My Thoughts on Sauerbraten

by dchauvette on 03/17/2008 20:14, 60 messages, last message: 05/01/2008 10:31, 31421 views, last view: 05/18/2024 17:56

Disclaimer: I appreciate that sauer is open source and I do much appreciate the work that people put into it. This is not a bitchy moan, this is just some constructive criticism.

So, graphically, Sauerbraten looks fantastic. Or at least, with shaders on. Problem is, looking fantastic at 5 frames per second makes gameplay a little difficult. Therein lies my first point: go for some major graphical speedup to make things faster, because at the moment, even using the old fixed-function pipeline, the slowness does my head in on some maps (skycastle jumps to mind, yes, I know it's a complex map). Consider using things like dynamic VBOs, more culling on models, things like that.

Okay, second point is on attention to detail everywhere. Sauer has great graphics, but the sounds seem a little hackish, the physics is simplistic and the music is, if you'll pardon my saying so, apalling. It pains me to say it, because I'd love to think Sauerbraten could take on the big boys FPS-wise, but those really, really need to be cleaned up.

Third point: single player. The AI, while fun for a time, can be downright idiotic - jumping off into space springs to mind, little to no pathfinding, and (one that always confused me) a complete inability to use the springboard thing with which the players get to fly around.

Again, this is just constructive criticism, not a whine - I love sauer, it's good fun to play and of course open source. But it still needs work.

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#1: ..

by SheeEttin on 03/17/2008 20:22

> looking fantastic at 5 frames per second makes gameplay a little difficult

Sounds to me like someone needs to check their drivers...

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#2: ..

by MovingTarget on 03/17/2008 20:27

Well, if you hate the sound, there are a couple packs over at Quadropolis (two of them made by me :D).

Oh, and what the heck are your system specs? I'd really like to know.

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#3: System specs

by dchauvette on 03/17/2008 21:17

G5 tower, twin 1.8, with an NVidia GeForce FX 5200. Should run pretty smoothly with sauer, doesn't.

(Have run it on a massive mac pro system with some hugely long named graphics card, ran like a charm with everything turned up to max; still, it'd be nice to have it running smooth on a low-end system too)

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#4: Re: System specs

by tentus_ on 03/17/2008 21:43, refers to #3

I'm a bit confused. Have you tried to run other games with similar graphics on the same machine? In my (admittedly limited by poorness) experience, you're not going to find many games that look this good and run this fast. There's a physical limit to this kind of thing, you can code and code, but a weak machine still won't be able to chug out a high framerate with all the shaders on. It's just mathematically impossible.

Interesting that you dislike the music: it's grown on me over the years, so I keep it around now, but there's no shortage of alternate tunes to grab. Marc has made a ton of music in the past, and then there's always DCP's soundtrag, PingPong's soundtrack, etc.

I sort of agree with your singleplayer points, but with a slightly different take: it is no fault of Sauer's if the AI does something dumb. With the existence of AIclip, there's no excuse for monsters running off ledges other than the mapper didn't feel like preventing it. But monsters not being able to use jumppads is problematic.

Just out of curiosity, if you got permission from a map author, would you go through it and add in AIclip, to help the cause of smarter monsters?

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#5: Hmmm...

by dchauvette on 03/17/2008 21:56

No, I'd hack the engine to pieces and make AIclip unnecessary. In principle, though, yes.

Unreal Tournament (2004) runs like a charm on my machine, that has graphics as or more complicated than Sauer.

To the music, maybe I just have high standards because I'm a musician and was brought up around music. But I've asked several musical friends who agree that yes, the provided soundtrack to Sauer really is quite crap. Apart from that guitar chord thing at the beginning of 11.ogg, I kinda like that.

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#6: ..

by makkE on 03/17/2008 22:18

Ut 2004 is technically like a q3-aera-engine, only with pretty high resoutions and polygon-counts. Admittedly, it looks really nice, but that´s more due to the fact that epic has a large staff of top-quality artists, rather than engine technology.

You can´t compare ut2004 to Sauerbraten. Rather compare it to id-tech 4. I doubt you can run quake4 any better than Sauerbraten, in fact, it will probably run worse.

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#7: Re: Hmmm...

by SheeEttin on 03/17/2008 22:45, refers to #5

Feel free to update the AI. We've only had the current one since, what, Cube?

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#8: ..

by IllvilJa on 03/18/2008 00:32

Personally, my favourite music for games like this is... silence. And luckily, the options in Sauerbraten allows me to easily select that favourite tune :).

Other than that, I've found the performance of Sauerbraten to range from sizzling fast with all shaders on (on a three year old still pretty high end gaming machine) to unplayable slow (on an approx 7 year laptop with potentially suboptimal Linux graphics setup and on multiplayer map). But in the cases where performance has been abysmal, I've pretty much expected it as the machines had either been generally weak, or they have had a particularly lame graphics card (the way things usually are with old laptops). Then of course, my failure sometimes to properly tune and setup the 3D-acceleration under Linux might be another cause of the poor performance.

I'm preparing the ultimate sadistic experiment, I'm going to install Sauerbraten on a 10 year old laptop (128MB RAM, 2 MB Video, 233MHz PentiumMMX...) and then try to run it without any shaders on. Probably it will almost grind to a halt, but I'll see if I can make it run (crawl? scramble) by reducing as much graphical detail as I can from pretty much anything I can touch... (Map textures, geometries, lightmaps, hudguns, player models). Only issue is that it has taken a few days to get the machine installed (Gentoo is SLOW to install on ancient hardware, even if the wait is worth it... it runs surprisingly fast).

I'll let you know the outcome, who wins the match, if it is Sauerbraten or if it is my old 233 MHz..

