OpenMW 0.46.0

Anything related to PR, release planning and any other non-technical idea how to move the project forward should be discussed here.
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psi29a
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Re: OpenMW 0.46.0

Post by psi29a »

This is an interesting problem then, as it exists across different game engines. We'll note it as a known issue that effects other commercial game engines. Perhaps one day it will be addressed.
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easygamer82
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Re: OpenMW 0.46.0

Post by easygamer82 »

Actually...Mass Effect 1 and 2 used the Unreal Engine. Mass Effect 3 used DICE's Frostbite Engine as an imposition from EA - who had bought Bioware and own DICE.
davidcernat
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Re: OpenMW 0.46.0

Post by davidcernat »

easygamer82 wrote: 29 May 2020, 09:37 Actually...Mass Effect 1 and 2 used the Unreal Engine. Mass Effect 3 used DICE's Frostbite Engine as an imposition from EA - who had bought Bioware and own DICE.
No. You're thinking of Mass Effect: Andromeda.

It's not hard to check what engine Mass Effect 3 uses. You just go to its Wikipedia page and it's right there in the info box:

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johnnyhostile
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Re: OpenMW 0.46.0

Post by johnnyhostile »

Popping my head above ground to say hey everybody, and also to let you know that I'm hard at work. I'm hoping to have another RC cut of the video shortly. 8-)
corristo
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Re: OpenMW 0.46.0

Post by corristo »

halcyon
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Re: OpenMW 0.46.0

Post by halcyon »

I'm glad to see a macOS RC! It worked fine for me during an hour or two of play with a new character.
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lysol
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Re: OpenMW 0.46.0

Post by lysol »

Thank you for testing, halcyon
hokan
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Re: OpenMW 0.46.0

Post by hokan »

Congratulations to a new release. I've tried it out for a few hours. I've mostly been running around and experimenting with shadow settings.

I now have some questions and observations (see bottom for my hardware setup):

* UI text seems a bit blurry at 1920 x 1080 (compared to 0.45). It looks fine at 4K.
* Getting 4K (3840 x 2160) as an option is very convenient, but I noticed that there is not option to change the UI scaling (unless one edits scaling factor in settings.cfg).
* Perhaps it would be appropriate to also have "retina" versions of certain resolutions, e.g. a 1920 x 1080 (retina) one, that runs at 3840 x 2160 and sets scaling factor = 2.0.
* Running at 1920x1080 vs 3840x2160 doesn't seem to affect my fps (with or without shadows), the GPU doesn't seem to be the fps bottleneck.
* The same can be said for Shadow Map Resolution, maxing it out at 4096 doesn't affect fps, but reduces pixelation in the shadows.
* Turning on any shadows tanks fps, going from ~60 fps to ~15-30 in any kind of visually complex location. I've checked locations like Sadrith Mora, Port Telvannis (Tamriell Rebuilt) and Solstheim (Vvardenfell and Solstheim Worldspace Remaster 1.0.2).
* I'm running with a number of mesh replacers (trees, rocks, objects, Telvanni buildings) and some town overhauls, so I suspect that this adds a lot of extra polygons for the shadow calculations to deal with. The countryside and less modded towns only drop from ~60 fps to ~30-60 fps.
* Changing the shadow distance limit (from 8192) to 4096 or 2048 doesn't seem to affect fps.

My setup:

* MacOS Mojave (10.14.6)
* 2018 MacMini, 32GB, SSD, CPU: Core i7 (I7-8700B) 6 cores
* eGPU with Vega64 (8GB)
* 2 x 4K displays, both run at "looks like 1920 x 1080"
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AnyOldName3
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Re: OpenMW 0.46.0

Post by AnyOldName3 »

It's expected that changing the resolution of things (be it the overall resolution or the shadow map resolution) won't have a big impact on performance until you reach the point where it does, but that threshold will be different on different machines. It's also expected that just having shadows on in the first place has a big impact on framerate. You effectively have to render each object an extra time per shadow map, plus you create extra work when doing the final render, too. Shadows are one of the most performance-intensive things you can turn on in most game engines.
hokan
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Re: OpenMW 0.46.0

Post by hokan »

That all makes sense. I was hoping that reducing shadow distance limit would have a notable effect - adjusting this in Fallout 4 had quite an effect on fps (at least on my at the time under-powered CPU).

I was also hoping that only using character shadows would be relatively lightweight, but I'm still seeing large fps drops in places.

I assume that the reducing mesh complexity (triangle count) and number of visible objects (i.e. remove certain overhaul mods and/or reducing view distance) are the only real options.

Are there any other shadow options beyond these (set in settings.cfg) ?

* actor shadows
* enable shadows
* object shadows
* player shadows
* terrain shadows
* maximum shadow map distance
* enable indoor shadows
* shadow map resolution

After some additional experimentation it seems that all but "object shadows = true" has low fps impact (when standing ontop of a hut in Hla Oad) the original/modded trees cause quite a bit of fps drop ~60 -> ~30, while other locations like Balmora seem to do decently with "object shadows = true" (fps ~60 -> ~45). Then there are other odd locations like the watching the fort Ammar (looking NW) from the coast (in Tamriel Rebuilt) where any shadow setting set to true causes fps ~60 -> ~15 drops - this is odd as the terrain doesn't look that complicated and one is mostly looking out over water.
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