Beautiful Britannia: Hotfix Released
Firstknight sent me an email to let me know that he has released a small hotfix for Beautiful Britannia, which should serve to correct screen shakiness encountered by some users (especially when using long viewing distances).
The hotfix removes two NPC types (the Stone Demon and Generic Brute, 16 entities in total) from the Britannian overworld. When the draw distance is set to a particularly high value, the engine of course renders NPCs of these types (which cause the ground to shake as they move)…and even though they may be quite some distance away, it takes their ground-shaking effect into account.
You can all download the patch via the Beautiful Britanniaproject entry.
Some additional infos:
Per default two NPCs types (Stone Demon and Generic Brute) have the “feature”, that the screen shakes, when they are walking around while within sight of the player.
Now, with using a middleclip of 10000 with culling 7 as in my screenshots, this effect occurs in a wide area of the main continent of Britannia (especially from Paws to Yew, because those NPCs are seenable from a far distance now), which can be really annoying sometimes.
The only way I found to change this is to remove the related NPC types (16 entities in total).
Of course, I will place other NPC types instead on those positions in later releases of Beautiful Britannia, but for now, this quick fix simply removes the annoying effect.
In all honesty I have trouble considering removing part of the monsters to be a “fix”. Keeping the shaking seems like the lesser evil to me.
Your’re right in some way, but the shaking was just too annoying for me, and further it looks like to decrease the stability of the engine, so that’s why I call it a fix.
Maybe in later releases we can manipulate the NPCs behaviour, who knows…
@Sergon:
I don’t know if you read this already in the other entry (I was a little late with this), so I post it here again:
The High-Res-Textures are stored in these modified files:
bitmap16.flx
sdinfo16.flx
BB comes with somes model changes, means I exchanged some of the “too low poly” models with better looking ones, and the textures are related to the “new” models. Means, that in addition you need the modified version of:
sappear.flx
So, using only those 3 files from the BB release result in a “Original UIX”, but with high-res-textures.
Some further addition to the Hotfix:
Another solution is to exchange the two enemy types with other ones.
If someone prefers this, please answer here and add the enemy types you recommend in exchange for Generic Brute and Stone Demon.
I will include the most prefered solution in the BB 2011 R2 release then.
Well, the shaking is caused by these monsters’ movements. The high-res and long view distance changes must be loading these monsters in a fully loaded state. This would include not only rendering the monsters with top resolution textures but also full animation of their movements, which includes the ground-shake feature. The magnitude of this effect appears to be distance dependent, which I’ve never noticed before. I guess my render distance hasn’t been long enough in the past for this aspect of the feature to be noticeable.
In any case, the engine appears completely stable and actually working better than ever if you can play with reasonable frame rate while fully rendering those monsters at such a distance.
Thanks for your assistence, Iceblade.
Now, if we compare the max settings from the ingame sliders:
; Clipping planes
FarClippingPlaneDistance=8000
MiddleClippingPlaneDistance=4000
; Screen radius of objects culled, and distance culling starts
MaxObjCullSize=10
CullStartDist=1000
with my custom settings, as shown in the screens:
; Clipping planes
FarClippingPlaneDistance=14000
MiddleClippingPlaneDistance=10000
; Screen radius of objects culled, and distance culling starts
MaxObjCullSize=7
CullStartDist=3000
we can see some difference. And, back in 1999, the game wasn’t even playable with the max slider settings, these settings were more common on high end hardware back then:
; Clipping planes
FarClippingPlaneDistance=5000
MiddleClippingPlaneDistance=3000
Means, back in 1999 the ground-shake effect starts in a middleclip-distance of 3000 (view from LB Castle balcony to the Majors house) , but with my settings now in a distance of 10000 (view from LB Castle balcony to the house of Iolo)