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#9: Music

by fdshjkfhsdkconorhfsdjk on 03/18/2008 00:49

I like the music. Great fragging music.

I think the Solaris hudguns and the movingtarget sounds should be in the next release as the default :)

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#10: Re: Hmmm...

by tentus_ on 03/18/2008 03:29, refers to #5

UT2004 is a nice looking game, yes, but at the same time, it can't (and therefore isn't) running the shaders that you're expecting Sauer to run at the same framerate. Take a good long look at Sauer's shaders: if I remember correctly, they have been favorably compared with the newest version of the Unreal engine. And while you're right that UT2004's models are more sophisticated than Sauer's, the actual level geometry and all hit detection that it provides is considerably in Sauer's favor. Far too many Unreal maps have almost no real geometry, but just a massive collection of models arranged in patterns (this is why UT2004 takes up more than a gig on your hard drive, and each level takes so long to load). This is also why UT maps seem to be so heavily clipped: they can't get the 100% accuracy that the octree system provides.

I'm now curious just how you would hack the AI. Would you try to make a waypoint system, like Unreal's? Are you prepared for the limitations it brings to the bots, and the massive amount of additional mapping time (and experience) it entails? Or is there a more elegant solution you'd shoot for?

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#11: Re: Hmmm...

by tentus_ on 03/18/2008 03:36, refers to #10

Note: I'm not trying to shoot you down (though I will correct you if I think you're wrong). I am trying to get people to discuss the shortcomings of the engine, and usually the best way to do so is get people bouncing ideas off each other. I promise I'm really a friendly guy.

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#12: I'm dchauvette! It's true.

by prophile on 03/18/2008 18:19

Spot on, a waypoint system of entities in each map and an element more intelligence to their behaviour (acting more defensively if < a fixed % of health for instance). And some downwards raycasting to stop them jumping into space.

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#13: ..

by James007 on 03/18/2008 20:18

lol, ut2004 does not look better than sauer. Better engine in some ways.... maybe yes, but still. Sauer runs at the same fps on high quality as ut2004 does on my mac and things look a lot prettier in Sauer. Sauer just needs nice animations, better (default)sounds, and some things here and there to spice stuff up(very vague descriptions i know)

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#14: Frame rate and stuff

by rknigh21 on 03/18/2008 23:23

Frame rate - On my quite old hardware (Radeon 9250) Sauer seems to have a comparable frame rate to other games. I tried making the same single player FSP map in Sauer, Retribution and Apocalyx (Three free FPS) and sauer had the best frame rate, and was easiest to map.

Music – I really like it.

AI – is a bit stupid at time, but so is the AI on may other FPSs. AICLIP helps a lot and can give good effects except the monsters tend to end up running on the spot! If you want to hack the FPS AI it's in fpsgame/monster.h.

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#15: ..

by IllvilJa on 03/18/2008 23:28

AI is a blessing and a curse to open source projects. A good AI makes a game very stimulating as a singleplayer game (one example is freeciv) but the work with the AI can also suck up an enormous amount of energy from the developers, potentially causing other parts of the game suffer from too little attention, or even worse, make the entire project die (Xconq seem to have suffered the latter fate).

Speaking of AIs, is there any way to have AIs present in multiplayer online games? Like a coop mode where the players fight together against the monsters?

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#16: Re: ..

by fdshjkfhsdkconorhfsdjk on 03/19/2008 01:11, refers to #15

I would really like the bot feature.

Alls it would be is a like a client playing on the server

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#17: Re: I'm dchauvette! It's true.

by tentus_ on 03/19/2008 04:44, refers to #12

So something like this?
http://www.quadropolis.us/node/124

People (specifically, Rick and also Pushplay to a lesser extent) have implemented systems like that. In each case, setting up waypoints was a chore that I did not enjoy... but perhaps that's just a quirk of mine. I'd be interested to see any developments you make along the same lines for Sauer.

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#18: Thoughts on Bots

by JadeMatrix on 03/19/2008 05:24

We could invent a new material to make a corridor for the ai. The bots aren't allowed to exit from the corridor unless forced, then they just return asap. if they need health/ammo, the engine plots the quickest course from their position to their goal.
Only a little looser than waypoints, the only plus being that it works as waypoints and aiclip at the same time.

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#19: Re: Thoughts on Bots

by tentus_ on 03/19/2008 06:28, refers to #18

Huh, hadn't really thought about doing an inverse. Do you think that (for lack of a better name) AItunnel would also act as an unclipping material, at least for the AIs? I'm thinking about bots moving through a detailed passageway and getting suck on stuff that would ordinarily be noclipped... if the details were noclipped like normal, or it would probably lead to the bots circumnavigating spots with no apparent reason to the player (which could actually be considered a neat little loophole for an ambitious mapper).

The more thought I put into this, the more I agree that the bot AI needs a bit more refinement in terms of what they jump off of, and how they act when severely damaged. These could be good behaviors to set in the spawning entity. Allow mappers to specify, as one of the variables following the type and orientation, whether the monster is cowardly or enraged after receiving sufficient damage. There could be several degrees of each direction, from behavior that leads the monster to flee and hide after taking only some damage, to just strafing more when near death, to monsters that will dramatically increase their rate of fire (at the cost of their accuracy) as they are shot.

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#20: bots

by 2345234523452345 on 03/19/2008 14:14

waypoints? with bots? for sauerbraten?

It's kind of hard not to notice how much people seem to want to go against the grain of the engine with all the feature ideas I've been reading on this forum.

Anyway, if you're really interested in bots with better pathfinding, it'd probably be better to generate a navmesh based on the octree and cubes. I bet if all you did was use empty cubes of at least a certain size, you'd have something that was half decent already.

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