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Christian9

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Hello world! I'm Christian9! The world's biggest dinosaur fanatic! I have joined the forum after being ran out another minecraft clone forum so now I intend on making a few Animal modules!
 

Cervator

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... hello there, I think. Not really the best first impression from either of you, between this forum thread and the profile conversation.

We welcome any sensible and mature individuals here who have an interest in working on (or playing) Terasology. We don't welcome drama from other forums or games.

Please confirm here in calm and mature language if you are intending to respect both other people and other games. If not then there are other communities more appropriate for that kind of activity :)

We'd love to get more animals created in-game for Terasology, but maintaining a respectful community is more important than gaining more content.
 

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Sorry, never happen again
Thank you! Now what's this about dinosaurs, animals, and other stuff? Have you developed or done artwork before on other games? Do you model in Blender?
 

Cervator

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Yes Christian9 and I fully intend to respect each other and everyone else. There was just a misunderstanding that has been resolved now. We do not intend for this to happen agian. I have been a fan of terasology for a long time(although my computer is old and terasology runs at less than 15FPS at best on it) , and Christian9 so far is just dabbling in it for now(he says he will only play it if there are more animals/dinosaurs)
I appreciate that :)

Happy to have more players and content creators as long as we can all get along.
 

Cervator

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I'm highly skilled in the voxel models in blender I'm finishing a high poly voxel tyrannosaurus
That's good. Are you intending for it to be used in Terasology or somewhere else? You might want to check out our art forum and some guides to learn about what we need to have a model work in Terasology, and to get some advice on poly count and art style. Not every model can simply be dropped into the game. @glasz is our most experienced 3D artist and might be able to offer some review and contents if you can make files / screenshots available or have questions.
 

Cervator

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Great. Test it out in-game sometime then if you can get it working and let us see how it looks :)

Just keep in mind the model format and code may vary radically from what you've prepared. If you want to "port" earlier content you've created for something else you might want to first try making something extremely basic from scratch just to get used to Terasology so you could more easily know what needs to be changed.
 

Cervator

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C9 give me another chance! Please!
Not Terasology related. Not the right venue. Take it somewhere else.

You've already threatened somebody, whether in jest or not. Consider this your final and only warning.
 

Cervator

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@Cervator Is there any plans to increase the performance of Terasology for very old computers, like a smaller texture pack? My computer runs Terasology at 15FPS max, that is with several changes to the java command line on Linux, and using the very latest graphics drivers for my computer, which only support opengl 3.0.
I would welcome any advice on how to make Terasology run faster, and how to replace the default texture pack with something different.

P.S. Can I use part of your signature, for my signature.
Signature - feel free.

Performance - we know the game doesn't run very well on old hardware, and it isn't super well optimized anywhere just yet. The good news is that general performance enhancements happen from time to time and help on many different kinds of hardware. The not so good news is that direct efforts to support older hardware, like by splitting apart the renderer to a less fancy option for older PCs along with another part for newer PCs that can handle the heavier effects, are likely to be prioritized so low with our limited time available it seems more likely people will have upgraded their hardware by the time we get to it :(

One possible enhancement is improving the graphic settings as there are several effects active even on the lowest settings that do not have configuration options in the game UI (for instance see #1144). When those are added (or possibly you can tweak at config.cfg directly) it may be easier to get a balanced setup that'll work better on your system.

Consider it an off topic post, after this is the general and off topic forum
Off topic - yes. Soap opera rolling in from a completely different part of the internet - no. If you want to talk to @Christian9 about personal topics between the two of you then use a private convo, not a forum thread. And respect somebody's choice in whether or not they'll respond to you. And no matter what be respectful and do not threaten people.
 

Cervator

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Is there any way I can contribute to Terasology, I might be able to help with performance optimization.
Quite possibly, yes :)

It depends on your current skill set and time availability.
  • The real deep performance enhancements in our rendering system take a lot of 3d programming knowledge (OpenGL / LWJGL) so relatively few can help there.
  • Profiling Java (running the game with a profiler tool enabled) to find spots of the code where execution ends up spending way too much time, like a poorly written loop, is another option that takes some familiarity with profiling tools.
  • Issue 1144 I linked above takes some minimal familiarity with UI config and a bit of detective work to find the existing code that connects game settings with UI and replicating it for any remaining settings we don't have exposed
  • Content review for various modules, world generators, etc that cause the game to run slowly (like the Throughout The Ages world generator) take a varying amount of skill and effort. I don't know how easily that would be to jump into.
  • Coming up with new approaches to render distant parts of the world (summarizing faraway chunks so we only render a small approximate representation for instance) can also help a lot, but likewise take a lot of skill.
How is your current familiarity with Java, profiling tools, optimization, etc?

The easiest would be simply looking at our current rendering related configuration and trying to expose more options to change settings. @manu3d might be able to point out a setting or two we are missing that could help speed up the game on weaker hardware.
 

Cervator

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I have dabbled in java code for Android, so I probably could learn to code for Terasology. I have used Valgrind for C code. I know about optimizing C, and X86 assembly, buffers and things. But I have little to no experiance with 3D programmang, OpenGL and things.
That's still a pretty good foundation to build on :)

We eventually hope to get Terasology on Android. We adopted a separate project a while back, a space arcade shooter called Destination Sol, which is written in LibGDX (uses LWJGL behind the scenes as we do) and available on both Steam and Android. That's another small project to consider - it is 2D and easy!

You could grab YourKit and try to see if you can get it working. A few here have played with it and spotted parts of the code taking way too many processing cycles (doesn't have to be rendering related), then spotted some easy optimizations. We have a freebie license for contributors to use.
 

Cervator

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I could try that, thanks for the suggestions. I am also trying to increase my knowledge of java, for non-Android platforms as well, my Android java experience was mainly just simple apps(creating intents, UI stuff like buttons). Also I would like to learn more about OpenGL, so this would be the perfect opportunity to learn.

Oh, if Terasology is written in Java, and LWJGL works on Android, then could it easily be made to work on Android? The next version of Android(7.0 due late 2016) is supposed to start switching to openjdk based code.
Interesting note about Android 7 and OpenJDK, first I've heard of it but then I don't keep up much.

LibGDX pretty much already is LWJGL applied to Android, that was one of the early goals and IIRC then it sort of branched out from there with all kinds of other utilities and side libraries like physics and AI. So we'd likely just switch from being based directly on LWJGL to being based on LibGDX based on LWJGL :)

At this point I'm not sure what would be the biggest challenge. Some of our libraries may not work out of the box on the sort of limited Java available on Android. So if v7 moves to be more like OpenJDK maybe that'll help a lot!

@manu3d is also using Terasology to help learn OpenGL, so you'd be in good company if you want to learn more.

You could check out closed PRs on GitHub by emanuele3d to get a feel for the kind of code he works on and how he's transforming our rendering system over time. He writes a ton of great comments and justification for changes.
 
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