Feature request: no planet animation request

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MatGB
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Feature request: no planet animation request

#1 Post by MatGB »

In Options, we can have either sidepanels with fully animated planets, or no planets at all.

I hate playing no planets, as I don't get the immediate visual queue the artwork gives, however in my current game I was suffering from lag, turning them off does, visibly, improve graphics performance especially the opening and closing of systems. The animations were visibly jumpy when I decided to do this.

But playing is really annoying as the immediate visual queues I'm used to are completely gone. Would it be possible to have a thrid option, where a single frame is loaded and displayed unanimated? I would hope this would improve performance enough for those of us on not-as-good systems while retaining the visual element that in part makes the game appealing in the first place.
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Any code or patches in anything posted here is released under the CC and GPL licences in use for the FO project.

Chriss
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Re: Feature request: no planet animation request

#2 Post by Chriss »

I'd like to second that. I've got laggy performance in later games as well when opening system views, production and such. If this helps a bit, I am all for it.

It's also why I like all those "improve performance" patches and works that have been going on. Thank you guys. :)
Attached patches are released under GPL 2.0 or later.

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adrian_broher
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Re: Feature request: no planet animation request

#3 Post by adrian_broher »

MatGB wrote:Would it be possible to have a thrid option, where a single frame is loaded and displayed unanimated?
There are no such things as 'frames' here. The planets are textured and animated spheres, that are rendered on the fly. It wouldn't make a difference if the sphere would be animated or not. The gpu still had to render the polygons.
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Attached patches are released under GPL 2.0 or later.
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vincele
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Re: Feature request: no planet animation request

#4 Post by vincele »

I think the idea was : render one first frame and always use that static graphic, instead of rendering frames in real time... That ought to use less C/GPU.
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MatGB
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Re: Feature request: no planet animation request

#5 Post by MatGB »

Not even render one frame, rather than taking a flat image and wrapping it to make it look spherical, just use a flat picture of each of the planet types, no effects, no extra overlays, just a plain picture.

From observation, without understanding the underlying code, this should make the sidepanel a lot less resource intensive for low powered devices while retaining the minimal graphical interface that gives the game feel and character.

(as it happens, I'm looking to upgrade and get a new system relatively soon, so for me it'll be a lot less of a problem, as dedicated decent graphics card'll be a priority, but I still think it would be good to make the game at least usably good on lower spec machines, etc—it's a really good game to fill time in when, for example, travelling)
Mat Bowles

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adrian_broher
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Re: Feature request: no planet animation request

#6 Post by adrian_broher »

MatGB wrote:Not even render one frame, rather than taking a flat image and wrapping it to make it look spherical, just use a flat picture of each of the planet types, no effects, no extra overlays, just a plain picture.
You're suggesting exactly the same as vincele unless you know a way to displaying something spherical without using a sphere.
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Attached patches are released under GPL 2.0 or later.
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MatGB
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Re: Feature request: no planet animation request

#7 Post by MatGB »

Currently, there is flat artwork that's curved to appear spherical by the rendering engine. Vincele said render one of those frames and leave it, but that still requires calling up the larger, flat art and doing processing to make it look spherical.

I'm proposing a flat picture of a planet, could even take said pictures from within the game, so there's no processing of the art to make it look spherical, just take a picture of a pre-existing spherical-appearance object.
Mat Bowles

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adrian_broher
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Re: Feature request: no planet animation request

#8 Post by adrian_broher »

Why should we include unnecessary assets which need to maintained if the same can be achieved by creating the image on the fly for some broken platforms and without knowing if the performance couldn't be improved by not using GLU apis but a vertex buffers making this whole discussion superfluous?
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vincele
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Re: Feature request: no planet animation request

#9 Post by vincele »

adrian_broher wrote:Why should we include unnecessary assets which need to maintained if the same can be achieved by creating the image on the fly for some broken platforms and without knowing if the performance couldn't be improved by not using GLU apis but a vertex buffers making this whole discussion superfluous?
Yeah that could even be done at load time, and then only require minimal CPU afterward for displaying a GG::StaticGraphic...
All the patches I'll provide for freeorion will be released under the GPL v2 or later license.
Let's unleash the dyson forest powa!

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