completely false impression of a place from films.

I just find the concept of saying 'hey mac, get outa here' really funny for some reason. Here, a mac is a raincoat, but people don't use 'mac' very much any more.

i do not use the term/word as such, but it is actually used.

"hop in mac" is common enuff

its like dude, or the word dude.. it means "a city person attempting to be western" as in a "dude ranch"

its rarely used that way though, more than likely, it would be used in lieu of mac.. as in "hop in dude"

another term is "buddy" in truckers lingo, it means "homosexual"

LOL

That explains a bunch of movie lines. It never seemed to make sense to me that people would agressiveley call somebody 'buddy' - I mean it could be sarcasm, but somehow... no.

A while ago, we were flicking through the TV channels, and there was this awful 70s film about some plane passengers who were stranded on an island. We watched it because it had 'lando' from star wars in it. Lando had a fight with some guy (I'ts probably just me, but the whole idea of a young 'lando' running around a jungle was just hilarious to me... I can't seperate the actor from the carachter lando), then afterwards was arguing with some other guy, and ended with 'yeah, real nice BUDDY' (buddy in caps because he said it with such force). Now it didn't make sense to me that he had such an aggressive tone, but was only calling the guy his 'buddy'. Now it all makes sense :smile:

Well, that was a nice post wasn't it, hope it makes some kind of sense.

That's the problem :smile: You can't begin to sit and define cultural differences in words because of subcultures developed, and developing.

It really is a grey area - something to celebrate really, there is such a vast range of dialects in the world it makes living unique from counties and towns :smile:

That's true Jeff, I always thought it sounded odd... almost sarcastic but not quite. It clicks :smile:

Billy Dee Williams.

Believe me, if you saw some of his other stuff you wouldn't see him as 'Lando'.

Kind of like I don't see Harrison Ford as 'Han'. Instead I see him as a bad actor that thinks he's too good to play the role that made his career. I mean, when was the last time you say Ford in anything that was really good? and then think of the amount of movies he's done total ... count the good ones ... the ratio isn't very impressive.

Orph, I've never heard of anyone using the term "buddy" to mean homosexual that's bizarre and I live here!

I try to have wpoly below 800 at all times. I do my best to lower any area back below this.

i like all harrison ford films, since indiana jones.. his han solo bit was iffy..

and the word "buddy" is only in trucking circles, by that definition.. i am unsure outside of it to be honest.

another that come to mind are "turtle hull" its the trunk on your car.

Oh I'm sure he's a perfectly good actor, I just haven't seen enough of him playing other carachters. And I like Harrison ford. Everyone says he's not a good actor, which probably is true, I just always like the guy that Ford plays... it's always a decent guy who stands up to some kind of adversity and does the right thing. waits for everyone to jump in with films where he didn't play such a role

[edit] If somebody said to me 'turtle hull', I would think they meant a mottled green boat hull. That's probably not what the average UK person would think though. [/edit]

scary_jeff said:
Oh I'm sure he's a perfectly good actor, I just haven't seen enough of him playing other carachters. And I like Harrison ford. Everyone says he's not a good actor, which probably is true, I just always like the guy that Ford plays... it's always a decent guy who stands up to some kind of adversity and does the right thing. *waits for everyone to jump in with films where he didn't play such a role*

"what lies beneath", was most definately NOT a ford sterotypical role bud :/

another word from across the pond..

"Delbert" it translates roughly to dumbs**t, or retard

Orpheus said:
"what lies beneath", was most definately NOT a ford sterotypical role bud :/

Are you calling him a homosexual?

Skeletor said:

Orpheus said:
"what lies beneath", was most definitely NOT a ford stereotypical role bud :/

Are you calling him a homosexual?

actually no, in truckers lingo, buddy is gay, but bud, was shortened to differentiate the two..

buddy, didn't used to mean homosexual, but through means unknown to myself, the term went from a form of friendship, to its present unsavory term.

anywho's, this all happen before my time.. i am just stuck with the current definitions.

"bud" and "reckon" are both widely used on the CB

Gorbachev said:
I try to have wpoly below 800 at all times. I do my best to lower any area back below this.

YOUR ATTEMPT AT DE-RAILING THE THREAD FAILED GORBI

fishy said:

Gorbachev said:
I try to have wpoly below 800 at all times. I do my best to lower any area back below this.

YOUR ATTEMPT AT DE-RAILING THE THREAD FAILED GORBI

you know butthole, that tid-bit would have went alllll day and no one would have said a thing..

taps foots

some people incert eye rolls here