Alien vs Predator Port

[mcobit]

I tried changing the resolution to the lowest (512x...) but it didn't get a lot faster. Sound stutters quite a bit.


What flags did you use at compiletime? Did the colordepth reduction, suggested by pickle do any good?


Can anyone test how much better it runs on a GHz unit compared to my video?


Might narrow down if its a gpu limitation.

 

[Rockthesmurf]

What flags did you use at compiletime?

Compile

-fsigned-char 

-mcpu=cortex-a8

-mfpu=neon

-ftree-vectorize

-mfloat-abi=softfp

-ffast-math

-fsingle-precision-constant 

-Wno-deprecated

-Wno-psabi


-fomit-frame-pointer 

-O3

-g

 

Link

 

-g

-lrt

-static-libstdc++

-Wl,-rpath=libs

 

Oops, didn't mean to leave -g on there, but never mind..! Doubt it has much (any?) affect on performance.

 

Did the colordepth reduction, suggested by pickle do any good?

I've made the code change whilst at work (such a quick change) and will hopefully be able to test it tonight, although currently there is no FPS displayed in game so it maybe hard to tell if it makes a difference or not. Ideally I could do with getting something in to display FPS otherwise optimizations could be hard to gage. Also, maybe the build never ran any faster, just when I first got it working I could have been excited and thought it was running better than it was (although it certainly didn't seem any worse, and that was an unoptimized debug build which could indicate it is GPU more than CPU as optimizations typically have a good improvement on CPU time).

 

[Rockthesmurf]

There are certainly some cases which can potentially enable GL_ALPHA_TEST it would be interesting to know how often this is used, as typically GL_ALPHA_TEST has poor performance on GPUs of the Pandora's nature.

 

[mcobit]

It really is strange, that a game runs like this on the Pandora even if it ran at 50 fps on my P2 266MHz with riva tnt 2 graphicscard...

 

[mcobit]

Had another play and as a marine the game was a lot smoother as you have only narrow corridors to manouver.


Some things I found:


- I tried to set the left nub to joystickmode before starting the game, but the joystick was not useable while playing.


- Detailoptions doesn't seem to have a huge impact on performance


- Playing in 640x480 doesn't either


- The game seems to slow down if you have some transparency onscreen, like windows, flares, gunfire etc. So your alphatest theory might be the right direction.


- Crank the gamma of the Pandora lcd all the way up in the lcdsettings and in the game and becomes much more playable. Could be done at gamestart with a script.


- I found a pretty decent controlconfiguration. For that set the left nub to joystick and the right one to mouse movement before starting the game:


Dpad horizontal: strafe


Dpad vertical: move forward/backward


Left nub (if it is possible to use it as joystick at all): horizontal: strafing vertical: movement


Right nub (mouse) vertical: looking horizontal: turning


Walk: LShift


Jump: A gamingbutton


Operate: Y gamingbutton


Crounch: X gamingbutton


Fire primary: right shoulderbutton


Fire secondary: left shoulderbutton


Next weapon: P


Prevö weapon: Q


Flashback weapon: backspace


Image intensifier: comma


Throw flare: period


The rest can be mapped as you wish as they are not really timecritical to use.


Hope I can help a bit.


Edit: those are marine controls of course, but I could try to get some decent ones for the others, too if you like.


Edit2: huge rooms slow down the game to a crawl. Maybe it's polycount or the lighting that's the cause for that.

 

[mcobit]

On another note: In polly-b-gone, changing the gllinear filter to glnearest helped a lot with performance even if the game looks more like a psx game then.


Edit: And something very positive: I played for half an hour now and the game seems to be very solid and stable. Even on the cc units.

 

[Silent-Hunter]

It is actually Alien vs. Predator, not Aliens. From what I can tell anyway.

 

[mcobit]

It is actually Alien vs. Predator, not Aliens. From what I can tell anyway.

Not really:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:AvP1.jpg

 

[kingoddball]

Do I need the entire filesystem or is it like quake - Only need PAK files? AVP.PAK (a few of these).

Also, does this play the old AVP2 and AVP2 Primal Hunt etc. I think these were made with same engine.

 

[mcobit]

I don't think that it will play the avp2 games as the code to them was not released.
Keep in mind that you don't just need the engine, but the gamelogic, scripted sequences etc, too.

 

[BAFelton]

I want to be sure before buying : avp classic 2000 will work ?

 

[Silent-Hunter]

It is actually Alien vs. Predator, not Aliens. From what I can tell anyway.

Not really:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:AvP1.jpg

That's what I thought originally! But I kept seeing it written as Alien everywhere.

 

[Silent-Hunter]

What files exactly do I need? I assume I don't need avp.exe, or any of the dlls, but what of the .cfg files, and the 6 folders?

 

[Loonie]

It's "Alienses versus Predatorseses".

 

[mcobit]

I want to be sure before buying : avp classic 2000 will work ?

Yes, I bought it, installed it and just copied the whole folder.

I think the upper or lowercase stuff doesn't even matter on Fat32 filesystem as I was able to play without converting everything to lowercase.

if I do "mv FILE1 file1" it won't do anything and just say, that they are the same.

 

[BAFelton]

I want to be sure before buying : avp classic 2000 will work ?

Yes, I bought it, installed it and just copied the whole folder.

I think the upper or lowercase stuff doesn't even matter on Fat32 filesystem as I was able to play without converting everything to lowercase.

if I do "mv FILE1 file1" it won't do anything and just say, that they are the same.

Thanks !

 

[Rockthesmurf]

I just pushed up 1.0.0.2, only change is 16 bit z-buffer instead of 24 bit. I haven't personally tested it, but am about to take a look a GPROF (although I have limited time tonight so not sure whether there should be any expectations of any meaningful results).

http://repo.openpandora.org/?page=detail&app=com.pawprintgames.avp

mcobit: Thank you for taking a good look at the build, if you do have time to compare this latest one that would be interesting (so we know we know if the 24/16bit Z buffer has a good impact or not).

 

[Pickle]

I just pushed up 1.0.0.2, only change is 16 bit z-buffer instead of 24 bit. I haven't personally tested it, but am about to take a look a GPROF (although I have limited time tonight so not sure whether there should be any expectations of any meaningful results).

http://repo.openpandora.org/?page=detail&app=com.pawprintgames.avp

mcobit: Thank you for taking a good look at the build, if you do have time to compare this latest one that would be interesting (so we know we know if the 24/16bit Z buffer has a good impact or not).

A simple look at top would tell you if your CPU limited, if so gprof would help

But i expect you are GPU limited and I would expect gprof wont help much if the GPU is taking up time.

One other thought i noticed vysnc code, it might be worth turning it off to get a couple extra fps.

 

[BAFelton]

Please fix this on the repo

3. Copy data into pandoraappdatacom.pawprintgames.avp

to

3. Copy data into pandora\appdata\com.pawprintgames.avp

 

[Rockthesmurf]

Please fix this on the repo

3. Copy data into pandoraappdatacom.pawprintgames.avp

to

3. Copy data into pandora\appdata\com.pawprintgames.avp

Done locally, will be in next build, thanks.