Esenthel, that how you ignore this subject (by commenting in this thread screens and not our problem) in my opinion only shows the size of this performance problem.

In this situation writing what you wrote in FAQ's seem to be a bad joke :(. If this engine is to be one of the best I think you really should optimize it so we can do serious games and not only "My testing grounds". We're working hard on MT and it's sad how engine performs. Even only static map goes slow (I am not talking about the demo!! But other maps WITH optimized meshes).

Decent Enough fps, in my opinion, is, for action game like MT, no less than 40. Sometimes we get that amount, where there is almost nothing on screen, but it's dropping rapidly when looking at more objects. Not even mentioning some real action.

We've done LOD's for every model - fps is up by several, but still it is too low. And, in which modern game can you see billboards instead of trees 200 m infront of you? That's 7 years ago...

Also, what about lights? Maybe we're doing something wrong - by we I mean me and my friend working on some other game, but putting several lights on map just kills the fps. And I DO mean it. Check for yourselves.

So, Esenthel. We would like to finish our game on your engine and buy license, but your attitude is not encouraging. Please, reply us, and do something with performance. No one will complain

I do agreed to certain extend that both the Esenthel engine and our own code/mesh/texture need optimization. I had problem earlier too. I place a test on my game with 10 trees (with 60k polygon each tree - using Onyx Trees) and place it on small area but the performance really drop. I placed the same tree model on UDK but bigger area, its not as slow as if were in Esenthel (almost similar terrain). I wish I have captured the screenshot to prove it. To be honest, I do like UDK and the Toolset are neater, but UDK licensing is something I don't like.

Esenthel is relatively powerful engine with some cool tools, but seriously it could use more optimization on the engine side and also some of the tools layout

FPS was different obviously on different machines. Again, newer cards perform a lot better than older models, but you can always switch back to forward rendering on those and gain a lot of FPS. In this area, if I remember correctly, the FPS was between 50 and 80 on the artist's machine.

As I said, Esenthel should always have an eye out on performance on all kinds of cards, not just the one the engine is developed on and tested. I just wanted to show that rather nice visuals can be achieved with the engine, especially the terrain system is rather well designed. When we showed the demo live to someone, that was the first thing he recognized. He said that the terrain looks rather nice and realistic, even though we didn't spend a whole lot of time on it. It's practically an export from an external terrain software, WorldMachine I believe.

Edit: And guys, I fully agree that Esenthel shouldn't ignore this subject. Performance is of utmost importance.

Edit2: Esenthel, also please update the engine comparison page. There are some facts there that are simply wrong. Especially when comparing with Unreal 3

(03-22-2011 07:52 AM)Hemi Wrote:  Esenthel, that how you ignore this subject..

Please read the updated FAQ - http://www.esenthel.com/community/showth...p?tid=3332
If you don't understand it, I honestly can't help you.

As others have said, engine performance is not everything. You need to have optimized codes, models, select proper rendering options/configuration, lot's of other things.

Investigating improving performance is on my roadmap, but not soon!

Hemi Wrote:In this situation writing what you wrote in FAQ's seem to be a bad joke :(

Your attitude is most certainly not helping you.

duplex Wrote:Edit: And guys, I fully agree that Esenthel shouldn't ignore this subject. Performance is of utmost importance.

No one is ignoring anything, I'm always doing my best in developing the engine and satisfying as many people possible.
Please don't confuse me with magical fairy that can spoof out requests for everybody everyday I am just human working on the engine every day very hard..

duplex Wrote:Edit2: Esenthel, also please update the engine comparison page. There are some facts there that are simply wrong. Especially when comparing with Unreal 3

Sometimes the information may be inaccurate or outdated, if you are aware of new information, please let me know the details.
On the comparison website there is link to email on the bottom of the page, where you can send the info.
However please provide me links to some official documentation/information where I can confirm the information from official website, that it clearly states the status of the features mentioned in the comparison website.

Thank you very much.

(03-22-2011 10:49 AM)Esenthel Wrote:  No one is ignoring anything, I'm always doing my best in developing the engine and satisfying as many people possible.
Please don't confuse me with magical fairy that can spoof out requests for everybody everyday I am just human working on the engine every day very hard..

I know, and I didn't want to offend you, quite the opposite. I know the path you are following, it is extremely difficult doing so many things all on your own. I've been there myself.
I think everyone here values what you have done, they just want to express their concerns.

