Reality Engine Demo & Runtime

(Licensee Evaluation Kit Build 14.00)

Overview

List of changes in each Reality version is at ChangeLog.

Technical overview pertaining specifically to the code and media within the Eval Kit can be found here.

Legal

You cannot distribute or commercially exploit this release in any way. You cannot release any media without our written approval. Support for this license is provided at our discretion. Artificial Studios provides no guarantees that the level of code access provided in this release will be sufficient to develop a working prototype. Full terms are available in our EULA.

Download & Installation

Pre-installation requirements:

	Be sure you are running DirectX 9.0c, available at http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx.
	XP SP2 recommended for Reality Builder tools
	Latest ATI drivers, or NVIDIA drivers
	DirectX9 capable graphics card. DirectX8 is supported but will not run the demonstration scenes except for the SimpleModule's "ShaderTest". GeForce FX Cards have known performance issues in ps2.0 mode.

The old Reality Engine Eval Kit is now available via a single installer, including .NET 2.0 used for the EvalKit scripting:

• Reality Engine EvalKit Installer (746 mb)

To Compile Reality Engine SDK:

• DirectX 9.0c SDK April 2005 (Required To Compile Reality SDK)
• Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition Beta 2 (Use To Compile Reality SDK, or Visual Studio Professional 2005 Beta 2)

Other Downloads:

• X-File Plugins for Max 7, Maya 5, 6, 6.5 (Require DirectX April 2005 SDK)

Your file structure should now like this:
\RealityEngine\Game.sln
\RealityEngine\EngineInc
\RealityEngine\Bin\Reality Engine.ini
\RealityEngine\Bin\System\Reality.exe

Note that all textures are shipped uncompressed. On the first run of each scene they will be converted to DDS. This may take several minutes. Also due to the extremely large unpacked textures shipped with this release, loading times will be considerably higher than normal.

Compiling the Projects

Feedback

Garden Demo

HDR significantly increases visual quality in all scenes, but comes at a performance cost, so is not enabled by default. Therefore there is a special shortcut in the release to launch in HDR mode, from which you can then use the New Game menu to select the Backyard game recording.

Frag Isle Demo

Also included for this scene is a pre-recorded demo game.

• FragIsle_Cinematic: This is a fixed-camera recording of the same game, illustrating some cinematic capabilities possible in demo playback.

Note that this scene does not officially support HDR on sub-6800 cards, due to lack of alpha blending capabilities on FP targets.

Recording playback controls

• W: Move Spectator Forward
• S: Move Spectator Back
• A: Strafe Spectator Left
• D: Strafe Spectator Right

• R: Hold to decrease playback speed
• F: Press to return to 1x playback speed
• V: Hold to increase playback speed (not advised, can dramatically increase CPU usage)
• Tab: Press to pause playback
• Control: Hold for very slow spectator movement
• Shift: Hold for slow spectator movement
• Left Mouse Button: Iterate through Players for lock-on
• Right Mouse Button: Exit lock-on, return to spectator flycam
• Z: Enter the FPV of currently locked or mouse-overed Player
• E: Lock-on to mouse-overed Player, or Exit the FPV of Player that you're currently spectating

Console Commands

Toggle the console by pressing tilde (~) after having loaded a level. The current console commands are:

Local Commands

• sethdr .3: Sets the HDR image exposure (HDR-mode only); higher values will yield more glow as lesser floating point colors will tend to over-expose.
• PrintActorClasses: Prints all the Actor Class Names registered with the application (this includes all MActor Script classes located in the Scripts\Spawnable directory!). Any of these names can be used with the spawnactor command.

Server Commands (work when you're playing singleplayer or hosting multiplayer, but not when you're a remote Client)

• changemap FragIsle.xml: Loads the specified map.
• spawnactor Truck: Spawns the specified Actor by its Class Name in front of your camera.
• setdaytime 17:30: Jumps the day to a particular 24hr time, such as 5:30 pm in this case.
• setdaytimespeed 30: Sets the number of day "minutes" that elapse per game second.

Network Commands (Defined in GameConsole.cs, these commands work whether you're a Client or Server, and when you're a Client these commands are sent over the network for the server to execute if you are a game administrator!)

