Road to Fiddler's Green ... Day of the Dead...

[MinionZombie]

Day of the Dead meets RTFG Was playing this mod map from undeadgames.com earlier today and decided to grab my cheap-as-chips digital camera to film video of when a new wave of zombies spawn in one of the locations in the Day of the Dead map, no sound sadly, but the siren from the film when the lift moves is in there as well as music from the film. Enjoy.

[losherman]

sweet, do you get other weapons?

[Andy]

if only they had been able to kill them that easilly in day

[MinionZombie]

Yeh there's a bunch of weapons, loads of things like an axe, shovel, pipe - on the Shaun of the Dead "Winchester Pub" map you get a pool cue and a cricket bat. Guns in the game range from revolver - complete with manual cocking for each round, a .22 rifle - which is mostly useless in the game, but in mods it's generally been improved (larger capacity and greater damage). There's a Glock, grenades, molotov cocktails...erm...shotgun. Some weapons aren't the greatest to work with (down to Groove Games' execution of the product) - but the mods are improving on the downsides of the game. It's just really awesome to see *that* lift come down with the siren going and a shedload of zombies coming down with it.

[eblade]

wow, that video makes me realise that my 2.0ghz box, although getting anywhere from 15-90fps depending on the level, isn't anywhere near capable of really driving this engine Wish I had something higher powered, so I could develop more.. i'm doing all kinds of neat development on the game, but i am a bit horsepower limited The game runs fine on my box, but that video just seems a lot smoother than my game does :-S

[MinionZombie]

Strange that...cos that camera does video clips at 10 frames per second I think. The level does slow down when the elevator comes down and there's a buttload of zombies on it, after I blow up a few heads it runs sweet as. It's not at all a demanding game - the only problem I've ever had is with mod maps where there are loads of zombies - the Shaun of the Dead map is one which does a lot of that...although *some* maps do go ballistic and runs in short judders of movement ... but that's down the mod itself (whichever one or two they are, I forget, not one of the "big daddies" like that Day map). The Dawn mall map does lag a bit - but only when you're at one end looking all the way down to the other, if you're around midway then it runs fine, only when you're looking really far does it start to lag. The official game relied on a lot of dark shadows, which were kinda just huge grey patches that are impossible to see in/through ... sometimes RTFG is just TOO DAMNED DARK, but most of the mods get the mix right. Oh yeh ... hopefully somebody can figure out how to make the guy be capable of running for longer, he gets tired out too quickly, it's annoying .

[eblade]

got it, but it's not something that can be easily plugged in.. if the original game was too dark, might be time to check the settings on the monitor.. i've got a nearly perfect calibration on mine, and the original settings are fine, but some of the additional levels (like INCompoundX) are impossible to see in :-S

[DjfunkmasterG]

I am using a 7900GT, which is a powerful fricking video card, and even I get lag on LOTD:RTFG on maps with huge Zombie spawn points. However, i think the card is crappy... Because that game is built on the older UNREAL engine and this Video card should have ZERO problems dealing with anything RTFG can throw at it.

[rikimaru]

is this game fun enough to buy? im intrested in it to say the least.

[MinionZombie]

The game itself I played once, it went on a bit long I think. I guess it's worth playing for sure ... but it's the mods that make it worth keeping installed on your computer. Also, I'm working on a better promo video for that Day map - which in turn is a kinda promo video for those guys over at undeadgames.com, was editing some of it last night, shouldn't take much longer to complete and then once it's done I'll host it online and let everyone peep it out.

[eblade]

One of the things that is a problem in the game is that the AI puts a major lag potential. A dedicated server on a nice fast 3.0+Ghz box can deal out at least over 100 zombies in a game at the same time. My 1.6 clocked near to 2.0 can handle about 40 or so, if i'm not playing on the server. With the AI mods I've done, I can hit almost 50 zombies without totally destroying the server. If I'm playing the game, with a dedicated server running, most i can handle simultaneously operating is between 25-35. A lot of the problem I think stems from that the engine parts of the AI are designed for driving things that shoot at you, not things that have to constantly be moving to get on you, and bite you. i think my radeon 9550 and gf6200 can probably come close to driving the engine itself to max, but the AI is just too intensive. The original game never had more than i think 6 zombies in play at any one time, so we're really kinda pushing it into new territory here

[eblade]

DJFunkmasterG: I'd be willing to bet it's not a video issue. I can seriously run the game at 60fps in a lot of places at 1280x1024 on my 2ghz with a GF6200. However, there are some issues that once you get tons of zombies out there, things start to drag, hardcore. First, is the AI. If you are running in standalone/single player, or a server on the same box that you're trying to play from, your effective count of zombies that you can deal with is cut to 1/2 or 1/3rd, maybe even more drastically. Second is the skeletal animations. It takes a ton of video bandwidth to be able to deal with assloads of skeletal animation all happening on screen simultaneously. I've run fairly extensive testing on my box(es), both of which are right around 2.0ghz, one has an ATI 9550 and the one that I play the client with has a GF6200.. Standalone, GF6200: max 30 zombies on screen before it becomes unplayable Dedicated server on same box as client: max 34 zombies on screen before it becomes unplayable Dedicated server running on the OTHER box, and the client running on the box with the GF6200: 70-80 zombies on screen before I ran out of space to deal with them. (i lost count... it was definitely slowing down but it wasn't down to the unplayable level that the others were) Dedicated server running on the GF6200 box, Radeon 9550 running hte client: 70 zombies with virtually no slowdown (the 9550, although slower and older than the 6200 has a much higher memory bandwidth.. the 6200 has a much higher display quality and operates much faster in Doom 3/Quake 4/GTASA, but in LOTD it is virtually the same as the 9550 in standalone and local server modes) I'm now realising I already explained part of this last time I visited, about 4 weeks ago.. oopsie! I have done more extensive testing since then, at least. Anyone but Minion around here play this game? And I haven't seen Minion around lately either

[DjfunkmasterG]

wow, that video makes me realise that my 2.0ghz box, although getting anywhere from 15-90fps depending on the level, isn't anywhere near capable of really driving this engine Wish I had something higher powered, so I could develop more.. i'm doing all kinds of neat development on the game, but i am a bit horsepower limited The game runs fine on my box, but that video just seems a lot smoother than my game does :-S Don't sweat that man... I have an AMD 3700+ Athlon 64, an ASUS Oil cooled Motherboard, and a GeForce FX7900GT video card and the game stutters for me. It is the engine of the came and the amount of spawning corpses. Even with the 7900GT I only get 3-4 frames per second when the elevator comes down,and with this card I can play battlefield on Full Graphics.

[MinionZombie]

Haven't seen me around lately? Are you b-b-bliiiiiiind, lol. I'm here every day. As for RTFG, it's all down to the game's engine I believe, that's causing the lag when you get too many zombies on screen. That'd take some serious knowledge to tweak I would have thought.

[eblade]

dj: is that seat of the pants, or actual fps from using 'stat fps' ? and talking about running it multiplayer or in standalone? i can deal with TrinDay at any point in it's default settings, without going below 10fps, so if you are going below 10 with the server running elsewhere, there's something wrong with that.. if you're running standalone, though, thats different. The combination of running the AI, plus running the animation just kills the CPU. I have improved the AI to some degree for the DeadAwake mod, but I still don't think we'll ever have more than 20 spawned at a time in single player.. unless i come up with some breakthrough in how to deal with figuring out a way to get to the player.. I'd be willing to bet that DeadRising's animation will be awful compared to LOTD.. :-S if they are throwing that many enemies at the card at once, it's going to have to be static stuff rather than true skeletal animation.