In my opinion, I wouldn’t go to any extreme lengths to overclock or over-power your machine. It might allow you to do more, but since the mainstream users’ computers are unlikely to have such crutches, their games will just run slower than yours. You want to have a nice testbed. It’s a lot harder to optimize your game if you have a super-computer (since you’ll only start optimizing way after the point where you need to).
BluePrintRandom does have some good ideas here - beginning by removing the oven and seeing what’s making your game crash is a good idea. Six extra faces shouldn’t be too much for your computer to handle, and Blender should just slow down if it has trouble keeping up, not crash. Is there anything wrong with the actual mesh (the faces) of the oven? Does the console list an error?
I’ve had a similar problems in the past with some of my projects.
I’m going along great and the game runs super fast with everything working as it should, then suddenly after changing one thing it either crashes, or slows to a crawl. At the time I thought that it would be impossible to continue, but after taking a look at what’s going on I finally fixed it and it ran great.
Usually it is one of three problems:
Physics. Sometimes if you have multiple objects with physics enabled trying to occupy the same area, parented to different or the same thing it can cause huge slowdown. I had the problem that i had a collision box around my character, then I accidentally enabled collision for the character’s skin, and armature. Big slowdown.
Adding objects. With the old blender I found a crash sometimes when trying to add too many objects at the same time, or when switching mesh physics bounds. After checking which objects are being added, or which meshes are being swapped, and then experimenting with differnet setting on those objects I fixed the problem.
Graphics bug. If you have a laptop and can’t do glsl, or you have a graphics card that doesn’t like Open GL (and there are a few of them) using 2d filters or complex textures can sometimes cause problems. Try disabling any 2d filters, and running the game in texface mode with drawtype solid (instead of textured). That will tell you if it’s a graphics problem.
Eventually you’ll find that blender can deal with most situations, if you give it some help.
Well it certainly isn’t physics because all the objects are static. I have the newest version of Blender so I don’t think it’s adding objects… I’m sure it’s a graphics bug since my laptop has a very old 128mb Radeon X1400. I don’t have any 2D filters (Don’t even know how to do them) but I will try doing the drawtype solid. I have a theory on why there may be crashes though… Could it have to do with me setting the “Normals” detail to medium instead of low?
Heh glad somebody got it. There is actually a very heavy Who inspired part that I hope to have in the beginning. I just need to figure out how to create a portal type object from one scene to another so that “something” will in fact be bigger on the inside.
Here’s a little more progress on some detail. Thought this up last night and put it in here. Basically, it’s a game of jacks rotating through the air thanks to the turbine in the ceiling. It looks pretty neat in motion.
Alright so I’m trying to figure out how to project a realistic looking puddle onto a textured plane, and I think I’ve got it almost down, but I need some help on an animated distortion for the puddle so that it looks like it’s displacing the texture it’s put on. Is this possible? I would prefer just a displacement over using a normal map since I don’t think it would look right on a small puddle and also it would probably cut down my frame rate by tons… Has anyone else played Bioshock and noticed the distortion they use? Here’s the .blend if you want to look at what I have: https://www.box.com/s/35vpjq6tvrtoqsly8966
Alright figured it out thanks to some help over in the Support forum. It has a reflective image plus an animated water texture for the normals and such. It looks pretty damn awesome if I do say so myself.
hey, it is a nice start.
I did a quick look at your scene.
First of all the 41MB download size is too much for a scene like this. Some people does not bother downloading that much for a blend…
Secondly - you have 8 spot lights casting 2048x2048 or 1024x1024 shadow maps!!! And there is no dynamic objects, so instead just bake all shadows to a texture. Use maximum of 3 dynamic lights per scene and try to use real time shadow maps only in dynamic scenes, they are expensive on certain hardware.
The huge download size is because of the extreme texture sizes, and that is also one of the reasons why the scene runs so slow on your computer.
Here are few tips on texture creation:
texture dimensions should be powers of two like (128x128, 512x1024, etc.)
do not exceed 1024 pixels. except for huge objects or terrains. you can add detail with a detail map later.
for a small objects use 256px maximum. you have 1024x1024px texture for a door knob, unless you want player to count dust particles on it just downscale it to 128x128, you will see that it looks the same.
for the floor you are using a huge 4048x4048px texture of the same pattern repeating multiple times - make a tileable texture of the pattern in 256x256 and scale the UV map to make the pattern repeat.
try to avoid using color texture for bump mapping - it considerably eats performance as it has to calculate normal map from it each frame. Use real normal maps instead.
Ah thanks for the tips! That’s actually a very old version of my game but what you said still counts. I do need to use smaller textures. Also, my .blend is packed with textures that I’m not even using. Is there a way to get rid of those?
Alright I went through and gave some things smaller textures and unpacked all of the unneeded images. The file is still 75.9 mb though. I guess I’ll just have to put into a .rar next time I upload it.
I also put some work into my doors. Some AO, better spec, and a ramp shader on the handle. I think it’s pretty neat.
Okay changed a bunch of things in the kitchen. Removed the sink because it just looked bad and replaced it with a leaking pipe. Also removed the oven because it looked really out of place with the scene. Added a pop-out-of-the-wall table as well. It looks incredibly empty though I think for a kitchen. Any ideas of what else it should have? (Oh I’m also planning on modeling a plate with old food on it to put on the table)
There is actually a very heavy Who inspired part that I hope to have in the beginning. I just need to figure out how to create a portal type object from one scene to another so that “something” will in fact be bigger on the inside.
