Gothic 3 Going to give Gothic 3 another try.

[JonNik]

I've only had problems with 12000 on a spot outside Geldern (so I was thinking
to go 13000, when I have the time to actually play again) and I've traveled all of
Myrtana and Nordmar.

A good area to use as a benchmark is Silden especially to gauge how much
of the entity.roi value your rig can take (a very large NPC concentration there) .
If you can handle Silden decently the rest of the game should be a breeze.

As for the unpacking thing I think its simply fantasy. Perhaps HiddenX or
Moriendor know more...

 

[JDR13]

What are your system specs JonNik?

 

[Moriendor]

Regarding the unpacking of all game files, I haven't seen anyone on the German forums (including the G3 modding forums where people with some pretty deep insight into the game's mechanics post very regularly) talk about unpacking files (other than for the community patch) in months which is a good indicator that it probably doesn't do much or anything at all. I'm sure that it would get mentioned a lot more if it would really have any (worthwhile) positive effects.

 

[JonNik]

What are your system specs JonNik?

AMD FX55 (on an ASUS A8N SLI)
2 GB RAM
ATI X1900XT 512MB
AUDIGY 2
2X WD Raptors 74 GB in Raid 0 (for windows-programs)
2x WD Raptors 36 GB (I have the Paging file here among other things)

And before you ask, I have the roi value at 4800 (6000 was what I
thought you should use ) and Silden Drops me at 17-18 fps (in
front of the "upper city" guards)... but its the game low. I usually
get fps in the 30s(or even more) everywhere else (not taking into
account the unfortunately often loading ofcourse).

All in all its playable to comfortably playable I'll see what I can do on
my next System (should be about 6 months away)...

 

[JDR13]

We have very similar rigs except for the hard disk.

Intel Core 2 E6700 (on an Asus nForce 650i SLI)
2GB RAM
ATI X1950XTX
Audigy 2
1x WD Cavier 500 GB 7200 RPM SATA Internal HD
1x WD My Book 500 GB 7200 RPM ESATA External HD


I think changing the entitiy roi has the biggest impact on performance in G3 along with general view distance. What do you think? Also, have you played G3 with the community patch yet?

 

[JonNik]

We have very similar rigs except for the hard disk.

I remember them from one of the Bioshock threads, hence the educated
guess that you should aim for a greater roi value (if you liked).

You see, your card is somewhat better and together with the dual
core it should give you the edge. Supposedly PB tried to optimize their
game for dual cores delegating i.e the streaming of the data from the
HD to the second core. That should, at least theoretically, give you less
stuttering even than my Raid couple afford me (I shall have to see for
myself on my next rig), If PB lived up to their claims that is...

I think changing the entitiy roi has the biggest impact on performance in G3 along with general view distance. What do you think? Also, have you played G3 with the community patch yet?

Definetely, especially the roi value (hence my little silden test).

I think view distance hurts by a combination of greater memory demand plus
more polys. But roi is a combination of cpu hog (AI) and graphic power since there seem to be a lot more polys in your average G3 model (despite the already
high value normal maps and textures they sport) than very large swaths of the
terrain. Some have criticized PB for being wasteful in that regard further cripling the engine's performance...

Also I used to think that upping the Roi was more of a cpu hog (remembering
some early PB comments about how they designed AI and why they were
Planning to limit the number of npcs per location) but the fact that you can
,with smaller roi values (<5000) ,often hear monsters fighting it out before
coming inside your sphere to be rendered, makes me think its more them damn
polys after all.

Re the community patch, I have mixed up things a little in my data folder.
I started out with the german help pack (had some mods like removing the
annoying fire sound bug, stunlock for the hero and human NPC's etc) then
removed some of its changes (i.e replacing the theme music with the one
from G2 !). Then added the 1.1 patch. Things seem Ok up to this point.
(I am some 40h into this run, finished with Myrtana and Nordmar for now
and leaving for varant for the first time, when I manage to start playing
again with the shape of my schedule these days...)

I think the patch is a very nice attempt and it will make a nice addition
to my next run of the game... until then I personally think it will pay to
give them time to round things up...

Wow, huge post

 

[JDR13]

Have you tried the tuning utility yet? It's really quite excellent, makes tuning certain variables much easier.

Do you play with "Render.EnableLowpolyRendering" set to true or false?

