New graphics engine testing

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It’s finally time to do a public test of thrive with the new graphics engine. I’ve been working on this for a long time:

If you can’t be bothered to read that thread, here’s a two point summary:

  • Ogre has a lot of problems, and I didn’t get any help. BSF is easier to do graphics stuff with, and there’s way more support
  • BSF supports DirectX11 which should make Thrive playable on older intel graphics, which people seem to want to do (and then when it crashes they submit bug reports)

So now it is time for the community (that’s you!) to test how well the new graphics engine works.
However, please do not report these already known issues (also don’t report any bugs that are also in 0.4.1.1):

That’s a bunch of stuff, but basically this is a test to see if the game runs, and if the fps is good or not (press F3 to show the FPS in game). Please also post your PC specs.

It would be extra helpful if you could test using the different rendering APIs as well. The default on windows is directx and on linux opengl.

How to change the selected API

You need to add one of the following lines to bin/EngineConf.conf:

RenderAPI = "opengl";

RenderAPI = "vulkan";

RenderAPI = "directx";

You can also edit the resolution in the config. This is what the config contents look like:

Vsync = 0;
UseGamma = 1;
FSAA = 4;
FullScreen = "no";
DisplayNumber = 0;
Width = 1280;
Height = 720;
MaxFPS = 120;
AudioDevice = "default";

Many of the options are obsolete / haven’t been remade.

Downloads

Windows: https://boostslair.com/files/thrive/Thrive-0.4.2.0-alpha-bsf-test-WINDOWS-64bit.7z
SHA3: dc8770291726012f3804e7d7611c839ada61071930d0351a09bc66899a6dc4a1
Linux: https://boostslair.com/files/thrive/Thrive-0.4.2.0-alpha-bsf-test-LINUX-generic.7z
SHA3: ba0719937a187118289088e0fb3cb353c446173d4b480d6d931fecd8c60e842a

tldr; 1. download the bsf test build 2. check does the game run on your computer 3. report that and also the FPS, frame time avg (you need to wait half a minute for it to update) and tick time, in this thread (include the CPU and graphics card you have, if possible).

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I think it should be made clear that the file to run is Thrive.exe in the bin folder. You need to use 7Zip or similar to unzip the archive first.

Everything seems to run for me. But uh, not entirely smoothly. The keyboard input delay I get in official Thrive versions is even worse in this. I made a video using the on-screen keyboard to make things clearer.

Then there’s stuttering when new things load. I didn’t see any rendering issues other than those you mentioned though, and certainly no crashing.

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I’ll post this here as well (from discord). There are issues open for bsf having low FPS even when not much is being rendered:

I’ll also report my numbers:
On Linux with opengl API I get around 50 to 61 FPS at 720p, at 4K I get only around 22.

On windows with directx I get 121 (the frame limit) most of the time, with render times at 0.1ms, when not much is being rendered. With opengl I get over 100 fps with frame times around 2.3ms. On Linux the frame times where close to 10ms.
I also get the occasional lag spikes, not really sure what they are related to, but they might be related to our gameplay code doing a bunch of stuff every now and then, instead of doing tiny steps each frame.

I have a GTX 1080Ti.

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fps: 108
avg: 2.9 - 3.9 ms
tick: 15 - 23 ms

The new zooming in and out looks cool, but the game environment kinda lags after the parallax which makes it somewhat disorienting

The “trail” the cell makes when it swims through and absorbs compound clouds seems somewhat offset to the left

Hexes in the editor seem stretched horizontally
Game environement in general seems stretched, actually

Intense lag spikes after leaving editor, probably due to other microbes

Parallax seems to move too quickly vertically when traveling diagonally

Sometimes compounds don’t seem to go in my “inventory,” even as I swim over extremely dense clouds. I was swimming through a cloud that had glucose in the thousands, but I still ran out of glucose, causing me to die.

Sometimes the game forgets I’m pressing a movement key and I have to press it again

Compound clouds become very bright when mixing instead of neutrally blending like in 0.4.1.1.

