Prey (2006) Remake mod

Github.com

DLSS 3 support and additional lighting complexity might be in the cards come next generation GPUs. Wrapping up on the high end in a few weeks. I will be focusing on the 2k version next, VR will be last, and free as originally stated though I would prefer to make my .pk4 read only in a way users cant easily bypass so I retain credit for my work. Ill give you as a relevant development party the non locked down version if I ever figure out how to make all that work.

I can confirm JPG is the most obvious venue to make your GPU bottleneck run a lot better at the cost of longer load times since mip maps are created during loading and wont impact in game performance other than positively. Thats assuming the bottleneck is bandwidth related. It might not be. In which case youll have to wait until I launch the full optimization pack.

Good to know. I can add all kinds of markers that wont be necessarily obvious to people trying to erase them if I ever run into someone who would actually steal my work and try to pass it as their own. And I could troll them with some kind of bot that would turn into a time wasting arms race if it came to that. And id be motivated to make something like that in house. Even if I had to actually take the time to learn programming. Ideally no more than 2 or 3 languages. If I make something neato enough it can serve as some kind of thesis later, if relevant to the field. Which in part it might be.

My dream job is scanning DNA with AI and finding patterns relevant to findings in an actual wet lab while others work more directly on Jurassic Park science. I want to port the cellular synthesis of Naked Mole Rat biology to humans, to create an elvish race with gene drive level stability. And we can monitor the next generations cell division information to see if mutations destroy my glorious gene drive stack in my son, who would be superhuman to the extent possible with present genomic information.

I want to reverse engineer Nikola Tesla, and make that strain more stable than ever before. So like Leonardo da Vinci in a runaway cancerous growth like a memory leak in the matrix if this turns out to be a simulation.

Cnn.com

Early prototyping strategies.

Rochester.edu

Alleninstitute.org

Someone like Emperor Carmack would be very low hanging fruit coming pre'evolved for cybernetic synergy being heavily general intelligence focused biological architecture. PC Master Race genetics.

I mean I think thats pretty reasonable. The ability to make free **** read only. To be upset about that is more strange than my plans for improving humanity.

You should on the fly do a test where real fast just keep PNG in general for transparencies, and do 4:2:0 87% JPG quality for the rest of the games stock textures from the original games TGA data folders. It might speed up your snapdragon APU and wont take very long to make. The engine supports custom resolutions. With enough optimization getting some kind of consistent upscale for VR should be doable with solid performance.

"(especially after the key resellers tripled the price for the original game)."

I mean that is true. Emulators with free content all over the public domain, just like that, have endless fields of projects for everything. Its impressive how once people start actually paying for abandonware the drop off intensifies, like it does for other paid products. My attitude is if you have a RTX 4090 you can handle a meal at McDonalds to siphon 6 months of human misery into one product.

Cant say software engineers are in a rush to monetize things so trivial as what we are doing. I have more incentive because im poor and literally without a job at present. Its amazing I could barely afford this RTX 4090 with last gen CPU grunt. If Mark the Lizard was smart he would find people like you and hire them to make his products more interesting. Side hustle cant hurt. You are beating your head against modern Meta technological slow downs already. I can see why Carmack left. 5% GPU utilization is definitely Satanic Evil that cannot be tolerated.

Team Beef plays the same game. Purchase the game legit through Gabens power. I wonder how much of that is basically crooked. CD Key gens, dead IPs, dead studios. Incentives speak quietly. It would have to be just under 1% happening out there in the real world. I mean Steam sold me a game you cant even play today, servers permanently down. Free money printer glitches like a clone board of advisers comprised entirely of James Camerons telling us how to make it big. Some of these websites are definitely gaming us. The incentive and ability to get away with it is too glaring. Meanwhile honest people work their *** off and make jack ****.

I noticed id tech 3 accepts zip files under specific circumstances so it shouldnt be impossible. Especially if one could change the way the engine functions with source code for the newer engine. Locking down a .zip is trivial. Getting the game into the file in a useable way is the issue. I can drop the .zipped version in your possession with a funky password for the fun of making the game use it. Like pulling a sword out of stone. If you were up for the challenge if you thought it would be reasonable, even for your own ambitions.

Does this work on windows at all?

Blogs.windows.com

Bluestacks.com

Think I can get your version working on windows? Havent tried yet.

By compile you mean the build function in visual studios? Im NOT a software engineer yet. And I only have minor exposure to Visual Studios using it to apply a CPUID hack to get around intels compiler slow downs in some rare games using the debug function which appears to be all thats needed to apply the patch.

Ill try to get in contact with him. Looks like hes Chinese, and the only way is through github making an account probably.

I removed a lot of comments to clean it up.

Im about halfway through the game optimizing the crap out of each level in the editor and making it smooth for a Zen 3D platform. Loading the GPU with heavy use because the mod adds latency to an already penalized game engine ticking around 62.5 times per second. So you need a really fast CPU to brute force through the desynchronized game logic latency penalty. I can mitigate it in the editor but its incredibly time consuming to make each level hit 60fps. I consider it a flaw of the engine that hurts VR performance especially since that platform has less power to brute force through the nonsense.