 

[JonNik]

Have you tried the tuning utility yet? It's really quite excellent, makes tuning certain variables much easier.
?

Not really, does it offer any special features (beyond what I can do with
the notepad) ?

Do you play with "Render.EnableLowpolyRendering" set to true or false?

Ah yes, I was wondering about that (its true on my ini). But I cant remember
If I actually tried it (Did you ?). If it actually essentialy removes loding as it
seems to be implied, the game would turn into a slideshow I am afraid (If
distant terrain is still rendered at all that is)

 

[JDR13]

Not really, does it offer any special features (beyond what I can do with
the notepad)

No special features, but you might be surprised at how well done and convenient it is. It allows you to view many more settings at once, rather than having to continuously scroll the .ini file up and down. It also doesn't require any type of installation.

Ah yes, I was wondering about that (its true on my ini). But I cant remember If I actually tried it (Did you ?). If it actually essentialy removes loding as it seems to be implied, the game would turn into a slideshow I am afraid (If distant terrain is still rendered at all that is)

It doesn't have anything to do with loading. It has to do with how the distant background textures are rendered. The horizon is rendered with low polys by default for performance. So if you set it to false the far distant graphics should look better. Take screenshots of it on true and false standing in the exact same spot and compare them. I'm not sure about the performance impact though.

 

[JonNik]

I'll have to give that tool a try then.

Also Loding as in level of Detail (LoD or the scheme used to transition from
the, near the camera high poly models, to those low poly away from the camera).

So,it works eh ... I was wondering for performance you see because PB said
that their average high poly house model was a couple of Ks in polygons while
their low ones about 80 ps !. So we are talking several levels of magnitude here.

Definetely wil try some time in the future ...

 

[JDR13]

Ok, I just tried it out. Interestingly enough I couldn't see a difference, unless it is so slight that I just couldn't tell from the snapshots. Performance also seemed to be the same.

What do you know about the variable "IgnoreUserOptions=false"?

 

[JonNik]

Hmm might not work then.

As for the other setting I can only speculate: It forces the game to ignore the
user Options (the ones you set from the ingame menu) stored at
MyDocuments/Gothic3/UserOptions.ini if set to true perhaps.

 

[JDR13]

I just received word that patch 1.4 will possibly be released this coming Saturday.

 

[JDR13]

Important question.

I'm going to start a new game after patch 1.4 is released, should I delete and reinstall Gothic 3, or will just deleting my saved games be good enough?

I keep hearing about some nasty bugs that can happen if you start a new game after you've already saved games.

 

[JonNik]

Might be a safe bet to uninstall-reinstall first (especially since the only thing
you want to keep from the old installation is your .ini I guess).

I've only heard of the bugs myself too, but sometimes there is actual fire
to come with all that smoke ...

 

[Moriendor]

or will just deleting my saved games be good enough?

That should do it. I think you can very safely install the 1.4 community patch over an existing install of Gothic 3 (unless the community patch notes recommend otherwise, of course). AFAIK, the changes are very superficial (the team still has no access to the source materials yet). It's just a few scripts that get changed (logical errors, relations between files, and syntax errors getting fixed mostly). There should be no reason for a reinstall. Or to use a -more or less fitting- comparison: When you write a letter in Word and you fix a couple typos in your doc, you don't reinstall Office either before you apply the spell-checking, do you?

 

[JDR13]

It's not the community patch I'm afraid of, it's a well known bug that's been around from the start. I've seen many people talk about lots of glitches, broken quest, missing npc's, etc, that can happen if you start a new game over a saved one in Gothic 3.

You're probably right though, I'm sure just deleting all the saved games will suffice. I'll manually delete the whole folder just to be sure.

 

[rooroosta]

Interesting thread indeed..i've just started playing Gothic3 with the community patch and various tweak gleaned from around the forums.

Might wait for 1.4 if it is available for download in the coming week as you say.

Most enjoyable game from the little I've tried so far though.

 

[JDR13]

Welcome to RPGWatch. Have you played the other Gothic games?

 

[rooroosta]

Welcome to RPGWatch. Have you played the other Gothic games?

Hi JDR13..yes, I've played both the previous games..really enjoyable games IMO..finished Gothic 2 a couple of times in fact.
I've a pretty decent system and it runs as well as can be expected (4600+ Dual Core, X1900XT 512mb, 2gb Ram).
Looking forward to see what 1.4 does before I start proper.

Cheers, Roo