First off I want to say it was worth the wait. The mod team has done an amazing job with a level of quality that’s lacking in a lot of AAA games. The game is simply stunning and I can’t wait for the final release to finish the story.
The one thing that’s really been bothering me is the performance issues I’ve been having. I know my hardware is capable of running this game well. What seems to be missing is multicore rendering. I don’t know how much work it would entail, but would it be possible to update the mod to utilize the newest version of Source for improved performance?
Well thank you for your entirely unhelpful and incorrect answer. There are no licensing fees for mods. I’m hoping that a team member can comment on the matter since performance problems are a pretty big issue at the moment.
I don’t think he was trying to be rude or anything…but from his post it is probably an insurmountable task to do. One that would take a great deal of effort…but then again I know nothing about being awesome like Raminator.
a) AFAIR Valve hadn’t released Source SDK Base 2009 (yet?), so you can’t base your mod on this. BMS included.
b) Multicore handling of the mat queue won’t help you with performance problems much. Most of the times BMS is ether fillrate-constrained due to huge overdrow with semi-transparent particle systems (smoke clouds and alike), CPU+GPU constrained with dynamic lighting (set zombie on fire in unforeseen consequences with enabled +showbudget panel, observe “Dynamic_Lights_rendering” bar) or CPU+GPU constrained with processing a lot of detailed prop_static geometry coupled with reflection effect. Multicore mat queue won’t help you much with latter, would be somewhat helpfull with dynamic lighting and won’t help at all with fillrate exhaustion problem.
They have mentioned in the past that it probably won’t happen. It was a big enough challenge to move to the 2007 Orange Box engine, it broke almost everything code-related when they moved from the HL2 launch engine, which would have had support for DirectX 7, so people with a Geforce 4 mx could launch the game and then come here to complain about all the missing effects and textures.
TL;DR Black Mesa is not Duke Nukem Forever, no more engine updates.
a) That could be a problem. So the team would have to mod a specific Source 2009 game rather than the free SDK? I can see how that wouldn’t work.
b) Well I don’t know how different BMS is from other Source games, but in Valve’s games (TF2, Portal 2, L4D2 and such) multicore rendering basically doubles my framerate and framerate drops from intense action sequences are no longer noticable when I would drop to 20 fps or less with it off.
As had already been posted here, in one of the past interviews it was mentioned that porting to 2007 version of the engine had been a painful process so there are next to none chances that team would hop into this boat once again porting BMS to Source 2009 anytime soon.
As for “in Valve’s games”: BMS is less polished than Valve’s games wrt to performance optimizations. Valve makes money from selling their games, they can’t afford release a product that wouldn’t work fine for most of their customers. BMS devteam does work on BMS at their free time and they could get by with being less thorough WRT polishing and optimizing the game. You should really get a habbit of displaying the budget panel and checking the bar graphs at the moments you have FPS dropdowns, both in Valve games and in BMS. Most of the bars there won’t benefit from multicore CPUs, except for physycs, particle simulation, sound mixing and geometry processing. To make it simple: executing some part of a work twice as fast won’t be of a much benefit if the bottleneck is in doing rest part of the work quick enough. If your GPU spend 40ms drawing the frame and CPU in single core spends 10ms preparing data for this frame to be drawn - you’d get 20 FPS as a result. Even if you manage to split CPU work ideally over four cores and make CPU finish data preparations in 2.5ms - you still would get 23.5 FPS which is surely better compared to 20 FPS but really isn’t that exciting.
TL;DR: There would be more benefits from optimizing BMS to work lag-free with the current engine version than to waste a lot of time and efforts porting it to a fresh engine version, especially without having a definite knowledge that this work would provide any noticeable benefits.
FAQ, Question 9. Place those command into your autoexec.cfg and use “b” button to show up budget panel. “n” key would toggle displaying global/per-frame texture budget stats. Pressing “b” once again would hide the budget panel.
As far as I remember, there have been posts from developer(s), stating that if the SDK was available they would consider it (and at that time I got the impression that they were willing to go through the pain of it).
The developers (CMT) of the Halo SPV3 mod are using techniques that allow them to add new features and extend the limits of the original engine, and to utilize these features the end-user only needs to install some thing called “OpenSauce.” If Black Mesa could be updated all I feel would be necessary is a plugin similar to that which would allow more dynamic lighting and shadowing. No upgrade to a newer source engine. Every thing else looks pretty nice, and with modern lighting/shadowing injected into the game, I would bet the game would look as good as any modern shooter coming out these days.
Founded in 2004, Leakfree.org became one of the first online communities dedicated to Valve’s Source engine development. It is more famously known for the formation of Black Mesa: Source under the 'Leakfree Modification Team' handle in September 2004.
