[BETA RELEASED] Necro Mutex playtesters? Especially Oculus users.

[al2950]

I thought as much. I have 2 machines that I can use steam on, its just at work I have access a larger selection of hardware. But happy to test on that limited selection above if you want

[mkultra333]

Okay, cool! I've sent you the key. Thanks.

[Zonder]

Had a quick bash on it all installed and is stable.

You any guidance and what feedback your wanting at the moment? things you know about. Infact do you have an issue tracker?

[mkultra333]

Erm... no, no issue tracker. Guess I should set one up. In the meantime, just tell me any problems here.

Also interested in general impressions. I've been working on it so long it's hard to have any perspective. I'm guessing it probably seems a bit weird, I know it has some rough edges. None the less, I'm very interested in feedback.

[mkultra333]

I know feedback is a tricky thing.

It's not the kind of game that's going to be every shooter-player's idea of a good time. It's aimed at being a kind of overwhelming FPS hell that constantly forces the player to react in the moment to a chaotic onslaught, and has a semi-perma-death system that prevents the player from being able to replay maps if they fail (at least, until a late game skill makes replay possible.)

It's also designed to eventually become impossible, and the player sees how far they can push themselves into its inexorably increasing difficulty.

I've gotten some feedback already on another forum. Some people are "meh," some say they wouldn't like it as a normal PC game but would play it as a VR game. Others are quite enthusiastic about the whole concept. I don't mind, however people react is fine. I expect it to have a bit of niche audience and not appeal to everyone.

[Zonder]

Couple of things:

- Getting this in the log "15:04:07: Can't assign material textures/metaltech/nomaterial to SubEntity of KinBoxEnt17 because this Material does not exist. Have you forgotten to define it in a .material script?"

- Hitting print screen caused it to close. (why I was in the log but nothing mentioned in there)

- Reason I was hitting print screen I got a part of the map (no enemy was around) which was just white wasn't sure if it was correct or not but it didn't look right lighting artefact I am presuming.

- Hitting ESC closes the game was expecting a menu

[Zonder]

- I think the most obvious thing I am noticing is the load speed as the maps are small and fast I am finding I'm spending more time waiting to get between screens than actually playing. The worst is after completing a level when the game hangs before going back to the menus.

- Should you be able to collect items? Just had some and moving over them just didn't do anything.

[Somtin]

I launched the game in full screen mode, but it launched it in my secondary monitor which isn't 1080. I then tried launching in windowed mode, and going to full screen by pressing alt enter with the window on my main monitor. That worked, but it didn't look like 1080 which was the resolution i had selected and the mouse was confined to a small area of the game screen.

Download and install otherwise worked fine.

[Zonder]

I'm dual screen as well went to primary monitor which so happens to be the correct one as most games only go primary

[mkultra333]

Couple of things:
- Getting this in the log "15:04:07: Can't assign material textures/metaltech/nomaterial to SubEntity of KinBoxEnt17 because this Material does not exist. Have you forgotten to define it in a .material script?"

Log fills with a bunch of those but they don't usually matter, just happens during map construction. However I'll have to check if you got some strange white area.

- Hitting print screen caused it to close. (why I was in the log but nothing mentioned in there)
- Reason I was hitting print screen I got a part of the map (no enemy was around) which was just white wasn't sure if it was correct or not but it didn't look right lighting artefact I am presuming.

Ah, I think I did something weird with print screen ages ago and forgot about it. I'll look into it. I have an option for printing out multiple debug screen too which I'll see about re-enabling.

That white area sounds problematic.
Was it a white square/rectangle on the floor or wall? Could be something wrong with the kinbox (kinematic box) material. Were other "pop open" boxes on the floor okay? Were the glass areas okay?

- Hitting ESC closes the game was expecting a menu

Hmm, that's wrong. Should go to a menu. I have Ctrl+Esc close the game but I meant to remove that.

- I think the most obvious thing I am noticing is the load speed as the maps are small and fast I am finding I'm spending more time waiting to get between screens than actually playing. The worst is after completing a level when the game hangs before going back to the menus.