I only will show some screens that show result in fps in game, full settings:

I see no mention of how anyone handled culling in any of the levels shown. AAA designers spend a ton of time setting up culling and distance culling. I can take any engine on the market and bring it to its knees with bad lay out and design and no culling.

I am not trying to knock your level but it is of poor design. You have wide open spaces with buildings off to the side going all the way down. You need a huge statue or something in the middle of the street to break up the rendering of extra items that are in the distance. If you look at the screens you posted of the AAA game they are cramped and have plenty of objects up closer to break up the scene and not render the objects behind them.

If you are interested I can post some information from AAA designers on how to handle culling and reduce unseen renderings.

@Seba

This tells nothing at all... only which card performs better in different cases.. the games are totally different from each with other engines.. there is no poly count / textures size / shader comparison.. I always said these benchmarks tells you only a bunch of crap... Makes people think ah look the Geforce performs better than ATI with 2 fps.. im gonna get that one!..

Kobaltic Wrote:If you are interested I can post some information from AAA designers on how to handle culling and reduce unseen renderings.

Post everything what can be implemented by user engine. Everything else send directly to E.

I will gather it up and post it tomorrow. Although it has little to do with the engine. It is the principles of level design with respect to rendering and layout.

@Kobaltic - this will be great.Thanks!

Esenthel, don't get me wrong. I really like this engine, rendering quality is great, you're making impressive job out there But performance is real problem for us . We're trying hard to do as many optimizations as we can but it may not be enough. If you could look into improving performance a bit sooner it would be great (propably before we release our game ) .

Also, is there posiibility you could write something more about "special effects editor"? It sounds really interesting.

(03-22-2011 10:13 PM)Hemi Wrote:  Also, is there posiibility you could write something more about "special effects editor"? It sounds really interesting.

Special Effect Editor? What Special Effect? :O Does this mean Particle Effect stuff? If it is, I like the sound of that IDEA!

I really want to see better performance in shadows.. right now ive turned it off cause it drops the fps insanely low..

If you have a level with e.g 50 objects in it.. not very high poly (around 500 poly each object) and you want to add a light that casts shadow it drops around 5 fps.. with just 1 light!! ..... the volumetric is pretty cool looking but same story..which makes me turn it off again..

This is very sad.. cause i really like this engine but sometimes it make me think it lacks some basic features/performance..

Don't confuse engine performance with gpu performance.

Some things just can't be optimized on the engine side, and the speed is only dependent on the gpu. Be realistic, good looking shadows usually require 1024x1024 res, directional lights by default use 6 cascades, local lights (point/sqr) use 6 cube faces so in both cases you have 6*1024x1024, that's lot of bandwidth, and additional rendering of objects for each shadow frustum they're inside).

Shadows are expensive on every engine, and I seriously doubt if other engines would work faster with similar settings. (exact same set of models, config parameters, I don't mean comparing different games, because it's completely pointless to compare different models/scenes/rendering options).

I did receive some email of a person months ago that has made perf. tests of similar scene on many engines, c4, unity, torque, udk, ee, what the person said is udk had best performance, and ee was next, but: udk used lightmaps instead of dynamic lights like ee. I don't know any more details so I can't realy tell more.

I am checking out some parts of the engine right now, searching for possible optimizations, but at the moment I seriously couldn't find anything where the engine would be at fault, and not the gpu.

For the person saying that UDK had rendered a similar scene faster than EE - please send me your scene! in UDK and EE formats. I'd love to investigate this, and do some tests on my own.

Personally when I look at the codes of ee im very proud of them and their optimizations. For the moment I can only recommend adjusting rendering configurations, there are hundreds (!) options in ee graphics headers, everyone of them can potentially affect performance, do further optimization of your scene/codes. Check both docs on ee optimization (wiki/performance optimizations and wiki/mobile platforms which has some additional info about increasing performance)

Next sdk will have some option for controlling world area early-z rendering, which may increase/decrease performance depending on your scene.

I will keep investigating the possibility of improvements of engine performance (and post hints in perf. optimizations docs), but don't expect miracles, as I've said some things just cant be done on the engine side, as it's only gpu dependent.

Oh, and about special effects editor, I can't really tell anything yet, what it will have because I don't know it yet only, that I know it's important stuff, and needs to be added in some time.