Bad graphics? Or usable ones?

From all I've read, a lot of emphasis is put on sprucing up the graphics. While I agree with a more defined artistic direction, I'm afraid you're forgetting how many Nexuiz players (including me) play with very crappy computers. Up the graphics too high and you lose that playerbase. So I just hope all your "improving" doesn't forget the all the gamers without gamer quality equipment. You guys may have already taken this into consideration but I have seen nothing posted so far on the subject so just a friendly reminder.

P.S. On second thought, this goes for all improvements you do. Not just graphics

Many of the old models were said to have been horribly inefficient, with unreasonably high poly counts for the level of detail they had. It's very possible that new, better looking models could be introduced that would actually be lighter in terms of how much is rendered.

The engine has always had a lot of options to scale down to lower-end machines, though. But, frankly, after a time the devs have to define a cut-off point for how low they want to support. It wouldn't be worth the effort to make sure it runs on ALL hardware if someone comes in saying they want to play it on a Pentium I with 16mb of RAM and no GPU. Not sure how weak your PC is, but I'd imagine if it's relatively recent (<10 years) you'll probably be able to play the game in some capacity.

If you would like to play Nexuiz at a higher FPS, try to install version 2.5 which is the graphic intensity at the best version yet...

another reasonable trick is to use fullscreen with a resolution smaller than your actual screen, i get 4 times the fps this way (1920x1080 screen, 1280x720 res)

another trick for better FPS can be achieved by reducing to the low graphic effect detail, antyaliasing - off, anizotrophy - trilinear and shut down HDR

You can compress the textures on the client side, and maybe someone will make a crap texture pack of low-res textures.

As well, I saw someone around here mention a "Damn Small Xonotic" similar to the Damn Small Nexuiz that there was before, that basically removed everything in the way of graphics, replaced the player models with colored cubes, and just generally made a client that could run on anything you could really imagine trying to run it on without a hitch.

If you find you're unable to play at an enjoyable framerate with the new graphical enhancements, this would be something to look for.

here is damn small nexuiz for notebooks and low-end PC:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dsn/file...p/download

I've already said this elsewhere, but here it goes again: we cannot advance and still keep the same requirements. It's almost impossible. For those who want to play on lower quality graphic cards there are solutions like Damn Samall Nexuiz, texture packs and tweaking to get the framerate you want.

Oblivion pointed out very well that today's games have models with 5000 polys and Nexuiz has models up to 2500 polys. We have to raise the bar if we want quality.

Dark Places aint exactly Cry Engine or Unreal 3.0. Also being able to make highly detailed models at half the polygons found on today's games give the authors serious bragging rights.

As for tips:
KILL the HDR, it doesn't look better than bloom unless you tweak it's advanced settings anyway
anti-aliasing isn't the greatest looking thing if your game is run on your monitor's native resolution
Geometry detail looks almost the same on Good as it does on Insane
If you can live without shadows, you can try playing with 16 bit color

that's all I can think of at the moment

At the first step the face lift ahead consists of two major components:
1) Much higher default texture resolution
2) Remade game models (foremost player models)

1) Can potentially slow the game to a crawl if you do not have enough memory for it, however theres two built in facilities to help with this. One is in the fly texture compression and the other is on the fly texture resolution reduction (gl_picmip). The latter lets you bring the textures down to or lower then Nexuiz default. It will also be faster loading then before since it now allows JPEG decoding directly to a lower resolution (before it had to decode in full resi and then re-sample).

2) May also introduce some additional load; but the aim is to have LOD for all new models. You can with the current LOD implementation force a constantly low LOD level, this should be enough to make it as fast or maybe even faster then Nexuiz was.

So to summary: The requirements for "normals" effects will likely go up a bit. The maximum quality looks will be far better (and slower). The minimal system requirement will be pretty much the same as Nexuiz.

Okay, thanks all! All my questions were answered. Do we lock this now? Not sure what the rule is.

Keep in mind this is just my guess of the performance impact; be it a somewhat educated one. Theres no way to really know until we can test. And no need to lock, perhaps someone else has input of questions on the same subject.

another trick for better FPS can be achieved by reducing to the low graphic effect detail, antyaliasing - off, anizotrophy - trilinear and shut down HDR

Doing that, I still get about 20 fps.

To crank it up to 60, I need to set these too:
r_showsurfaces 3
r_sky 0

another trick for better FPS can be achieved by reducing to the low graphic effect detail, antyaliasing - off, anizotrophy - trilinear and shut down HDR

Doing that, I still get about 20 fps.