Yeah, I'm unhappy with the load speeds. I spent a week trying to fix it with multi-threading but introduced an intermittent bug that I couldn't find and forced me to revert. Fortunately the maps get larger fairly quickly and so the load time relative to play time is not as bad. Early maps are ridiculously small and easy.

I'll go back and see if I can get any of that multithreaded code added back without problem. Come to think of it, maybe I can pre-generate some stuff instead of constructing it all at run time. Just a big job when there are 10,000 maps. Pre-generated stuff also has an impact on the size of the game download, so I'll have to see how that pans out.

The lag at the end I might be able to get rid of. At some point I had a problem with some textures getting lost, so at the end of each map I reload all the textures. If I can find some way to iterate all the textures and check if they are okay or not I could skip a lot of that and just reload those that were lost. It's also possible the missing texture problem isn't even an issue anymore, since that was many versions of ogre ago. I'll remove that reload and see how things go.

- Should you be able to collect items? Just had some and moving over them just didn't do anything.

You can only collect them if you can use them. Early on, most are ammo for guns you don't have, so you can't collect them.

[mkultra333]

I launched the game in full screen mode, but it launched it in my secondary monitor which isn't 1080. I then tried launching in windowed mode, and going to full screen by pressing alt enter with the window on my main monitor. That worked, but it didn't look like 1080 which was the resolution i had selected and the mouse was confined to a small area of the game screen.

Download and install otherwise worked fine.

Damn. I don't have a dual monitor setup so I don't know much about that. I'll have to look around and see if I can find any info about controlling what monitor the game launches in.

[Somtin]

Got around to looking my log file, and saw this:

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20:46:23: -------------------------
20:46:23: D3D11: Subsystem Initialising
20:46:23: D3D11: Driver Detection Starts
20:46:23: D3D11: "NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970"
20:46:23: D3D11: "Intel(R) HD Graphics 4600"
20:46:23: D3D11: "Microsoft Basic Render Driver (software)"
20:46:23: D3D11: Driver Detection Ends
20:46:23: D3D11: Requested "(default)", selected "NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970"
20:46:23: D3D11RenderSystem::_createRenderWindow "Video Start", 1920x1080 windowed  miscParams: FSAA=1 FSAAHint= colourDepth=16 gamma=false useNVPerfHUD=false vsync=false vsyncInterval=1 
20:46:23: D3D11: Created D3D11 Rendering Window 'Video Start' : 1424x821, 16bpp

That last line seems suspicious.. I can PM you the entire log if you wish.

[mkultra333]

Yeah, that definitely looks dodgy. PM the log, thanks.

One thing I was wondering, probably won't help, but on the bottom of the start dialog where it says "Technical rendering system options", is there anything in there related to either rendering device or whatever that might help? Especially since the log is mentioning "Intel(R) HD Graphics 4600". Just want to make sure it's using the correct card.

Edit: Wait, it says "Requested "(default)", selected "NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970" so that probably isn't it.

[Zonder]

You have a detail level clash at the moment in a couple of places.

- Cube map this has too little detail. I'd suggest trying to double it. Is this static?
- Outside space scene in level this also is too low detail which clashes with the environment. Maybe have a look at https://github.com/petrocket/spacescape (MIT)
- End of level text think it says "Sector Complete" could do with ensuring its not pixelated should be crisp to the resolution your in this goes for any text tbh but thats the obvious one.

[Somtin]

Sent, though it's sitting in my outbox for some reason? Not sure what's up with that.

[mkultra333]

You have a detail level clash at the moment in a couple of places.

- Cube map this has too little detail. I'd suggest trying to double it. Is this static?
- Outside space scene in level this also is too low detail which clashes with the environment. Maybe have a look at https://github.com/petrocket/spacescape (MIT)
- End of level text think it says "Sector Complete" could do with ensuring its not pixelated should be crisp to the resolution your in this goes for any text tbh but thats the obvious one.

The general surface areas vary in their polish, and surfaces with lower polish use lower mipmap levels of the cubemap. It's a technique to make metal surfaces not all look like perfect mirrors. I found the visuals looks too busy if all the reflections were super sharp.



