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A Space Ship Tester (for 3D artists) v0.10.02
Developer   Battagline
GenreShooter
PlatformWindows
Downloads423

About: This is a stripped down version of Epoch Star I built for my artist to test his ship models in the Epoch Star Engine. You can easily drop .x files and textures into this and test the way they look in a simple space shooter.

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Please offer only constructive criticism. The intent of the GD Showcase is to help the developer create the best game they possibly can. Show them you support their efforts when posting.



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I pulled this together pretty quickly. So if there are problems please let me know. I'm only going to maintain and upgrade this if there seems to be some interest. So also let me know if anyone is interested in the idea. If you have any screen shots you made from this, either post them back to this forum, or send them to me via email: support@epochstar.com so that I can post it to my site. Hopefully today or a little later this week, I'll be able to get more detailed instructions on my Epoch Star site, and start a gallery of screen shots created with this tool.

Thanks

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I have no idea why this thing is so slow. It doesn't seem to be doing anything complicated, but, by its own admission, it is running at somewhere between 1 and 5 frames per second. Most 3d programs run at about 60 fps on this computer - it is a Dell Optiplex GX60.

Any ideas?

Mike C.
http://www.coolgroups.com/zoomer/



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Quote:
Original post by mike74
I have no idea why this thing is so slow. It doesn't seem to be doing anything complicated, but, by its own admission, it is running at somewhere between 1 and 5 frames per second. Most 3d programs run at about 60 fps on this computer - it is a Dell Optiplex GX60.

Any ideas?

Mike C.
http://www.coolgroups.com/zoomer/


Well, I had made some changes to my engine to make this faster if you have a video card that doesn't support pixel shaders, but I never bothered to make those changes in my ship tester because my vc, and my artists vc (whom I built this for) supports pixel shaders and it runs at an acceptable speed on both our machines. I didn't bother to make the update to this because no one had commented on it so I assumed no one was really interested in it. Do you know what kind of video card you are running? Are you anything more than passingly interested in this? If someone has a real interest, I can update it... but at this point I'm assuming that no one really cares much.

--

Just check your computer on Dell's web site. It has an integrated graphics card. I'm guessing it has no pixel shader support, so that likely explains why this runs so poorly on your machine.

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Do you really need to use a pixel shader? Weren't most of the space ships texture mapped anyway?

What advantages do you think you're getting from the pixel shader?

Mike

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There is a glowing effect that looks rather nice if your card supports pixel shaders. If you want to see what the game looked like before and after I added the glow effect, I documented the pain I went through putting it in my game in my Developer's Journal. Feel free to take a look.

In the game, I turn this off if your card does not support pixel shaders. In this ship tester, I try to do the same thing another way that causes the game to go exceptionally slow if. Once again, this problem should be fixed *hopefully* in Epoch Star. In this ship tester, I just haven't taken the time to fix the problem, because it was something I just threw together for my artist, and thought I'd put it out on GameDev in case anyone was interested. I would think most 3D artists would have a decent graphics card that supports pixel shaders. If not, oh well, this is really more of a toy I built to help me in developing my game that I thought I'd share. Once again, if your really interested in it, I can see what I can do to fix it for you. If not I'm not going to worry about it too much.

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