I recently restarted work in (which BTW right now changed to be a first person... thing ? ) and sharing my time between the painful creation of non-completely garbage artwork and fleshing out the gameplay, but some serious rendering performance issues started to arise with Darkplaces. After all, I am basically trying to render several hundreds of bmodel entities at once, some of them with dynamic lights, and there are points in the map where the framerate drops to below 10 fps when in first person mode. And I haven't even started to actually populate it...
After fiddling with Darkplaces settings for some time I decided to experiment running the mod with FTE. "Probably it won't work without a lot of rewriting, something essential must be broken like some builtin", I thought but to my surprise not only things worked (mostly) without flaws at the first try but FPS are between 90 and 110 even on spots where things looked like a slide show, so congratulations Spike! Your engine really rocks. There are minor problems due the fact I am running a relatively old build and different folders names, but overall I am not only considering to support both engines in my mod, but is very likely that FTE becomes the default choice.
However, I am observing a strange behavior while running the mod on FTE: while in Darkplaces most randomically generated maps have (most of time) layouts heterogeneous enough to ensure good opportunities of exploration and gameplay, every map generated on FTE has pretty much the same boring, single and short corridor layout. The length sometimes is shorter or longer, but the variation is almost inexistent. WTF ?
There are no runtime errors or console warnings; I am not doing anything unusual like using obscure DP extensions for control the world generation; everything apparently works as expected, but at the same time, this is NOT what was expected (or how was working in DP). Since my QC code relies heavily on several calls to random() to define all aspects of the generated map (how many portals, how many roads/paths, their length, how many corners, how many builds, etc) this makes me believe that in FTE random () behaves vastly different from Darkplaces (and apparently in a very repetitive way). Is that the case ? Is there something I can do to force a better random seeding ?
(LordHavoc)