The cubemap is static but it's mixed with realtime Screen Space Reflections.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

To get the best speed possible the star field is part of the same mesh/texture that the player, the guns, the items and the doors/lifts are made from. One batch = faster rendering, which is the overriding issue for compatibility with VR. So the resolution of the stars is related to how much spare space on the texture I have. (In fact, almost everything rendered, player, world, monsters, is all on one big 16384x16384 texture.)

However I still have a bit of room left on that texture, I might be able to up the resolution of the stars a little. I'll see.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Yeah, I agree, the "Sector completed" bit should be sharper. I render text using sprites so I'm stuck for resolution, but I'll make the text smaller, that way it won't look so stretched out.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

I was wondering, when you press escape, does the game end cleanly or is it a crash? Does the log show a proper shutdown procedure? The bottom of the log should look something like this:

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17:08:00: Main loop quit (Default)
17:08:00: Shutdown OGRE...
17:08:00: Start unloading map.
17:08:00: Physics thread ended.
17:08:00: MetaballMesh thread ended.
17:08:00: Metaball thread ended.
17:08:00: BoneMatrix thread ended.
17:08:00: Path thread ended.
17:08:00: Clearing resource group QuickResource
17:08:00: Finished clearing resource group QuickResource
17:08:00: BulletRigidBodyCount 0
17:08:00: Destroying resource group GuiResource_Gui
17:08:00: Unloading resource group GuiResource_Gui
17:08:00: Finished unloading resource group GuiResource_Gui
17:08:00: Destroying resource group GuiResource_MenuLrg
17:08:00: Unloading resource group GuiResource_MenuLrg
17:08:00: Finished unloading resource group GuiResource_MenuLrg

[mkultra333]

I've uploaded a new version. It'll say "beta 1.3" in the screen corner.

-"Print Screen" key now works properly. Also, if you hold down shift+ctrl+PrintScreen, it'll spit out a bunch of debug images. This takes 30 seconds or so, since it's spitting out about 25 png images.

- Got rid of reloading all textures at the map end. This is a test, the question is whether this leads to losing textures at a later stage, which was an old bug. Texture reloading can be forced by pressing shift+ctrl+WeaponSwitch while in a sector. (WeaponSwitch by default is the "Q" key.)

This at least allows for screen shots now, and no lag at the end of a map.

I'm still working on other stuff, see if I can improve the load speed a bit. Pre generating the mesh for the map won't work, I did a test and it'd turn the 10 gig download into a 250 gig download. But I'm looking at some other things I might be able to do to at least trim a bit off the load time.

Note that the first load is always a little longer than subsequent loads due to some one-time setup. Not a huge difference, 5 seconds or so.

[mkultra333]

Maybe have a look at https://github.com/petrocket/spacescape (MIT)

Come to think of it, maybe I can use that. I'll look into it, thanks.

Regarding the reflections/cubemap, I might do an experiment where I don't go as low in the mipmaps. That's a tricky one, because it's sort of a question of preference/taste, and I've already spent a long time fine tuning the metals to look how I want. But I'll do a test and see what I think.

[Zonder]

I just checked the ESC key and it does indeed bring up a menu as expected so last time must have been a crash.

I did receive a crash after I completed the level though (possibly not related)

18:19:46: OGRE EXCEPTION(-2005270523:RenderingAPIException): Failed to create sampler state
Error Description:infoQ exceptions are turned off in D3D11RenderSystem::_render at C:\Ogre\Ogre_1_10\RenderSystems\Direct3D11\src\OgreD3D11RenderSystem.cpp (line 2485)

With the CUBE map I completely get what your doing. I think what prompted me to say most was the narrow corridors it makes the mipmap very prominent unfortunately.

Didn't get prompted to update the game so not tried print screen yet.

[mkultra333]

I find steam can be pretty slack about updating the game unless you change the game's steam settings. If you want it to update faster you can do the following.

Right click on it in your library and select "Properties." Then in the "Properties" dialog go to the "Update" tab and set "Automatic Updates" to "High Priority - Always auto-update this game before others."

