Particle Editor demo released

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SomeFusion
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Post by SomeFusion »

Great! I tried to run it on Wine... and guess what? It would work if the mouse movement wasn't messed up :) But it ran constantly with ~137 FPS in the standard view when starting the editor :)
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Post by CrazyEddie »

Sputnick wrote:Is it CEGUI that make the fps drop or the particules ?
It's a bit of both, in any app the more complexity you have the lower the rates are going to be. jwace basically hit the nail on the head though, some of those panels are very complex and cause a large number of quads to get sent through to the CEGui renderer (along with vast numbers of texture swaps) Hopefully some optimisation work for cegui later on will see the extent of any related performance hits reduced.
Sputnick wrote:CE, can you increase the width of the sidebar compared to general width of the slider widget. It is rather hard to pick exactly the sidebar on small sliders.
I'm not sure I fully understand exactly which part you're talking about, so I'll just say... Err, it depends :)

CE.
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Post by mac »

Antiarc wrote:My concern, too, is the mouse input. The demo is running at about 15 FPS constant for me, but the mouse is so slow that's it's almsot unresponsive at times. Are you using unbuffered input?
That is strange... even with 15 FPS (I made up a very expensive effect to simulate this) the mouse is still responding ok. I think we use buffered input, otherwise with under 20 FPS you would have problems when writing text in an editbox... but I have to check.

What kind of hardware do you use that you only have 15 FPS? With my old computer at home (500MHz, Matrox G400) I get 20 FPS when I restrict myself to simple effects.
Ratend3R wrote:Great! I tried to run it on Wine... and guess what? It would work if the mouse movement wasn't messed up :) But it ran constantly with ~137 FPS in the standard view when starting the editor :)
What hardware are you using to get such a good framerate? :)

@jwace81: You are right, the main speed killer is the sheer number of gui controls. You can see the different when changing between the basic parameters and the emitter parameters.

There a a few places where we can optimise a bit more - but without changing the ogre particle system (which is already working quite optimised I think) or CEGUI (which hopefully has a little room for optimsations) we probably can't do much.
Anyway it is helpful for us to hear if somone has problems with the overall speed of the editor and which hardware is used. Maybe it even helps Crazy Eddie to improve the gui. ;)

Cheers,
mac
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Antiarc
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Post by Antiarc »

Geforce 3 Ti 200. I was running fairly complex effects to get 15 FPS.

It does, however, run perfectly in OpenGL. I can do most any effect I want without suffering a hit.
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Post by SpannerMan »

Yeah, I must admit I was surprised to hear that mouse input is proving to be a problem, as I have not experianced it on any of the machines I tested it on. But so many people are reporting it, it is definately something we need to address.

@Antiarc: To be completely honest, a particle editor is a very easy tool to make thanks to the graphics engine. Everything is already there for us, its just a case of sticking some controls on top of it. Not to belittle our work or anything mac :p I am honestly surprised that one hasnt been made before. Anyway, if it does end up that you are making the Chronos plugin for particle effects yourself, it should be relatively straightforward (for you, even more so), and if our code does prove useful at all, then thats even better :)
By the way, we are using a standard EventProcessor, so yeah, its buffered input I believe. Very strange to hear OpenGL runs better for you though?!

@Sputnick: Thanks for your comments, unfortunately Im not really sure what you mean about the slider, could you be more specific?
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Post by jwace81 »

SpannerMan wrote:Very strange to hear OpenGL runs better for you though?!
That is strange. On my system at 1280x1024x32bit full screen I get better performance in DirectX. Just opening up the program to the initial particle system turning up the quota to 10000, and the emission_rate to 2000 DirectX runs smoothly at ~30fps, and OpenGL slows down to ~10fps. In DX at 30fps the cursor is very responsive, and in OpenGL mode, the cursor is unresponsive.

Specs:
AthlonXP 2400
NVidia GeForce 5600FX

J.W.
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Post by neocryptek »

i have similar results as antiarc

ive only ran it in windowed mode...so fullscreen is probably loads faster, but i had to play the lemmings [discussed in irc] too!

opengl gave me 3x+ better frame rates then dx9

athlon xp 2600
geforce 5700 ultra

the major slowdown was when on the tab with the million cegui controls on it, that really impacted the dx9 fps A LOT. opengl only suffered 5-10fps, but the dx9 got chopped to a third, around 10fps, which made the mouse unusable. but switch to another tab and fps shot back up to around 30-40 in dx9. opengl meanwhile stayed around the 100 fps mark

-N30
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Post by Kencho »

Yep, I got the same problem. Please, don't open the emitter tab when a "huge" particle system is active... That KILLS frame rate and makes Jesus cry...
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Post by AssiDragon »

For the sake of record: OpenGL gets like x3 better framerate than DX anytime here. :) (Geforce4GO-420, 56.72 drivers)
Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment.
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Post by pbridger »

Hot damn, very impressive. Downloading now. :)

This wil be so useful for when I need to blow things up etc.
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Sputnick
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sliders

Post by Sputnick »

CrazyEddie wrote:I'm not sure I fully understand exactly which part you're talking about, so I'll just say... Err, it depends
Being now to Ogre, I'm not sure what part is from CEGUI and what part is from the bitmaps that SpannerMan and mac have used.
But anyway I was meaning this. That's the current interace from the demo:

Image

And that's what I meant by a wider slidebar. At least the area for the OnClick event:

Image

I found not very friendly to use such sliders:
Image

Last advice, to orbit the camera, a horzontal slider on the bottom of the screen and a vertical one on the left side is lot more friendly than buttons.
We used this a lot in the past and it appeared to be very effective.

