[MOD] Lower Poly Asteroids v2.04: Less Fat, More FPS [UPDATED 03.05.07]

[Achatos]

I just tried both download links and got "File not Found on the Server" errors for both.

I'm looking forward to this 'cos my rig really struggles in high asteroid count sectors.

For you too, above solution may be useful.

[halo112358]

Someone need to write a little app that'll pull out the textures (all of them, and replace them with low detailed ones like in gaming days gone by.

I wonder how many fps you could improve it if you get rid of the rubbish eyecandy that 90% of us don't even look at

You could have retro asteroids by just turning off normal and bump mapping, it would look terrible and you would gain _very little_. This is my (cheap & easy) attempt to make the asteroids perform a little better at the cost of a little eye candy - it was a judicious trade

I don't want to be a spoilsport but there has been a script out there for ages that lets you get rid of ALL the small asteroids at once. Or just in the sector of your preference. Wouldn't that be more effective than just getting them out of sight? It certainly improves your FPS, I guarantee (tried it myself).

The point of this mod isn't to get rid of the asteroids, it's to make them more playable for people who want better performance.

Let's just say that there are a lot of little rocks in Seizewell and Ore Belt - if you can reduce the poly count on all of those little 'roids by ~30-50% then you've _drastically_ reduced the number of polygons that you have to draw to the screen - hence better performance and very little sacrifice.

[KanineLupus]

Someone need to write a little app that'll pull out the textures (all of them, and replace them with low detailed ones like in gaming days gone by.

I wonder how many fps you could improve it if you get rid of the rubbish eyecandy that 90% of us don't even look at

Have to concur with Halo on his response. Texturing makes very little difference at all to game performance (although switching off 'post-filtering' in the options menu does make a fair difference when you need it).

Besides, one doesn't buy a high-end sim-style game and then take away half of what goes to creating the environment. As much as many don't notice the specific details of the 'eye-candy' all that often, it would be a rather bland and empty void without them ...it would also take away any sense of authenticity.

[Achatos]

I don't want to be a spoilsport but there has been a script out there for ages that lets you get rid of ALL the small asteroids at once. Or just in the sector of your preference. Wouldn't that be more effective than just getting them out of sight? It certainly improves your FPS, I guarantee (tried it myself).

The point of this mod isn't to get rid of the asteroids, it's to make them more playable for people who want better performance.

Let's just say that there are a lot of little rocks in Seizewell and Ore Belt - if you can reduce the poly count on all of those little 'roids by ~30-50% then you've _drastically_ reduced the number of polygons that you have to draw to the screen - hence better performance and very little sacrifice.

Yeah, so I understood. But do you really want those little rocks in your universe?? Most players find them only annoying. Consuming them by mobile mining takes ages. I mean there are faster ways to make credits!

[halo112358]

Yeah, so I understood. But do you really want those little rocks in your universe?? Most players find them only annoying. Consuming them by mobile mining takes ages. I mean there are faster ways to make credits!

Would I have made a mod that reduces the # of polygons they contain if I wanted to get rid of them?

Yes, that question is rhetorical.

I agree that they can cause problems for people but I think that certain sectors are boring without them. It's better to give people the choice on their own - you like to play the game without little rocks, other people like to keep them.

Now that you mention it, it does take ages to mobile mine them away by yourself - I think it might be time to mod Jobs.txt and script in a few NPC miners

[arcana75]

Bravo! I just got ur mod, with the fewer polys the roids look more chunky and heck they look more like asteroids than the previous render!

Better looks, better framerates? Oh yeah!

[KanineLupus]

Now that you mention it, it does take ages to mobile mine them away by yourself - I think it might be time to mod Jobs.txt and script in a few NPC miners

Now THAT is a good idea!! Let the X-Universe clean up it's own mess for once, lol. Might be a little tricky pulling it off in the Xenon sectors which are roid night-mares though ...I don't see the Xenon taking up mining for extra cash

[halo112358]

Now that you mention it, it does take ages to mobile mine them away by yourself - I think it might be time to mod Jobs.txt and script in a few NPC miners

Now THAT is a good idea!! Let the X-Universe clean up it's own mess for once, lol. Might be a little tricky pulling it off in the Xenon sectors which are roid night-mares though ...I don't see the Xenon taking up mining for extra cash

They do need ore and silicon to make new ships though

Bravo! I just got ur mod, with the fewer polys the roids look more chunky and heck they look more like asteroids than the previous render!

