[Guess Who]

I never meant to suggest that LOst should have the programming skill of an entire team of professionals, but I'm sure most of the tech members here will back me up when I say that it doesn't take the skill of an entire team of professionals to make a 2D engine with parallax scrolling and a few relatively simple shader effects run on fairly low-end hardware. There's no reason a game like this shouldn't be capable of running on a damn iPhone.

[Steven M]

Black Squirrel, on 31 March 2012 - 04:03 PM, said:

in the industry people are hired to make the most out of graphics cards and optimise the crap out of specific sections which they have knowledge on. LOst is one man. Regardless of whether it's right or wrong that one man did everything (bar sound?), it's stupid to expect amazing graphics programming AND amazing physics AND handle the game engine AND presumably do a bit of hacking to get data from the original game.

I mean people like to make comparisons to Rayman Origins but I count over 30 members of the programming team in that game. Are we really suggesting one man should have the technical skills of thirty industry professionals working day in, day out? Really? I'm surprised the Mobius Engine isn't already out the door then!

You made a solid point. Perhaps this project would benefit from the aid of multiple programmers from the community. A community project, as it were.

[Falk]

Big wheel keep on turning!

[Hodgy]

I'd Love to be a programmer on this project, I didnt have the skills when it was started back in 2008, so I attempted to help with art, which has since been completely overhauled.

But now that I've been at uni for a couple of years, I am now competent with C++ and DirectX, I'd love to help program for this project, it's jsut a shame that LOst doesnt trust people with his code , heck he could make me sign some sort of NDA or contract sying I cant take code if it means that much to him, I would just love to be a part of this great project.

[Travelsonic]

Black Squirrel, on 31 March 2012 - 04:03 PM, said:

Again

in the industry people are hired to make the most out of graphics cards and optimise the crap out of specific sections which they have knowledge on. LOst is one man. Regardless of whether it's right or wrong that one man did everything (bar sound?), it's stupid to expect amazing graphics programming AND amazing physics AND handle the game engine AND presumably do a bit of hacking to get data from the original game.

But it isn't stupid to expect that said programmer should do his or her best to optimize, and use efficient programming techniques.

The way I've been taught programming is not so much to work in limited confines - as in, "here's the system, the limitations, now work," but that it is always good to simplify tasks as much as possible - rendering, I/O, etc, and make code that does said tasks as efficiently as possible [as little memory, as few clock cycles as possible], modularly - meaning that code can be reused wherever possible - etc.

You don't need to be an entire dev team to have good programming practices as a habit you always adhere to, and from the looks of it, there is a bit to be desired so far as how this was coded.

[Stealth]

Deef, on 31 March 2012 - 08:05 AM, said:

I admit, the framerate did drop to 30fps. But I really mean it's as if the client didn't notice. No chugging, no slowdown, just a game running at 30fps perfectly solidly. [...] that's how solid it is. [...] again 30fps [...] never go under 30 fps.

This should be running at no less than 60fps. A solid framerate really has nothing to do with it because if you're running under framelock, depending on how you set it up, overdoing the load will kick it down to the next range. Being able to hold stable at 30 isn't a surprise; it's still running too slowly to stay at 60. E02 did maintain 60fps, and it does more processor-intensive things than S2HD should. I admit that while playing with it more and more, the frameskip was much more noticeable than gameplay slowdown, but it was so bad that I couldn't make a decent judgement over whether the game logic was still running at the correct speed. I don't even understand how the display rate could get as bad as it did with this being a 2D game and looking the way it does. This shouldn't be straining the 3D hardware nearly as badly as even a mediocre 3D game, many of which I have no problems running properly

Guess Who, on 31 March 2012 - 04:08 PM, said:

I never meant to suggest that LOst should have the programming skill of an entire team of professionals, but I'm sure most of the tech members here will back me up when I say that it doesn't take the skill of an entire team of professionals to make a 2D engine with parallax scrolling and a few relatively simple shader effects run on fairly low-end hardware. There's no reason a game like this shouldn't be capable of running on a damn iPhone.

^ That, so very much. There are plenty of people who do better jobs with projects they aren't getting paid for, and who are also way more modest

Hodgy, on 31 March 2012 - 05:47 PM, said:

I'd Love to be a programmer on this project, I didnt have the skills when it was started back in 2008, so I attempted to help with art, which has since been completely overhauled.

But now that I've been at uni for a couple of years, I am now competent with C++ and DirectX, I'd love to help program for this project, it's jsut a shame that LOst doesnt trust people with his code , heck he could make me sign some sort of NDA or contract sying I cant take code if it means that much to him, I would just love to be a part of this great project.

You'll see LOst off the project before you see him working with anyone else. Trust me- this isn't the first time this sort of thing has happened

Travelsonic, on 31 March 2012 - 06:09 PM, said:

Black Squirrel, on 31 March 2012 - 04:03 PM, said:

Again

in the industry people are hired to make the most out of graphics cards and optimise the crap out of specific sections which they have knowledge on. LOst is one man. Regardless of whether it's right or wrong that one man did everything (bar sound?), it's stupid to expect amazing graphics programming AND amazing physics AND handle the game engine AND presumably do a bit of hacking to get data from the original game.

But it isn't stupid to expect that said programmer should do his or her best to optimize, and use efficient programming techniques.