• /killme: Kills your Player, if you are controlling one.
• /switchteam: switches you to the other team in the game sample

• /login admin: Client can attempt to login with the specified password, such as "admin", for administrator privilige. The Server's administrator password is defined in RealityEngine.ini, defaulting to "admin".
• /spawn Truck: remote version of the spawn command, allows administrator-priviliged Clients to spawn game Actors remotely.
• /setdaytime 17:30: remote version of the setdaytime command, for administrator-priviliged Clients.
• /setdaytimespeed 30: remote version of the setdaytime command, for administrator-priviliged Clients.

Multiplayer Support

We also have an online dedicated server you can join at 67.19.181.229:7777 (Offline - being upgraded)

Performance

For general performance measuring, enable "Display Performance Stats" in the Game Settings menu. You will get a read-out for each engine timer. This should give an indication as to where you are bottlenecked.

Fillrate: Fillrate is the #1 performance concern in Reality, because of our heavy emphasis on pixel shaders and per-pixel lighting. Several things can be done to reduce fillrate, including disabling any anti-aliasing, lowering your video resolution, and disabling HDR rendering, which requires extra rendertarget passes in post-process.

Video Memory: At highest settings Reality uses full-resolution uncompressed normal maps and DXT1 compressed diffuse maps. This can very quickly exceed the onboard memory of your video card resulting in memory swapping over AGP. If you get jerky behaviour or exceedingly low fps troughs (such as drops to 5fps) this is most likely your problem. You should lower the texture quality in the menu to a more appropriate setting.

CPU: Reality is generally not CPU limited, though in large scenes with many objects slower CPUs may become the bottleneck. Investigate the performance stats to see where the CPU cycles are going to, and adjust the game settings appropriately.

Known Issues

Fatal Problems:

On Windows XP, running Reality.exe an error is displayed that Game.DLL failed to initialize or could not be found. Running Reality Builder.exe gives the following error:

“The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0150002). Click OK to terminate this application.”

This appears to be a bug in .NET 2.0 Beta 1 related to your install/upgrade history. Installing or reinstalling Service Pack 2 seems to solve the issue. This may be related to the following KB article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/822520/EN-US/

Driver/Card Specific Issues:

• X800: Flickering/corruption may be seen on certain objects. This can be exacerbated by shadow mapping or water rendering, and at higher resolutions. This can also exhibit itself as completely missing geometry or polygons. This is a confirmed ATI X800 driver issue. The 64-bit drivers do not exhibit this problem. Latest ATI Drivers fix this problem.
• X800: Render Targets (Refraction shader, Gun Scope) do not always display the correct image. Latest ATI Drivers fix this problem.
• X800: Fog and drop-shadows flicker on and off on some objects in Frag Isle scene. Latest ATI Drivers fix this problem.
• 6800: Texture Memory Trashing on FragIsleBeta. Even though FragIsleBeta does not use 256 mb at 100% texture size, you may experience thrashing slowdown due to an apparent driver bug at 100% texture size on FragIsleBeta in particular. This does not occur on any 256 mb ATI cards, and will not occur on a 6800 if you reduce the texture size to 75% when playing FragIsleBeta via the Graphics Options menu. NVIDIA has been notified of the problem.
• 6800: Invisible meshes or popping - disable anti-aliasing in the NVIDIA driver control panel.
• 6800: Any NVIDIA ForceWare driver version > 71.24 will quickly lock up when rendering the WaterSurface in FragIsleBeta, so by default the WaterSurface has been disabled with RenderWater=false in RealityEngine.ini. You can also re-enable the WaterSurface rendering from the in-game Graphics Options menu. NVIDIA has fixed this problem in new internal test drivers, currently only for GeForce 6800 here.
• 9700/9800: With the 128 mb cards, set texture size percent to 50% when running FragIsleBeta. You can run the "Backyard6" and "ShaderTest" demos at 100% texture size on these cards.
• 9700: In DirectX Debug Mode (via control panel) the 9700 driver will complain that it cannot lock a mip surface level when water rendering is enabled. This can result in the entire scene not rendering. This is a driver issue.
• FX Cards: While these cards technically support ps2.0, they run poorly with those shaders. We recommend using ps1.1 instead.