For VR hardware if you are still working on the project you are going to def want DDS JPG support, which I got working on my end, and the graphics API being used to be using more than one ARM core for performance reasons. Which the project you are building from uses, but I think you mentioned you are deviating from that. I also recommend using the asynchronous cvars to offload more game logic to the second thread that isnt default.

Being out of sync with 62.5 will cause MASSIVE stalls unless you know the editor workaround to fix when they happen. I want to push the VR hardware to the limits but by the time I get there the things ive pointed out need to be taken care of.

The goal was a solid 60fps on the Quest 2. Its obvious the texture mod for this device will have to be very conservative, but the problem is clearly going to be the CPU performance we need to focus on certainly. What im doing in the editor is important for hitting 60fps consistently which would be impossible without it. Even without the mod in places the game will sometimes drop fps which I can fix in the editor. It would be far better if we could run the game logic at 60fps instead of 62.5fps but thats digging around Carmacks C++ and sounds unreasonable. So maybe I can talk him into doing it one day for the open source DOOM 3 that you guys are basically working from by spreading graffiti in his social media on this subject.

Ill make the VR version free but I dont want it to be used by rando modders where they take credit for months of work I put into this so I might want some help with that.

Youtube.com

RTX 4090 version core should be done soon as in about a month. Optimized for 4k point blank texture shader resolution custom resolution every texture tuned by eye which took ages. And 8k at normal distances which without raytracing the RTX 4090 can drive.

2k version, then the VR version. So you have time to refine the project here and there as I know you have several you are juggling with your superhuman programmer capabilities and stuff.

It would be super sick if someone was like entity AI now runs on the 3rd core, and I would just run the sound events on the 4th core. Trust me it sounds stupid but the way the game logic works even without changing the 62.5 tic **** that would really help the bottlenecks that believe me are a huge pain in the *** to work around with like 4 or 5 different optimization tactics.

The more cores, the more latency is the tendency. I get that. But if you can do **** in parallel that might actually help even if it adds overhead and complexity. If the tick rate was 60 the Quest 2 performance would be considerably superior trust me. But since thats probably too hard just chucking stuff on different cores would be a id think quick and dirty hack. It genuinely requires a pretty super fast CPU for solid 60 performance because the game logic just wasnt perfect I think even historically because DOOM 3 launched early to not come across as a copy of Starbreeze (2004). Thats speculation but relevant since John wants to be cutting edge, and that had to hurt because its a damn good engine with basically the same features. Then there was the stencil debacle.

Reddit.com

What it feels like to use the patented code and just not announce it because its almost a quarter century into the future and we need to double the shadows eventually and soften them like Starbreeeze does for the good of mankind. Its what the cool kids do.

So I guess I kind of wish he just waited a few more months to look into the crystal ball of the future and ****. Your Prey VR project would run significantly better if Satanic evils like 62.5 tic rates werent introducing horrible lows with slower machines or crazy mods. Like it runs about as well as Unreal Engine 4 Final Fantasy VII Rebirth performance mode on PS5. But it really needs to be silky smooth period for VR. No excuses. So the flaw I cry about with the game engine is more an extreme annoyance that it could have been the ultimate perfect retro engine to make Turok or something legally scary with.

Thats fine, I can target around that performance envelope and bring CPU optimizations to Qeust 2 as im doing that right now. I can also get higher fidelity if that allows us to leverage more CPU I freed up to save bandwidth and use it more efficiently by mixing DDS and JPG together to get as much visual enhancement as possible. Without JPG I can not target higher resolutions if already operating at the hardwares limits. And 87-94% 4:2:0 is the sweet spot. I have a rule to never allow any one texture targeting beefier hardware to go over 100mbs though. DDS normal maps are very expensive. JPG is far more efficient, and 50% to 2x higher the compression artifacts are irrelevant. The ability to never have to use RXGB DXT5 would be a game changer and would net the most radical bandwidth savings. Its folder centric out of the box. What im talking about is customizing the software to support it however it pleases. Probably not too hard id imagine especially since the code is very clean as legends indicate. Low hanging fruit would be like I said throwing sound and AI on their own cores 3 and 4 respectively. That would be the best way to get more oomph out of the Quest 2 unit since those are jugulars for the game logic desynchronization latency bottleneck. I can work around it in the editor mostly, but more ways to make it matter less would make inferior hardware handle the game better. Like the android project.

If its arbitrarily simple to go into id tech 4 as an engine and change a few lines of code allowing the tic rate to be 60 that would obviously be the most sound move to play since it would be the correct one assuming it didnt incur other as of now unknown issues. I would have to then fix the sound events and animations since the devs built them around the flawed game engine logic. My guess is this was set to that specific number in part because it was rapidly brute forced into market space with competition. And there is hope its changeable which would have a RADICAL impact on all platforms assuming mods or just very low barely able to run it specs.