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For me game works pretty fine. (Using Windows)

But for some reason while playing 0.4.1.1 I had about 80-90 FPS
But while playing 0.4.2 I have only 15-25 FPS

Other than that game didn’t crash, and I don’t have problem with screenshotting because I use snipping tool

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On a fresh start or in the editor:
120 FPS
avg: 2 ms
tick time in editor: 3 ms
tick time in-game: 10 ms.

However, after a while I’d get frequent lag-spikes and stutters, which would then temporarily lower the FPS to around 30 -37, with corresponding frame times, and a tick speed of 18 ms.
This may had something to do with the fact that I for some reason had around 10-20 of some weird species follow me around everywhere, (who couldn’t damage me and couldn’t be damaged by me either,) during which the lag spikes grew larger and more common as the group grew.

EDIT:
GPU: 1050 Ti
CPU: AMD Athlon x4 845

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Intel® Core™ i7-3610QM CPU @ 2.30GHz
Nvidia GeForce GT 630M
Windows 7 64-bit
frame avg 20.8ms
tick 11ms

The game launches normally. After beginning a game, the UI is present but the rest of the screen is black. That is, there is no game world. The UI occasionally blinks and stutters.

Opengl and Vulkan immediately crash, but you stated that was a known issue and should not be reported.

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weird effect when zooming: https://gyazo.com/51d9598972d5986ac8e78d032e415dca (clouds do it too)
input lag might be related to rendering
maybe do a little test like play a sound when u press W to test

also resizing works for me (looks a bit pixelated though)

specs:
OS: Windows 10
RAM: 16gb
CPU: AMD FX 6300 (3.5ghz 6core)
GPU: Nvidia gtx 970 (4gb)
Monitor Resolution: 1920x1080

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There’s so many layers of smoothing and interpolation going on, that it’s difficult to get it to exactly match the camera movement.

I’m pretty sure there is nothing here that has changed. It’s always been so that the cloud compound grab starts to the top left of the cell (and if the cell is nearly full) it can’t grab stuff directly underneath the cell.

I think the hexes were that way since I put them back in the game (in 0.4.0).
I’m not ruling out the possibility that the aspect ratio setting is wrong for the camera. To make that always work, I need to request an auto aspect ratio feature for bsf.

In the Ogre version the background was tied to the window aspect ratio, now it is actually a square. People are welcome to tweak the speeds, I think it should now correspond 1-to-1 world coordinates.

That’s very unlikely to be graphics engine related.

Interesting, this might be lag related. The only way I see this happening is that for some reason a key-up event is triggered for the key.

This is maybe related to the overall eye adaptation brightness. Cloud colours likely need tweaking for all different environment brightnesses.

I was hoping the lag would be mainly caused by long tick times. It’s starting to look like the rendering is also contributing to lag. But I hope that the huge lag spikes are tick related and not a sign that the graphics engine is really not up to scratch.

Is it actually playable or not?

I’ve disabled the actual rendering resizing on windows. So it still renders at the old resolution. If I hadn’t disabled it the game would freeze.

I don’t think the clouds should do anything like that. They should behave like all the cells (ie normally) when changing the zoom.

The game state is updated only 20 times per second. All smooth movement is interpolated. Many people, myself included, don’t really feel like that really breaks the playability, but some people do feel the delay between pressing a key and moving. What kind of FPS do you get (press F3 to show it)? It’s likely this version feels like it has more input lag if the FPS is lower.

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No, it is not playable for me. The game is a black screen with a UI on top of it.

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i get 120 fps (cap)
used to get alot more lag in old versions

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I keep getting this strange bug when trying to launch the game, apparently its incompatible with Mac for some reason???
I mean, I don’t know what could possibly be the problem here…
shrug

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I’m wondering the same thing. I mean, why aren’t all the helpful people with macs flocking to offer help in making mac versions of thrive?

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Here are my findings. It seems to have lag spikes like others have been stating, otherwise I get decent frames.

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