I find that usually gets it to update fairly quickly. The bulk of the 10 gig download is the maps, which I'm not changing, so it's usually just a few megabytes of downloading.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm going to have some more updates soon, doing a new star field at the moment. Also going to add a new config to make working out the problems a bit easier.

[mkultra333]

Uploaded beta 1.4

- Increased resolution and detail in star field.
- Reflection cube map doesn't go as low in the mipmaps. This is okay because it matches the detail of the screen space reflections better.
- VR_0_Standing_Fastest texture filter changed from linear to anistropic.
- New config, DEBUG.cfg.

The DEBUG.cfg is to make debugging easier. It turns on extra debug info that gets saved to Logfile_Debug_0.log and Logfile_Debug_1.log.

It has the following keys.

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e_debugtrack 1				// debug info 0=off 1=low 2=medium 3=high
e_shadermicrocode 2			// 0 = compile shaders from files. 1 = generate and save microcode. 2 = load microcode.  2 is normal, 0 and 1 are for development.
r_lotex 0				// replace some textures with low resolution versions.

Only e_debugtrack is different from DEFAULT.cfg, but the config can potentially be modified to change the other two keys as well.

e_debugtrack turns on the extra debug info.

e_shadermicrocode controls whether the game loads shader microcode or compiles them at level load. Compiling makes level loads a lot slower, but might help track down shader related problems.

r_lotex controls whether the high resolution or low resolution textures are used. Setting it to 1 so that lo res gets used might turn up problems related to GPU memory, since the GPU memory needed gets cut by roughly a quarter, at least for the biggest textures.

[mkultra333]

IMPORTANT NOTE FOR VR USERS.

Just did a test of running the game in VR from steam, and notice there's a problem.

If SteamVR is already running, and you launch the game, it will often force the startup dialog to go to VR too and give a warning. When you try and play the game from there, it just seems to exit straight away.

The workaround is as follows.

1. Turn off SteamVR before starting the game.
2. Start the game. Select a windowed mode and a VR config option.
3. When the game launches, it'll pause while it starts up SteamVR.
4. Once SteamVR is running, click in the Necro Mutex window to change the focus.

Things should work fine after that.

The steam methods don't seem very good at handling a game that's playable either normally or VR. They work on the assumption that either the game is strictly VR or it isn't. I'll see what I can do to get around this, got a couple of ideas.

[mkultra333]

VR Users.

The problem seems intermittent. Sometimes the game will run fine even if the VR Theatre starts, other times it won't.

Another thing that seems to work is to right-click on the game and select "Create Desktop Shortcut." You can then use that shortcut to launch the game and it won't get messed up by the desktop theatre stuff if SteamVR is already running.

Edit: Hmm, so now it seems to be working fine, and not launching the dialog in the VR Theatre even when it warns that it will. Beats me. But at least if you do get this problem, there are a few ways around it. Either close SteamVR before launching the game, or create a shortcut and launch from that.

[Zonder]

Uploaded beta 1.4

- Increased resolution and detail in star field.
- Reflection cube map doesn't go as low in the mipmaps. This is okay because it matches the detail of the screen space reflections better.
- VR_0_Standing_Fastest texture filter changed from linear to anistropic.
- New config, DEBUG.cfg.

I'll give it a try later hopefully steam won't mess around updating like last night

[Zonder]

I think steam was patching the game so fast I didn't notice

- Load speed now is perfect instant transitions through the screens only bit you have to wait is loading the level that's expected!
- Print screen worked fine but it probably should save to the pictures folder not game folder (on windows at least)
- Still unsure about the cubemap. I did wonder if you could use 2 both full res and second blurred should have the GPU memory available easy these days for it.
- Stars much better

New things

Did notice the game calls it self "Video Start" on the game window should really change it to "Necro Mutex"
"Q" to swap weapons doesn't appear to work tries to swap but always goes back to the first weapon
Drops do work for health but nothing else might be related why "Q" not working?
Would be good to restrict "E" to only boost health when you are below full (I keep hitting the wrong key haha)