[Nel] Getting NeL up and running.

[Vianney Lecroart]

I already sent a mail in this list about how to increase the fps in
snowball.
(vincent archer, you should put this in the FAQ ;-)

---------------------

Yes, snowballs is slow because it s a prototype for a futur game.
There s no optimisation and our game is planning to work with next computer
generation.

Anyway, you can increase the frame rate with changing the default value of
the tesselation of the landscape and others variables.
In the client.cfg, you have 2 variables:

LandscapeTileNear = 50.000000;
LandscapeThreshold = 0.001000;

The first one is the distance, in meter, of the near algorithm, if you
decrease the
value (putting 10 for example) should increase the framerate.
The second variable is the threshold of the tesselation of the landscape,
you can
increase the value to increase the frame rate (try 0.01 or 0.1 for example).
of course,
if you do that, there will be less details on the landscape.
You can modify these 2 variables in realtime using chat commands. You just
have to
write:
/setthre 0.1
to set the LandscapeThreshold to 0.1
/settilenear 10
to set the LandscapeTileNear to 10
when you change variables in realtime in the game, they are automaticaly
store in the
client.cfg so you don t have to do it again on next launch.

With this, you can increase the framerate from 10 to 30 fps on a fast
computer.

On our computer, the frame rate is around 10-15fps with default value and we
have:
Athlon 750Mhz, 256Mb RAM, GeForce256 32Mb RAM.

Another thing you have to know is that we use lot of processor time.
If we change only the processor and put an Athlan 1Ghz, the framerate
increase
to 20fps. But if you put a GeForce2GTS, you ll see no difference in the
frame rate.

The fill rate of the 3d card isn't use a lot, you can try to put the
resolution
to 320*240 or 1600*1200 and you ll see that the framerate doesn t change a
lot.

Anyway, we know that snowballs is slow :-/

Vianney Lecroart
---
lead network programmer / nevrax.com
icq#: 6870415
homepage: http://ace.planet-d.net
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