The way I've been taught programming is not so much to work in limited confines - as in, "here's the system, the limitations, now work," but that it is always good to simplify tasks as much as possible - rendering, I/O, etc, and make code that does said tasks as efficiently as possible [as little memory, as few clock cycles as possible], modularly - meaning that code can be reused wherever possible - etc.

You don't need to be an entire dev team to have good programming practices as a habit you always adhere to, and from the looks of it, there is a bit to be desired so far as how this was coded.

I'd also like to endorse this one 100%

[James K]

Hypocrisy aside, why the overprotectiveness?




At the worst, what could someone even do that would cause enough alarm to want lock down EVERYTHING on a free, hobbyist-driven game?

[SeanieB]

James K, on 31 March 2012 - 06:15 PM, said:

Hypocrisy aside, why the overprotectiveness?




At the worst, what could someone even do that would cause enough alarm to want lock down EVERYTHING on a free, hobbyist-driven game?

I think it's just sheer protectionism... It's the same reason why real game companies use DRM, although for a fangame, S2HD takes it way farther than even Sega do themselves... Although there's a chance that maybe, he doesn't want someone at Retro to take it apart and find out why exactly they want you to have an i5 2500 and a Phenom X4 to run a 2D game... Sonic Generations played negligibly well on my old Core 2 Duo machine at 1080P, I'm downloading the Alpha right now, but I have a feeling I'll be fine since I just changed over to an i5... My best guess is probably just that he doesn't want people to find the skeletons in the closet of the engine for some reason or another.

[Elratauru]

James K, on 31 March 2012 - 06:15 PM, said:

At the worst, what could someone even do that would cause enough alarm to want lock down EVERYTHING on a free, hobbyist-driven game?

Look at the code, learn from it, code a better engine. Not that it matters though, It's just paranoid to me.

I guess that encrypting the art is alright, since artists usually don't want random people using their time-worty spritesheets. Or background pieces of art and stuff in fangames that had nothing to do with them. But protection or not, its never impossible to rip stuff with enough time. Look at Dario's Generation Hacking Skills, reverse engineered everything and made it work, with nothing to help him besides the files (and other epic users).

[diplomacydog]

I'd rather have him come into this thread and explain himself

[SeanieB]

Just played it, I got perfect results, and I noticed some things:

I'm using an i5 2400 and an ATI Radeon HD4850OC w/800 shaders at 750mhz. I got a perfect 60FPS as measured by FRAPS IF I right clicked the game and changed it to the "full screen" driver.

Why does the game render in a window? There were times when my task bar covered the bottom of the screen, not to mention that it doesn't allow DWM/Aero and the rest of the windows UI to duck out of the way, which has the potential to put a damper on performance, there's a reason a lot of games run better in fullscreen. Especially one designed to be at 1920x1080. The whole window mode thing confuses me.

It did however do quite a bit in the performance department, which leads me to my next problem

http://img.lostsig.net/whys2hd.png

Down there in the lower right is the Task Manager's "floating monitor mode". I don't know if anyone else did this, but I noticed it only really seemed to use most of one core, why the hell is this a 64 bit game, and demanding expensive multi-core CPUs if it only really seems to run on a single thread? :/

My NOD32 did not complain about the EXE, but I do not have Potentially Unwanted Program detection enabled.

I may re-download and compare this to Sonic Generations on this same machine.

Edit:

I just found something interesting. The game appears to be pretty much all CPU based (software rendering!), it's not even using accelerated graphics much at all.

On the title screen, with the parallax scrolling and the logos and all, the GPU is 0%, idle, in game it's 11-30% GPU utilization, and my GPU is a 4 year old example. Where do these GPU requirements come from?

http://img.lostsig.net/zero.png
http://img.lostsig.net/ingame.png

This post has been edited by SeanieB: 31 March 2012 - 07:36 PM

[tokumaru]

Tets, on 30 March 2012 - 03:22 AM, said:

Also I just about came when I saw the smooth animation on the title screen.

You mean Parkinson's disease Sonic? That hand animation looks completely unnatural.

[Mercury]

tokumaru, on 31 March 2012 - 08:18 PM, said:

Tets, on 30 March 2012 - 03:22 AM, said:

Also I just about came when I saw the smooth animation on the title screen.

You mean Parkinson's disease Sonic? That hand animation looks completely unnatural.

That's 'cos it's rotating instead of waving, which is really mystifying. Why didn't anyone reference a real hand doing the motion? The artists must have had at least one near at hand.

[Volpino]

Has anyone considered that maybe the system requirements are so that when the game is more resource-intensive, people who ran it on machines that could handle the alpha but can't run the game at that point will have a heads-up?

Also yeah that hand is really weird, everything else is nice, but that doesn't look like something physically possible, let alone I've never seen a human being do that before so it also seems a bit random.

If it weren't for how entirely random Adventure's artwork looks half the time, I'd have probably been way more bothered by it. :V

[SeanieB]

Volpino, on 31 March 2012 - 08:51 PM, said:

Has anyone considered that maybe the system requirements are so that when the game is more resource-intensive, people who ran it on machines that could handle the alpha but can't run the game at that point will have a heads-up?

Fair enough, but they're still ridiculous.

This post has been edited by SeanieB: 31 March 2012 - 08:55 PM