
But I don't remember ever seeing the sun in this game. Was it there in the very first version of the game that was released?
I only know about this one. It gives the warning that it's still beta.The demo I have (on the 1999 CD of PC Zone magazine) is the same as the finished game. There may have been earlier builds of the demo out there but I'm not aware of them.
Just did a bit of flying across The Islands level with God mode cheat and being bombarded by other dragons. Most of the time, the lowest frame-rate was 37, once it momentarily dropped to 30, that was probably external factor though. That's with AiO Patch, Fog Distance set to 200%, all graphical goodies except Lens Flare Effects enabled, 1920x1080 resolution and 4x MSAA anti-aliasing forced via dgVoodoo2. The latter two don't make much difference, max GPU load as reported by GPU-Z was 23%, so very low GPU utilization. Dropping resolution to 640x480 gains some extra frames mostly because of lower field of view rather than having to deal with less pixels. Maximum CPU utilization as reported by Process Hacker was approximately 31%. On my quad core, this means one core fully utilized plus a second core utilized somewhat below 50%. My CPU is AMD Phenom II X4 920 and the GPU is NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti.Even on modern hardware the game runs like a slideshow when increasing draw distance to the maximum and disabling the fog. Guess they didn't know that at the time but the fog seems to have been put there to hide the distant pop-up graphics and increase the framerate. Later versions of the riot engine seem more optimised as TAG does not suffer this problem although it does suffer from distant pop-up mountains and distant objects.
True. From YouTube videos, GTA: San Andreas seemed to have fared better few years later, though obviously still limited by PS2 hardware. GTA was still 2D at the time when Drakan was released.Not the best engine for a flight based game but it was Surreal's first effort at making a game engine from scratch. I also suspect the average PC at release date couldn't play the game as it was originally intended anyway. I remember seeing an article early in D:TAG's development that Surreal had got OOTF (or part of it) running on a PS2 but framerate was poor hence an engine update and the switch to those awful low resolution textures so the game would fit in the PS2's limited RAM.
In all fairness, one of the main reasons for the fog, draw distance, and low flight ceiling, is to conceal how small the levels really are, at least in terms of Arokh's capabilities.Arokhs Twin wrote: Tue Apr 03, 2018 9:49 pm Even on modern hardware the game runs like a slideshow when increasing draw distance to the maximum and disabling the fog. Guess they didn't know that at the time but the fog seems to have been put there to hide the distant pop-up graphics and increase the framerate. Later versions of the riot engine seem more optimised as TAG does not suffer this problem although it does suffer from distant pop-up mountains and distant objects.
Yup, the mix of air and ground action makes this game a gem it is. Also noticed that the multiplayer modding community was mostly focused on designing ground levels.And without all the ground action, it would be quite boring, really. Fly around for a short bit, annihilate some fish in a barrel... lather, rinse, repeat.
I can't confirm as I can't open the files on the Drakan 2 disc but checking around it seems they are a mixture of 64x64 and 32x32 resolution textures. Also the PS2 renders the game at only 640x480 (NTSC) and 720x576 (PAL) interlaced so that's actually only 320 / 360 lines displayed at any one time. It looks better on the emulator upscaled than it does on the native PS2 hardware. Maybe it would look better on a CRT TV but that went to the dump long ago. If using the emulator on a PC I used 1024x768 resolution and played it on a LCD TV. Looks better than the computer monitor.UCyborg wrote: Wed Apr 04, 2018 1:47 am
Any idea what size textures are in Drakan: TAG? Most in Drakan: OOTF are 64x64, the ones for the moon and certain objects are larger. Drivers for Voodoo 2 card have auto-mipmapping option for DIrect3D apps, which make Drakan blurry. Saw that while playing with PCem.
Wait, but wouldn't it then be rendering @ 30/25FPS instead, because of hardware limitations? It is rendering twice as many pixels per frame, after all...Arokhs Twin wrote: With component output which supports progressive scanning the game might render at the full 640x480 / 720x576
Not at all surprising, considering that this was supported by pretty much 100% of TV sets of that time, as opposed to the alternative modes.Arokhs Twin wrote: (...) most games do not support this and run in 4:3 aspect ratio with interlaced scanning.
An interesting observation... albeit not quite what I'd have expected.UCyborg wrote: Also noticed that the multiplayer modding community was mostly focused on designing ground levels.
Clearly, although obviously necessary, it's not a sufficient condition by itself. One needs to look no further than, say, Divinity:DKS, to see why...UCyborg wrote: Yup, the mix of air and ground action makes this game a gem it is.
Interesting, because I tried fooling around with it, and I was able to select textures for the lens flare class just fineUCyborg wrote: Tue Jun 12, 2018 9:19 amThere has to be predefined Lens Flare object in the database. Multiplayer Common has one. Defining your own seems to be impossible as the interface for selecting textures appears to be broken.