Better looks, better framerates? Oh yeah!

It was your 50km visibility mod that made me want to make this Seizewell was really living up to it's name.

[SLeeZeCoRe]

@SLeeZeCoRe true

i've seen vids with awsome grafics and music with a codesize
of only about 20kb, where others with theire tools and gadgets need 200mb.
If i only could remember the names/links. There is every year a conntest with the task to put as much as possible in a few kbs.

But you know as long as nobody wants cars as long-living as pyramide, the car industrie gets a long with sth like a predetermined breaking point

...

k i'm off topic, solong

Thats Krieger (sp) a full FPS in a super compressed single file, took me a year to find a PC capable of decompressing and rendering it, looks damn pretty for 100k- app lol.

If only other gaming companies had the brains to make stuff like that.

[arcana75]

Bravo! I just got ur mod, with the fewer polys the roids look more chunky and heck they look more like asteroids than the previous render!

Better looks, better framerates? Oh yeah!

It was your 50km visibility mod that made me want to make this Seizewell was really living up to it's name.

I scratch ur back, you scratch my back!

BTW I use the low quality mod. Did u say it's 50% reduction in polys? Are these for the large mineable ones or also the smaller non-mineable ones?

Split Fire has ALOT of small rocks.

Oh BTW, if u like I can mirror ur mod. I know from experience rapidshare can be really anal with free users. But I'll only do it if u're ok.

[Schabernack]

Achatos:

I don't want to be a spoilsport but there has been a script out there for ages that lets you get rid of ALL the small asteroids at once.

i like the astros, its a bit of reality, nethertheless, as we see they could be improved for performance


crayolakidd:

Texturing makes very little difference at all to game performance

little difference is still a difference

crayolakidd:

Besides, one doesn't buy a high-end sim-style game and then take away half of what goes to creating the environment

so myself paid a 10bugs game and i'm going to tweak the performance to
my lowbudget old hardware as good as possible and for that i'm glad for any script/mod which helps me there.


If you took in npc mobil miners then there also should be a kind of respawning of astroids, like BBS "The Minersguild will be happy bcz shortly new astros came in from the outer starsystem of the Profitmines" or sth like that.

SLeeZeCoRe:

If only other gaming companies had the brains to make stuff like that.

some do have, but most companies want to hold there fixed deadlines to get the product to the market to earn money, then there is less space to perfection

[arcana75]

I'm all for performance-enhancements over removal of content.

Sure we could run a script or mod to remove say half the factories ingame, it'll improve ur perf by leaps and bounds. But that'll suck.

One could argue that removal of ships is the same, but civilian ships really add nothing to the game. The service ships (hospital, taxi, etc) on the other hand do, they add flavour.

Similarly, I like that asteroid fields have lots of rocks, rather than a few big rocks here and there. If a mod like this can effectively give me 2x the framerate whilst maintaining the environment and atmosphere, why not? Win win.

[SLeeZeCoRe]

See I don't see how removing some useless eyecandy does make the 'atmosphere' take a dive, coz X3 has almost zero atmoshpere in the first place, thus all the hundreds of Mods trying to recapture some of the X2-ness.

imo

[halo112358]

I scratch ur back, you scratch my back!

BTW I use the low quality mod. Did u say it's 50% reduction in polys? Are these for the large mineable ones or also the smaller non-mineable ones?

Split Fire has ALOT of small rocks.

Oh BTW, if u like I can mirror ur mod. I know from experience rapidshare can be really anal with free users. But I'll only do it if u're ok.

Feel free to mirror anything I produce - I know how the internet works, whether I authorize mirroring or not it will happen, so I give my permission freely

So here's the secret about the medium and low quality mods - for both mods there's a 30-50% poly reduction on all of the small and medium sized rocks (however far I could optimize them and keep the look roughly the same). Those rocks are identical between the two mods.

