I has been playing POTC Online, the Disney’s MMORPG made with Panda3D, this game is amazing and will be atractive to people to try Panda engine…
But I wonder, why the programmers did not made smooth meshes (at least for players), so that can as well make a very good looking game (more than is it), just used solid ones, i’m not saying that is not well, but smooth of course you know difference…
The game runs very well, yet sometimes lags and gets slow (but this maybe cause of network lag,(because i can imagine that they implemented psyco to do the game). I think “mist” can increase the speed while drawing less things in screen at well the far things aren’t visible so, aren’t rendered…
In what year this game was written,?,
P.D. Particle Fire and smoke are wonderfull.
One of the difficult things to balance in an MMO is maintaining a reasonable scene complexity in the face of users coming and going at random, adding their vertices or taking them away; also running well on a wide variety of user hardware of greatly varying capability. Adding more vertices to the players to make them smoother looking could increase the “lag” in the game when many players gather onscreen together.
Still, you may be looking at the lowest level of detail. You can increase the level of detail in-game by fiddling with the game options settings, if you prefer to see better-looking characters, and you know your hardware can handle it (or if you don’t mind the additional lag you experience due to this).
psyco has nothing to do with this. Increasing fog and pulling in the far plane is a trick that many games use, and POTC does also to a certain extent; but it can also be frustrating if you can’t see more than 20 feet in front of your face.
My PC is not a very strong computer and i can play very well this game, but did you notice the difference inside house and outside…
Looks like there are shadders, dynamic lights, and smooth sprites, and that is not all !, game is very fast… i think at least run to 70 fps… very smooth speed… that is very nice, but i think that is due to the inside house’s scene, less elements…
You probably are right with the fog, but some games looks really better with it, have you played silent hill?.
Psyco should accelerate python code, (if Pirates was made with python of course), psyco must accelerate the load or the game?, i’m not clear in that…
I’m playing with defaults (medium) detail, … high details runs very well too, but when many players are in screen, get a bit slow, but i supposed that is a network lag not the game… is really hard to try sync with all players…
Anyway, i thing this is the first Mmorpg I try, and really like it too much, however, its serves me to know more about big Panda habilities… !
i never played POTC online since its hard to download it with a linux-based browser (hint at disney).
but if you’r inside a house with no windows and door closed you can just remove the world around it. which takes a lot of load off your computer thus it runs fairly well even with better visuals.
psyco !can! accelerate python code. it does a farily well job especially on long algorithms with long loops.
Panda itself is written in c++, python just controlls that code. it barely does math-heavy calculations. so in panda’s case psyco wouldnt speed up that much since there is not much to speed up. most of the time of a panda application is usualy spend with rendering the actual image, doing physics or collisions.
Probably when you’re in the house the rest of the world is hidden (I’m assuming using portals or some light form of occlusion culling)
It makes sense that the game becomes slow when a lot of players are online. All MMO’s suffer from this on a certain scale. The bottleneck is either the GPU that can’t render so much at once, or the CPU not being able to animate so many avatars based on the data from the server - the only real solution is just to switch to lower settings when you’re planning to go into an area with much players. It would be weird if the game would adjust the settings by itself.
As ThomasEgi pointed out, I doubt they are really using Psyco since all the speed-critical parts are in the Panda3D engine itself (which is C++.)
(also see this thread.)
Unfortunately I never had the chance to get Pirates running through wine, I only got halfway through and gave up at the point where I got some weird crashes in libpandagl.
(Hint hint? )
Its all clear now, so is good that this does not require to use psyco, and you’re right in that you mention that much players = much lag.
And yes!!, i noticed that, inside the house, world outside is lightblue, … that scene is only a house… but!!, is too much to make a game with so many details…without a fog, this game was an exception, distance clipping maybe adjusted for large amount of objects games…
hahh , you two are linux’s users, just want to install x64 ubuntu 8.10, but i didn’t because pirates’s compatibility (and only for that)… maybe with cedega may run…
Before i was installed Ubuntu 8.10 and virtualbox, but i’m not sure if virtualmachines can handled accelerated video drivers, since nvidia and ati does not release de source code of them to windows port… But is a nice idea to try it…
I’m going to download Ubuntu 9.04 (tomorrow will be downloable)… and going to try.
@digimikeh :latest virtualbox veresions have accelerated openGL support. it should work as long as your driver supports opengl (my guess since i doubt the drivers have special virtualbox additions).
btw… ati (now amd) has open source drivers and its constantly releasing new documentation including the full chip register specifications which makes open source driver development a lot easier. it’s already outperforming the closed source ati driver when it comes to 2D, but still lacks behind in 3D. it’s getting more and more useable,thought.
@croxis: installing windows in a VM defeats the purpose of not installing windows since you still need a valid windows license.
If you got a dual processor try qemu - I made win2k virtual with great performances and stability
ah that’s interesting - I would be very keen to know how it goes 'cos I pretty much jumped the 8.10 (I’m actually stick on 8.04) release because of many issues and disappointment
Yes, i’m going to download today and install, and let here the results, using ubuntu 9 in general and with panda.
I had been noticed about qemu, i can imagine is for linux too, so is gpl soft… thnks for the tip… I have an INTEL Dual Core 1.8 Processor, think this is 64 bits, i hope AMD64 Ubuntu is compatible…
I was in doubt and checked out: 't was KVM - it fall back to qemu if your cpu isn’t suitable for real hardware emu but if it is so that’s another story - I’d problems with qemu - KVM is the ticket
Since when was this thread about not installing windows? I simply pointed out one way to get POTC working in linux (as it looks like wine is unable to run it at all)
Croxis, i think he does not understood your “pirates in opengl” word you mentioned first, you were talking about Pirates of the Caribbean, and he may be thinking about “pirate copy of Windows”… i guess…
If i get run potc in linux i will notify it in this thread…
i got your ideas of opengl quite well. the thing is. potc does not run under wine so far, and there is no official linux-build either.
you can have opengl-acc 3d in a vm with windows-guest on a linux host. but installing windows as guest os and running it is about the same as running it under windows. it still doesnt work under linux.
if you manage to run potc under linux i’d love to give it a try,too.
hoo… I installed Ubuntu i32, 9.04, is a bit slow running 3D applications, Blender is slow, Panda too… i think wait updates.
Seems to be that ubuntu 9.04 is using even more python… yet the console… you write a wrong command and console alerts you like python error…
Pirates of the caribbean gets fine into welcome, but at moment initializing username and password, wine tells that there is a internet connection issue…
Download the phase multifiles manually (check wine debug console to get the urls), rename them into phase_x.mf.bz2 and put them in the Pirates directory to get past that issue.
I think it has something to do with ssl not working correctly in wine or so.
I got a issue, like a SO this run very well, as XP, but 3D acceleration is some slow, and I have installed last drivers 180, blender, panda run slow, what are your computer’s specifications?
I don’t have the 180 drivers. They are crashy and unstable for me - I have 177.
Dell XPS Laptop intel x86_64, dual core 2.5 GHz, 4GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 8600M. 256MB.
Yeah, I normally disable compiz when I do 3d stuff - things is a lot faster without compiz.
(hint at disney).
)
, sad to disable it…