To crank it up to 60, I need to set these too:
r_showsurfaces 3
r_sky 0

add these lines to your config.cfg ,save and run nexuiz or xonotic:

set cl_bobcycle 0
set cl_bobmodel 0
set cl_itembobheight 0
set cl_rollangle 0
set v_kicktime 0
set cl_decals 0
set cl_stainmaps 0
set cl_nogibs 1
set cl_noplayershadow 1
set cl_particles_blood 0
set cl_particles_bubbles 0
set cl_particles_bulletimpacts 0
set cl_particles_explosions_bubbles 0
set cl_particles_explosions_shell 0
set cl_particles_explosions_smokes 0
set cl_particles_explosions_sparks 0
set cl_particles_quality 0.5
set cl_particles_rain 0
set cl_particles_size 0.5
set cl_particles_smoke 0
set cl_particles_snow 0
set cl_particles_sparks 0
set gl_picmip 2
set gl_texture_anisotropy 1
set r_detailtextures 0
set r_picmipworld 1
set gl_flashblend 0
set gl_polyblend 0
set r_shadow_bumpscale_basetexture 0
set r_shadow_bumpscale_bumpmap 0
set r_sky 0
set r_water 0
set r_waterscroll 0
set r_waterwarp 0
set r_bloom 0
set r_coronas 0
set r_depthfirst 0
set r_drawfog 0
set r_dynamic 0
set r_glsl_deluxemapping 0
set r_glsl_offsetmapping 0
set r_glsl_offsetmapping_reliefmapping 0
set r_glsl_water 0
set r_hdr 0
set r_lerplightstyles 0
set r_shadow_gloss 0
set r_shadow_glsl_offsetmapping 0
set r_shadow_realtime_dlight 0
set r_shadow_realtime_dlight_shadows 0
set r_shadow_realtime_world 0
set r_shadow_realtime_world_dlightshadows 0
set r_shadow_realtime_world_shadows 0
set r_shadow_usenormalmap 0
set vid_samples 1
set ambient_level 0
set bgmvolume 0
set snd_staticvolume 0

if you have a problem of some maps showing the effects of water write this command through the console:
r_water 1

If they do make a smaller version of xonotic I don't think they should totally copy the name from DSN,
I think they should be clever with the naming.

Ever heard of Damn Small Linux?

If they do make a smaller version of xonotic I don't think they should totally copy the name from DSN, I think they should be clever with the naming.

Ever heard of Damn Small Linux?

Aye, this time it could even be named after Tiny Core Linux. I mean its a really good abbreviation with large friendly and futuristic yet techy letters! Just look at it!

TCX.

See what I mean?

another trick for better FPS can be achieved by reducing to the low graphic effect detail, antyaliasing - off, anizotrophy - trilinear and shut down HDR

Doing that, I still get about 20 fps.

To crank it up to 60, I need to set these too:
r_showsurfaces 3
r_sky 0

add these lines to your config.cfg ,save and run nexuiz or xonotic:

set cl_bobcycle 0
set cl_bobmodel 0
set cl_itembobheight 0
set cl_rollangle 0
set v_kicktime 0
set cl_decals 0
set cl_stainmaps 0
set cl_nogibs 1
set cl_noplayershadow 1
set cl_particles_blood 0
set cl_particles_bubbles 0
set cl_particles_bulletimpacts 0
set cl_particles_explosions_bubbles 0
set cl_particles_explosions_shell 0
set cl_particles_explosions_smokes 0
set cl_particles_explosions_sparks 0
set cl_particles_quality 0.5
set cl_particles_rain 0
set cl_particles_size 0.5
set cl_particles_smoke 0
set cl_particles_snow 0
set cl_particles_sparks 0
set gl_picmip 2
set gl_texture_anisotropy 1
set r_detailtextures 0
set r_picmipworld 1
set gl_flashblend 0
set gl_polyblend 0
set r_shadow_bumpscale_basetexture 0
set r_shadow_bumpscale_bumpmap 0
set r_sky 0
set r_water 0
set r_waterscroll 0
set r_waterwarp 0
set r_bloom 0
set r_coronas 0
set r_depthfirst 0
set r_drawfog 0
set r_dynamic 0
set r_glsl_deluxemapping 0
set r_glsl_offsetmapping 0
set r_glsl_offsetmapping_reliefmapping 0
set r_glsl_water 0
set r_hdr 0
set r_lerplightstyles 0
set r_shadow_gloss 0
set r_shadow_glsl_offsetmapping 0
set r_shadow_realtime_dlight 0
set r_shadow_realtime_dlight_shadows 0
set r_shadow_realtime_world 0
set r_shadow_realtime_world_dlightshadows 0
set r_shadow_realtime_world_shadows 0
set r_shadow_usenormalmap 0
set vid_samples 1
set ambient_level 0
set bgmvolume 0
set snd_staticvolume 0

if you have a problem of some maps showing the effects of water write this command through the console:
r_water 1

Question: in the config.cfg files, they always use "seta" instead of "set". Is there a difference?

Using seta writes the value of the variable to config.cfg after the game closes.

I'm playing on a crappy Laptop too. Intel "Extreme" Graphics Adapter with 32MB VRAM, so I would be really happy about a Low-Res version of the game too, because Nex was one of the only FPS games I could play on it without a fps lower than 20...