The low poly mod takes the mineable asteroids down by ~50%, and the medium poly mod takes them down by maybe ~20-25%.

In rocky sectors like split fire, ore belt & seizewell the bulk of the onscreen polys come from huge quantities of small rocks, so that's where I concentrated. I initially wanted to reduce the polys on the big rocks by the same percentage but I found they just didn't look good to me so I did them again and didn't take them quite as far (that's why there are low & med poly versions).

[Schabernack]

So here's the secret about the medium and low quality mods - everything except the mineable asteroids is exactly the same, there's a 30-50% poly reduction on all of the small and medium sized rocks (however far I could optimize them and keep the look roughly the same).

The low poly mod takes the mineable asteroids down by ~50%, and the medium poly mod takes them down by maybe ~20-25%.

In rocky sectors like split fire, ore belt & seizewell the bulk of the onscreen polys come from huge quantities of small rocks, so that's where I concentrated. I initially wanted to reduce the polys on the big rocks by the same percentage but I found they just didn't look good to me so I did them again and didn't take them quite as far (that's why there are low & med poly versions)

That is handy information perhaps you could add it in the first page?

Meanwhile got some script ideas by myself, for that your mode/script would be usefull, so am i formaly allowed to use it ?

[halo112358]

Meanwhile got some script ideas by myself, for that your mode/script would be usefull, so am i formaly allowed to use it ?

Sure, just give credit where it's due

[Squelch]

For you too, above solution may be useful.

Thanks Achatos, but I like the rocks. They come in useful sometimes when trying to thin out large groups of enemies. I do use Bunnys' mobile mining scripts though.

This really does help Halo. Thank you. I love the look of X3 but looks aren't everything. It's only the very odd time I care to stop and admire the detail. The rest of the time it just flies by as fast as my rig can render it. Which brings me to ask.

Have you considered doing the same with stations?

Frame rates hit the floor when I'm in amongst a group of factories. Yes they do look fantastic, but as long as they still work and resemble what they should be. Having every rivet, union and frame rendered is kind of defeated when the suspension of disbelief is broken by low frame rates.

[Schabernack]

... i would say to do that with factories would be a bigger piece of work, but sounds familiar that thought.

as most of you which are here bcz of performance problems i post you the scripts i found in this direction.

Tubeless Komplex mod(no tubes, no kollisions with them)
http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=167224

Less Astroids(10% fewer every time activating)
http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php? ... sc&start=0

Remove Rocks from Sector(sometimes no rocks is the better choice)
http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=148622

Fewer PPC Rounds(Still i didnt know what a PPC is ^^)
http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php? ... sc&start=0

Fog Off + different view ranges
http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=110083

MinimumHud(no anoying imgs at the edges of your screen, no squares arround the foes, ...)
http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php? ... sc&start=0

NoCivilians(get out of my way)
http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=161435

i would be glad for any other script/mod you could post which is missing in the above list.

solong

[arcana75]

Tubeless Komplex mod(no tubes, no kollisions with them)
http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=167224

Fewer PPC Rounds(Still i didnt know what a PPC is ^^)
http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php? ... sc&start=0

Fog Off + different view ranges
http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=110083

MinimumHud(no anoying imgs at the edges of your screen, no squares arround the foes, ...)
http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php? ... sc&start=0

NoCivilians(get out of my way)
http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=161435

The last four mods there can be found in my sig. Do read the postings in them for better explanations of what they do.

I also use the TCM mod as well as this roid mod (low version).

I would recommend the Complex Cleaner mod, but I prefer to gawk at my fabs once in a while: the TCM mod makes that more ideal.

[Squelch]

I was about to say arcana75 has .....

That is a good list. most of which I have running or have tried.

Reducing the poly count on stations is undoubtably a big job. It still might be possible given that many of the components are replicated within the different races, and so should only need to be edited once.

[Edit]

To add to the list, take a look at the tech support stickies. Killing background processes and freeing memory before starting X3 helps alot. Trying to run X3 below 1G memory can lead to swapping to disk which will drasticaly slow things down. I can vouch for closing explorer to free up memory.

[/edit]