GoldenEye 007 Nintendo 64 Community, GoldenEye X, Nintendo 64 Games Discussion

[bmw]

Don't worry, I haven't abandoned the train, I just needed to work on something different for a little while, that was getting rather tedious. Besides, all this work will ultimately go into the finished product of the MP pak.

Anyways, on the bottling room, I'm going to actually shrink the entire playing area by lowering the entire ceiling by about 10 percent - I'm gonna lower everything to match the front area and then diagonally raise it only to the blue-lighted room. I also removed the narrow middle-area connector room, effectively somewhat reducing the room's depth. Preliminary testing suggests framerate improvement, I'm hoping the lower ceiling will further that result. These mods should be a sufficient compromise, keeping the overall feel of the level but making it much more playable without lag.

I still have to finish lowering the ceiling and the beams, but you get the idea....



Last edited by bmw on Wed Aug 27, 2008 9:56 am; edited 1 time in total

[SubDrag]

Did you find a good way to lower the ceiling? That sounds pretty tricky. I'm liking how you're reshaping a current level, pretty powerful stuff.

[bmw]

Lowering the ceiling, while somewhat tedious because of the number of triangles composing the beams and the ceiling itself, was quite simple. The only modifications done to any of the triangles were to their y-coordinates.

Here is an "after" picture....



The texture differences on the beams where they come together is not at all visible in-game because of the dark coloring of the beams.

I do have a question though - you see on the right-hand side of pic where at ceiling level, you can see the pipe triangles (which I moved to remove the entire pipe) bleeding through? What would be the process for outright removing a verticie from a .bin file? Would it require modification of the indicie file as well? Because that pipe is made up of a LOT of triangles, and I'm not convinced that simply moving it outside the visible bounds of the level is enough to help framerates - the verticies are still in existence and are still loaded.

[SubDrag]

The best bet is to remove it from the indice file. There's a command 04 in there which sets the vertice offset. Then it draws after that. You'd have to try and remove the draws for the pipes. It's a bit trickier. Or you can keep moving those vertices higher and higher.

[bmw]

I'm a bit intrigued by my final testing results. Removing the center room helped a little bit, though not as much as I had expected.

The significant tile modifications I made (removing the pipes, raising the ceiling, and even bringing in the walls near the bottling tanks and getting rid of 2 portals in the process) helped ZERO. I confirmed through more thorough testing (by firing off a full clip of ammo in 4p mode under identical circumstances and timing how long the clip took to finish) that framerates were for all practical purposes identical. Framerates in 4p mode are still horrendous.

So apparently simply moving triangles out of view isn't enough. I may play around with removing the draws outright, but I don't understand why this room is such a framerate hog, even after significant modification.

I haven't played around with this - but I'm wondering, does the coordinates of the rooms themselves play any role in affecting framerates? The bottling area is a considerable distance from center, with some coordinate values exceeding 10,000. Since I don't know exactly how the level is loaded into memory I didn't know if that would have any impact, like if it would get better if I re-centered the rooms closer to zero.

[SubDrag]

I don't believe the coordinates matter too much, except when relating to fogging. Moving triangles probably doesn't help because I guess the n64 engine still draws them even though they're not visible? It's not supposed to though.

[Wreck]

So long as the data for the pipes exists in the Vertice and Indice files for the room in question, it'll still be loaded in. You'll need to strip it out completely in order for it to make any difference.

This is really interesting. The bottling room must seem a lot smaller without that middle section. I'm curious to see this one in-game.
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