If it's very slow on Shamblers Radeon 9700Pro, you really shoulda optimize the speed.
I didn't test it since I rarely test Demos, but I guess it's an open terrain outdoor thing? Well, there is one real problem with outdoor stuff: the camerarange. There is only few methods to prevent the player looking down from a mountain and force the rendering of thousands of things, which will slow things down dramaticly, so try:
-fog
but people hate Fog as a trick to reduce the camerarange, so an other method, as seen eg. in the Lithtech engine is:
Create the level in a way that the player will never be able to have a long viewrange, You can do this by:
- use Rocks, Trees, steep slopes, walls, etc. to prevent the player from climbing higher zones. Force him to remain in natural or sythetical valleys.
This way you can reduce the camerarange to something very low, and this will help you to automaticly occlude entities that are far away, nevertheless it gives the player a feeling of a wide outdoor area.
Needless to say that you have to prevent all kinds of heavy Polycount, use only lowpoly meshes.
If you are useing FLE, the Landscape editor, there have been an early version that used to save the terrain in two parts: one part was the bottom mesh, and the second part was all layers that are ontop of the bottom mesh. This way it's possible to assign Collision only to the bottom Mesh, this will be faster too.
Also don't turn off mipmaping for vegetation (I've seen this several times), it will make things much slower too. Instead use masked Leaf Textures that are using a green maskcolor (using an alpha channel to mask it, 23bit TGA), this will prevent dark contours of the masked textures perfectly.
I didn't test it since I rarely test Demos, but I guess it's an open terrain outdoor thing? Well, there is one real problem with outdoor stuff: the camerarange. There is only few methods to prevent the player looking down from a mountain and force the rendering of thousands of things, which will slow things down dramaticly, so try:
-fog
but people hate Fog as a trick to reduce the camerarange, so an other method, as seen eg. in the Lithtech engine is:
Create the level in a way that the player will never be able to have a long viewrange, You can do this by:
- use Rocks, Trees, steep slopes, walls, etc. to prevent the player from climbing higher zones. Force him to remain in natural or sythetical valleys.
This way you can reduce the camerarange to something very low, and this will help you to automaticly occlude entities that are far away, nevertheless it gives the player a feeling of a wide outdoor area.
Needless to say that you have to prevent all kinds of heavy Polycount, use only lowpoly meshes.
If you are useing FLE, the Landscape editor, there have been an early version that used to save the terrain in two parts: one part was the bottom mesh, and the second part was all layers that are ontop of the bottom mesh. This way it's possible to assign Collision only to the bottom Mesh, this will be faster too.
Also don't turn off mipmaping for vegetation (I've seen this several times), it will make things much slower too. Instead use masked Leaf Textures that are using a green maskcolor (using an alpha channel to mask it, 23bit TGA), this will prevent dark contours of the masked textures perfectly.