EvilChickenNugget's All Purpose, Self Rising, bzFlag thread

EvilChickenNugget · Post by **EvilChickenNugget** » Sun May 30, 2004 11:23 am

Rather than clutter the forum with multiple threads I'm just gonna combine all the topics I'm curious about into one:

What Lighting settings does everyone prefer? Personally I turn off shadows and lighting because I think it looks a little better, and the glow around shots really sort of annoys me.

What time/daylight settings do you prefer? I almost exclusively play bzFlag at night, but on the rare occasions that I do play during daylight periods I ALWAYS have to advance the in-game daylight settings back to nighttime. I feel that it is easier to see what is going on due to the increased contrast.

I had another one but I forgot it... If I remember it I'll edit it in.

The Red Baron · Post by **The Red Baron** » Sun May 30, 2004 12:30 pm

no. don't turn of the glow around the shots! sometimes you can see the glow coming and dodge them! its important to survival.

EvilChickenNugget · Post by **EvilChickenNugget** » Sun May 30, 2004 2:28 pm

Ugh.. But it annoys the heck out of me. Besides... it would only be useful for me when people have the IB flag since I tend to focus on my radar.

Chestal · Post by **Chestal** » Sun May 30, 2004 2:47 pm

Lighting is one of the few things that I have enabled with my software renderer because it looks good and has only a very small performance hit.

I always set the time of day to dawn, depending onwich color I play (usually red vs. green) I choose slightly different times. I have also set fixedTime.

Workaphobia · Post by **Workaphobia** » Sun May 30, 2004 5:19 pm

I have everything enabled including lighting. As for time of day, I normally leave it on server default, and don't mind when the sun rises or sets. It's not too hard to play on both equally.

rob1n · Post by **rob1n** » Sun May 30, 2004 5:40 pm

i turn off everything...doesn't annoy me without anything, but it's really unlaggy...

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Sun May 30, 2004 7:18 pm

if i dont have everything ON then i cant play cuz i cant concentrate AND it lags WAY too much.

Saturos · Post by **Saturos** » Sun May 30, 2004 7:27 pm

Playing everytime on day (i hate night) with everything on excluding Depth Buffer and Shadows.

Post by **blast** » Mon May 31, 2004 1:30 am

I usually play with everything on except Shadows and Lighting. The shadows don't look too good and take a good chunk out of my FPS. The lighting I really don't need, cuz I got used to it without it. Don't really care about the time of day in the game.

lildog wrote:if i dont have everything ON then i cant play cuz i cant concentrate AND it lags WAY too much.

Hmm...wouldn't it be faster with less stuff on? Except for Depth Buffer, which I'd never turn off.

rob1n · Post by **rob1n** » Mon May 31, 2004 3:46 am

blast wrote:I usually play with everything on except Shadows and Lighting. The shadows don't look too good and take a good chunk out of my FPS. The lighting I really don't need, cuz I got used to it without it. Don't really care about the time of day in the game.

lildog wrote:if i dont have everything ON then i cant play cuz i cant concentrate AND it lags WAY too much.
Hmm...wouldn't it be faster with less stuff on? Except for Depth Buffer, which I'd never turn off.

i like it with everything on, but when i do, it hangs and freezes and i have to force restart my machine...i'm using macosx, and i think it's a known bug.

I think it is faster...i used to have lagggggg, (i have a 32 mb vid card in my laptop), so now i'm happy...sorta...

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Tue Jun 01, 2004 1:33 am

blast wrote:I usually play with everything on except Shadows and Lighting. The shadows don't look too good and take a good chunk out of my FPS. The lighting I really don't need, cuz I got used to it without it. Don't really care about the time of day in the game.

lildog wrote:if i dont have everything ON then i cant play cuz i cant concentrate AND it lags WAY too much.
Hmm...wouldn't it be faster with less stuff on? Except for Depth Buffer, which I'd never turn off.

its just the way my client is. :~/

toaster · Post by **toaster** » Tue Jun 01, 2004 11:15 am

I play with everything on, but with some tuning. I get good frame rates, and I usually adjust clock to late morning/early afternoon. I can't tell you how many times I've killed st's because I saw their shadows.

Post by **blast** » Tue Jun 01, 2004 1:18 pm

If I had a faster video card and processor, I'd probably use shadows. But I would rather have a higher FPS than more eye candy.

EvilChickenNugget · Post by **EvilChickenNugget** » Tue Jun 01, 2004 1:39 pm

Well.. I tried turning lighting and shadows on last night... Couldn't take it... Just don't like the way it looks, distracts me from the game.

Oh well, I've been using it this way for a long time, no sense changing now.

Princess Mononoke · Post by **Princess Mononoke** » Sat Jun 26, 2004 2:20 am

I turn Depth Buffer off, and everything else is on. I'm not sure why I do that, though.

Post by **blast** » Sat Jun 26, 2004 5:16 pm

Depth Buffer is good to have on, unless it causes problems. It typically increases your FPS.

Post by **trepan** » Sat Jun 26, 2004 8:57 pm

I usually play with depth buffer on, lighting off, and
shadows off. I also use "set fixedTime 04:00:00" in
my config file to play in the dark. I find that the dark
background helps to increase the contrast so that
items are easier to see (tanks, text, etc...)

Depth Buffer: The depth buffer should always be on
if you have video hardware acceleration. Some maps
look whacked out if you don't use it. It should also
provide better FPS on hardware.

Shadows: Just garnishing as far as i'm concerned.
They wouldn't show up with my "fixedTime" setting
anyways...

Lighting: I do like the look of glowing shots, but I
don't enable it because many a map has been
designed so that lighting brings my client to a
grinding halt. The big probably with lighting is that
OpenGL 1.2 does its lighting per vertex, and not per
pixel. To make shots over a big surface look proper,
BZFlag has to break up that surface into many
smaller surfaces (to make more vertices). That math
to break up the surfaces and all the extra data that
gets sent to OpenGL causes grindage.

You can minimize that amount of grindage caused by
lgihting on a map with a couple of tricks.

1. Break up large surface (boxes) in smaller boxes.
It's a tradeoff between the total number of boxes
generated and the amount of "splitting" that the client
has to do for its lighting.

2. Use the "/set _maxLOD 1" command to force the
clients not to break up surfaces. This also means that
the glowing effect will not look right on big surfaces,
but it does look fine near smaller objects. This can
only be done by a server admin.

There are at least a couple of ways that BZFlag can
improve it's lighting in futur releases. Instead of having
OpenGL calculate the lighting effect for each shot, you
can draw it yourself (this feature is called multi-texture).
It's like drawing the circular picture of the glow on to
the surface. Also, newer video cards have vertex shaders
and pixels shaders. Pixel shaders allow a developer to
having lighting calculated per pixel, so that no spliiting
is required.

P.S. The "splitting" is also called tessellation.
P.P.S. I'm probably wrong about everything.

Workaphobia · Post by **Workaphobia** » Sun Jun 27, 2004 3:30 pm

My laptop has a SIS 630/730 card that doesn't support opengl very well at all, but if I turn quality higher and texturing on it runs ten times faster - that is to say, it goes from 2000ms lag to 200 or so. Still really not playable when you considered the slow framerate as well, but odd nonetheless. Anyone know why that is?

Death Barrel · Post by **Death Barrel** » Mon Jun 28, 2004 9:12 pm

lol thats funny...

i turn shadows off cause i hate them, if i am green i like to play during they day (red is easier to see) and if i am red then i play at night (green is easier to see).

i also make my radar as big as it can go... 90% of what i look at is radar for some reason.

db