The Titanic Mod brings people at one of the most detailed and accurate free 3D recreations of the Titanic ever made. It puts the player in a whole new storyline for the game Mafia.
Time for a little motion.
This is part of what I've been working on the last two days. After countless of painstaking hours filled with trial and error and crashes, I finally seem to have gotten the hang of it.
What are you seeing in this video?
This video demonstrates an optimization script to improve the framerate of the game and to allow the whole scene to run smooth.
What it does -as you can see, the whole exterior of the ship disappears when the player enters any deck below C Deck, causing the framerate to jump to around 60 FPS as you can see in the top right corner. This should allow the whole ship including interior to be put into one scene without any loading screens between areas.
It's certainly not a new trick in the game development book as it has existed for ages, and is even automated in modern gaming engines, but I wanted to show to everyone that this mayor part of optimization is included to answer any concerns people might have about the final performance of the mod.
As for the exterior framerate, I'm still working on improving that.
Excellent work! I was afraid that it will be much harder to find the solution for the low frame rate. Old Mafia 1 Engine with all of these awesome details would lower the frame rate massively. However, it's great to see that you have fixed this!
Good idea and nicely implemented! I always wondered why you chose to mod Mafia though. Is it because it was around the same era as Titanic?
Not even as Mafia takes place in the 30's. The reason I've decided to stick with this game is because this project was originally intended for it back in 2006 and because it's still my favourite game.
Though it has certainly been tempting to just use Unity or Unreal Engine instead. I might do that at some point once this mod is done or if the dreadful day comes when Mafia can no longer run on modern Windows operating systems.
I too play Mafia from time to time, truly one of the best open world games that have ever been released. And I have the OST burned on a disc for me to hear while driving :P .
I see. I only ask because the work you do in your 3D modeling program is simply spectacular, and it would be nice for it to shine in a newer engine, without dealing with 2002 limitations. Nonetheless, I believe that there couldn't be a better game chosen for this mod as a base, than Mafia.
Yeah it's a pity once stuff turns ingame it's suddenly less... shiny...
Also setting up lighting in Mafia is a complete nightmare. To give you an idea, I've spent the last 3 hours trying to light the pool area alone. The editors have crashed I don't know how many times, my scene file has been corrupted at least 20 times and some models still aren't coöperating.
Big advantage of a modern game engine: It gives an error when something isn't set up properly. Here with Mafia, the editor closes to desktop and the scenefile becomes corrupted. I have almost a hundred backups of the exterior file alone. One for each tiny update I added.
Oh and I'm also guilty of occasionally playing the Mafia tune when driving in my old car in the city. It feels like Mafia with proper graphics :P
Same story with Hammer and GoldSRC, with which I work for the past 10 years or so. No proper error log, crashes to desktop and corrupt files. I have to make a backup every time I change a tiny little thing, just like you. Can be really time consuming (and utterly annoying).
It would be nice if you ever ported this thing to UE4 or Unity. But for now, let's enjoy playing MTM first ;) .