Chess Piece Public Feedback

[lal7777]

What I'm trying to do here isn't show off the "sweet" .obj loader that i made half a million years ago.
Instead I'm trying to get advice/criticism about the chess models that I've made.

Leave some suggestions/comments. (about the models not the program.)

Here's what I'd like to know:
How can I improve them?
If I can't improve them, then what features about the models do you like?
What's the worst part about these models?
What would you like to see in a "Perfect" Chess piece?

Describe in detail.

Attachments:

[matthew]

There isn't much I can say about them as they look just like they're supposed too.

However you might want to think about reducing the amount of detail in some of the pieces to decrease memory-size & loading time.

[lal7777]

When you say

reducing the amount of detail in some pieces[\quote]
which pieces do you mean?

[matthew]

Well if you were to reduce the polygon count for all the pieces by a little they'd load faster.

[lal7777]

I can do that easily using the decimate tool in blender, however that also reduces the appearance quality of the pieces.
What I'd like to know is which piece(s) you think would really need it.
Also what fps does your computer get with the .obj loader?
If it's really slow on everyone's computer then I'll definitely have to reduce the poly count for all pieces.
I'll try adding a poll for people, so they can show what their fps is when running the program...

[shadow008]

Averaged out at 120 fps on my comp using game booster. The loading time was well over a minute though... I'm thinking an ASCII to binary converter for .obj files is ready to be made at some point, it would significantly bring down the loading time. But writing such a thing would require ambition in which I have not.

Btw, for using per-face lighting, that looks REALLY GOOD! Which leads me to the same thing that matthew brought up, you need to bring down the poly count and switch to per-vertex lighting (Screw it, go per-pixel if you can).

Also, somewhere in your code (like, at the beginning of the loop) add in a glEnable(GL_CULL_FACE). I cant believe I can get good frame rates rendering 97,908 poly's on screen at once with out it. Guess it shows your program isn't going to be geometry limited.... Just tested it and got about 10 fps faster.

Finally, the knight... has 10k polys a piece, with nearly a third of that being just the lower quarter of it. And the eyes, with ~250 poly's a piece seems like overkill to me. Thats the one you should decimate. The poor queen, the most powerful piece in the game, has only ~2300 polys...

[matthew]

Well it runs at a constant 11 Frames on my netbook. If I enable GL_CULL_FACE (which you should do for 99% of your OpenGL programs) it runs at 16 Frames.

[Wayne Rayner]

I get 40 frames in the normal program and 50 frames with gl cull face.

[lal7777]

Thank you for your feedback. (the polls are still open for more.)

also:
Shadow008 - I've never heard of game boost before, it sounds amazing (except for the loading time).
I'll definitely lower the knight's poly-count. 10k poly/1 piece does sound like too much.
Mathew - I'll use GL_CULL_FACE in all future 3d programs. However when this .obj loader was made (about a year ago) I had never even heard of GL_CULL_FACE. I will change the code for that, however doing so might change voting results.

Early Conclusion: (may need 2 b changed later)
I want to see the lowest fps that displaying the whole board gives, in order to know how much needs to be changed to "speed-up" the game for computers that aren't so great. However, seeing as the fps isn't too low for tons of people so far I believe I'll leave the high poly pieces and have 2 modes for display in the chess game. (low-poly and high-poly).

i.e. I'll just include 2 .obj files, one of which will be high poly and one low poly. Then the user(s) will get the choice of using 1 or the other.

[lal7777]

Well here's the second version of the chess viewer.
It has both the low poly pieces and the high poly pieces in it. The user get's the option of viewing either, and whether or not to cull faces
docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B2rqIy25tcEeYWJlYWQ5ZTEtMzkxNi00YjM3LTg5OTQtM2M4YjUyMDNkZGVm&hl=en_US&authkey=CNCCmIID

I get about 265 fps with the low poly pieces.(when faces are culled)
The new pieces have about 16.2% the amount of faces that the high poly ones do.
high poly - 97,908 faces
low poly - 15,932 faces

[matthew]

I get 56 FPS here.

[lal7777]

56 is Good, however when the actual game comes out there will be 7 display lists (one per piece +1 for the board). This may speed it up even more (I'm unsure about whether it will or not). The longer the player(s) play the higher the fps, because less pieces will remain on the board the closer they get to the end of the game.

[lal7777]

May 22, 2011 17:38:33 GMT -5 shadow008 said:

I'm thinking an ASCII to binary converter for .obj files is ready to be made at some point, it would significantly bring down the loading time. But writing such a thing would require ambition in which I have not.

Have you ever looked at the .ply file format?
paulbourke.net/dataformats/ply/
They have both a binary and ascii version. If I knew how to work with binary i could make a binary .ply loader.
The only downside that I've seen to their format, is that it doesn't have any support for textures.

[twasik4]

I got about 1487 FPS.. If i even touch the arrow key it freaks the h*!@# out and rotates like crazy.

EDIT:

And it loaded in about 8 seconds for me.

And i have not tried cullface.. =O

[lal7777]

I've decided to switch programming languages... (c++)
So the chess project will probably never get completed unless I remake it in OpenGL...
Unfortunately (for this project) I've become quite interested in animated meshes so remaking it probably will not happen.(I wasn't particularly far on the actual playing part of the project anyway)
By the way anybody wanting to learn LOTS about OpenGL should get the OpenGL Redbook. (make sure it's the newest version) - It's very useful...