Then someone has already done that work which is great and it sounds like its also using a multithreaded renderer which if it has its own threads thats brilliant. Is there a formal set up guide ideally by video for various platforms? Im going to focus on windows until im done. Which is then the clearly inferior version if everything else checks out. Then ill experiment with Linux on its own NVME since im aware I have to switch formats and its a hassle to go between windows and Linux for this reason.

Ill have to jump on the Quest 2 unit before any of that high performance hardware Linux adventure takes place. It sounds like its going to actually need to be starting off with memory bandwidth savings or raw triangle performance enhancement before considering any HD pack. Which is partially what im doing. The heaviest levels that were exceeding a 24GB framebuffer are getting somewhat consolified. Which will round out the requirements where your VR experience was struggling.

Getting the performance up for VR is already possible with the editor and 95% of the game the devs were lazy with texture optimization shoving it into memory even when out of view. So I can target the HD pack and fixing the performance issues at the same time. Im optimizing the crap out of it out of necessity because windows using the original game code is slow unless I do a bunch of gorilla warfare in the editor where the devs dropped the optimization ball. And frankly the mods add so much overhead the latency penalty of the engine out of sync logic arises as a problem. The multithreading craziness sounds like it arose out of targeting a cell phones hardware originally. Necessary action with slow ARM. We can forget about raytracing, but im 100% positive hd textures are going to fly on Quest 2. There is a wild room for improvement it needed the devs just didnt invest time into before shipping. Not even the last 1.4 patch had the lets optimize the bandwidth of our levels feature thought out and executed.

Now im going to want to make this mod thats also going to be free tamper proof or credit lurking. Unreal engine appears to just like that offer encrypted pk files. Which means I might delay the launch until I learn python. Im not seeing a obvious solution just kind of dabbling. Its going to be such a thorough good job that there wont be any need to change anything in the first place. Zero need to maintain compared to what you are doing. Security is kind of a joke these days anyway. It sounds like AI with Q* and OpenAI might be able to just render quantum computers irrelevant. It basically achieved a mathematical Genius level beyond humans, and kind of proved we could break the the veil of our ignorance as Sam Altman the fired then rehired CEO put it.

Maybe John Carmack is like Batman, with a secret AGI lab with no intention of being nationalized for national security purposes.

He becomes a third party AGI developed to oversee the best intentioned future of mankind. But not directly controlling it beyond providing safety guardrails.

"But the CPU isn't a bottleneck, the GPU is mainly the part where it comes to its limits."

My friend, the sacred bandwidth efficiency curvature design is coming to fix your GPU bottleneck. I can save on each level probably 5-20% memory bandwidth depending on how ****** up the dev optimization was thinking about it like a graph side by side. Sometimes they had multiple objects floating in space over eachother. Im suffering both CPU and GPU bottlenecks due to the extreme nature of the mod. Solving them has been, difficult. I cant seem to get beyond the eternity of the modding time distortional event horizon. Which is why locking it behind some sort of DRM would make some sense. Because aint nobody going to do all that. Its simply too much work. Entire development teams said, nah.

"He can't use it because somebody "got passed the uspto before he did". Annd now, he has to use a potentially less efficient or unnecessarily complex mechanism to circumvent an idea he had on his own."

If there are faster mathematics, its been over 20 years now, I dont think anyone with a patent thats irrelevant today since literally no one uses it or cares is going to get us for upgrading this engine.

Also it would be nice if there was a guide to use the t rex version of this engine one windows that was normie proof. Consider me dumb when it comes to downloading github stuff and compiling it. The best ive done in visual studios is patch software to lie to it about its CPUID using the debug button. Rare case speed hack for AMD CPUs using intels compiler.

I have about half the game complete now and it should be barely fast enough with my Zen 3D using all of its threads to losslessly record 4k. I can then upscale it with AI similar to DLSS but not real time to 8k from this lossless data and upload to YouTube, and watching it buffered at 8k you can get a decent quality supersampling to a 4k display. After about the third level the devs stopped optimizing the video memory usage behind the scenes so to speak for the rest of the game. This stacks with mods eating over 24GBs without massive human labor input. Even when under control its required to bring the GPU latency down so these out of sync game logic stalls dont drop the framerate under 60. The combination of the mod and the really not ideal programming to be brutally honest is why the lows are what they are. John Carmack is definitely a good programmer but this is brutally not good in id tech 4 since no one can sync the game logic in this mode where it isnt a stutter fest. Out of the box the game engine is super unplayable trash. The cvar fix definitely isnt a complete fix either. And we are lucky I can port over to your version the edited levels with all the optimization despite this flaw, since im directly fixing it in a very ooga booga way. One of the levels had a map memory leak out of the box that is also fixed. So the devs left wonderful gemstones in addition to Carmacks Satanic ritual of desynchronized game logic penalization upon a helpless mankind.

Im going to make the Quest 2 version free.