Maybe I'm to much obsessed. :roll:

- Sput
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Re: sliders

Post by CrazyEddie »

Sputnick wrote:I found not very friendly to use such sliders:
Image
Most of the scroller/slider sizes are under application control, so Spanerman & mac could increase the width of some of those if they choose to. The exception to this is scrollers that appear in listboxes and comboboxes; the widths for these are specified in the 'look' module that creates the parent widget (it's still possible to modify the size, but it's not as easy as making an API call).

CE.
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Re: sliders

Post by SpannerMan »

@Sputnick: Ok, I see what you mean now :) Thanks for taking the time to explain this. We will definately look into making our sliders a bit more useable in terms of size for the next demo.
Sputnick wrote: Last advice, to orbit the camera, a horzontal slider on the bottom of the screen and a vertical one on the left side is lot more friendly than buttons.
We used this a lot in the past and it appeared to be very effective.
- Sput
This is a matter of personal preferance; I have seen many different GUI layouts and ways to move cameras about a scene. Like I mentioned in the Readme file, we will be adding key stroke support for the camera, so hopefully the existing GUI and the keyboard input combined will present enough camera control to satisfy the majority of users.
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Post by spookyboo »

@SpannerMan
Nice work. This is what i've searched for
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Sputnick
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orbiting

Post by Sputnick »

SpannerMan wrote:Thanks for taking the time to explain this.
My pleasure :wink:
SpannerMan wrote:This is a matter of personal preferance; I have seen many different GUI layouts and ways to move cameras about a scene.
I agree, but moving a camera and orbiting the camera around an object (which I guess is the purpose of the editor) are two different things. I'll show you an example soon for a tree generator I'm working on.

Nice work anyway. :D

- Sput
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spookyboo
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Post by spookyboo »

I've searched the Internet for some new particle textures, but cannot find that many. Does anybody have a link?
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Post by tenkei »

Hi guys,

Love the demo. Runs great on my Radeon 9600.
My dev team and I really like the interface you used, any chance you'd release the source code so that we can see how you did some of those cool effects?

Cheers...
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Post by Grooves »

Looks awesome!!! :D Great Job!!!
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Post by SpannerMan »

Thanks for your kind words, guys :)
spookyboo wrote:I've searched the Internet for some new particle textures, but cannot find that many. Does anybody have a link?
Apart from what you could find on google, I dont know of any particle-specific resource sites Im afraid. If you have a good image manipulation program (e.g. Photoshop) making these simple textures is very easy, especially with the built in filters, such as lens-flare.
tenkei wrote: My dev team and I really like the interface you used, any chance you'd release the source code so that we can see how you did some of those cool effects?
We will definately be releasing the source code for the entire project, but not yet. We would feel much more comfortable releasing it after the editor is 'complete' (or at least when the majority of the planned functionality is done), and after we have had the chance to clean up the code etc. Sorry. We will most probably be releasing another demo or two before that time arrives.

However, if there is anything specific you would like to know, just ask. Im sure mac and I will be happy to tell you how we have accomplished things in the meantime ;)
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Post by semicolon »

I must say thank you so much for the tools. As an artist, this will help accelerate my work a bunch.

Semicolon
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Psilo
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This is plural awesome

Post by Psilo »

Cheers a lot :D

This is just super for designing particle systems. This alpha release is very good.

I too encountered machine slow-down, when exposed to too many particles when rendering.

Another thing is that it's seems impossible to decrease the quota in particles system parameters, but you can increase.

Anyway, as long as you are aware of these small facts, it is EXTREMELY easy to quickly develop and save a new particle template or script and use it in an OGRE application.

Thanks and BIG s*m*i*l*e :D
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Post by AssiDragon »

Particle FX qoutas aren't that effective in working... Sinbad somewhere mentioned that you cannot decrease them on the fly (have to restart the particle system to take effect)... you're better off controlling the emitter values to cap particle number. I think :?
Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment.
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Post by SpannerMan »

Thanks again for the kind comments :)

Setting the particle system quota problem is an issue that mac and I knew about, but again, we forgot to put it in the Readme...sorry.

Changing the particle quota is a little more involved than the rest of the parameters, because you effectively have to recreate the entire system. Thats because the quota, or max number of particles, is tied into the number of 'billboards' allocated for that specific template upon creation. Something like that anyway :p

It'll be supported by the next demo.
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Post by mac »

In the course of writing the editor we noticed that the chapter about particle scripts in the Ogre manual is out of date. There are some interesting parameters you can access with the editor which aren't mentioned in the manual.

We are willing to compile a patch for the manual. Is anybody already working on this? Should all available affectors be included? Any options from the core team ;) ?

Cheers,
mac (& SpannerMan)
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Post by sinbad »

There have been a few external contributions which may not have gotten a specific mention, so a manual patch is definitely welcome.
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