Monthly Archives: October 2016

Maniaplanet 4 Preview #2 – Nadeo Live Part#1

Note: All images are Work In Progress.

Hello everyone,

Today, we are very pleased to present this second preview of Maniaplanet 4 which will be including a sneak peak of:

  • How to promote your “Title Pack” on the Web?
  • Clubs creation and management
  • The new Maniaplanet chat

“Title Pages”: automatic websites to promote your “Title Packs” on the Web

At Nadeo, one of our goal is to give creators the possibility to better promote their “Title Packs”.

Thus, when a “Title Pack” is published with Maniaplanet 4 on the Maniaplanet store, a mini website is automatically generated and published on the web: the “Title Page”.

title_page

These “Title Pages” can easily be customized from the “Title Manager” which will be accessible on maniaplanet.com website. You will mainly find the same features as of today plus new ones as:

  • Images upload and hosting,
  • Admin management,
  • News posting,
  • Statistics.

tm_metadata

Zoom at 50%

Images upload and hosting Zoom at 50%

News will be written and posted directly from the “Title Manager”. They will be posted on maniaplanet.com, the “Title Page” and in Maniaplanet.

title_news

tm_news

Statistics will be accessible from the “Title Manager” too. You will find stats about your “Title Pack” that will help you know the activity on your title.

tm_stats

Clubs creation and management on the Web

With maniaplanet 4, you will be able to create and manage your own club. A club gathers players sharing the same interest for an activity like, creation, competition or/and rock’n roll for instance. Topics may be infinite! Besides, a club doesn’t need to have a team. You could only have individual members.

Clubs will be created, managed and diplayed from maniaplanet.com

Each club will have its own customizable webpage (emblem and header page). The Club webpage will give the following info:

  • Club members and teams,
  • Competitions and/or matches played by the Club,
  • Results.

club_home

The Club Manager will have a panel of tools to manage its players / teams / admins / matches and competitions.

cm_players

cm_edit

cm_team

The new Maniaplanet chat

The new chat plugin code has completely been written again. The improvements done on the chat server and in the Maniascript allow an important gain of performances (50%).

Design
Design will change in order to give a better sight on your friend’s info and a bigger text zone.

Conceptual image

Conceptual image

Notifications
The notification system has been redone too and gives now more details like the type of notification.

Chatrooms
The major update is the chatroom support allowing you to discuss with several users at the same time. Besides, you will have the option amoung others, to:

  • Add a user in your friends’s list
  • Join a user’s running game

XMPP clients compatibility & multiline messages management
The new maniaplanet Chat will be compatible with external XMPP clients and will allow the message of multiline messages. In nutshell, it means that it will be possible to connect to the chat server with an external communication soft such as Jabber, Trillian ou Psi for instance, and then to communicate with your friends and in chatrooms without the Maniaplanet client.

The Internet chat client

The chat will be accessible from the future new maniaplanet.com website

 

chat_web

More features are expected to come to Maniaplanet 4 (for the beta, the release or after the release), so stay tuned to hear about them!

Have fun and see you on the forum for any questions you may have!

Maniaplanet 4 #Preview 1 – Performance and rendering

Hello everyone,

After three months of development on Maniaplanet 4, it’s time now to start our preview phase. Until the release of the beta, we’ll be posting previews, highlighting the key elements we are working on. For today, our preview 1 focuses on performances and rendering in Maniaplanet 4. Hope you’ll enjoy it.


Maniaplanet 4 will show major technical improvements to the Maniaplanet engine and especially on:

  • processors and GPU performances,
  • building blocks optimization,
  • loading times,
  • lightmaps rendering.

All theses changes will result in a faster and more powerful Maniaplanet system which will enlarge player’s possibilities of creation and offer a better gaming experience.

Better performances

We’ll switch the engine’s graphical API from DirectX 9 to DirectX 11. This change added to a better use of processors (especially multi-core processors) will allow better general performances in Maniaplanet 4.

As you can see in these pictures, there is a visible gain of frames per second***:

You can also count on an improvement of performances and a better framerate in Virtual Reality.

Building blocks optimization

In Maniaplanet 4, environments blocks will be optimized to reduce the size of maps and their loading times, framerate and lightmaps computing times.

1/ Blocks size will decrease.
You can see in the table below, the block size variation between Maniaplanet 3 and Maniaplanet 4*.blocks-size-table

2/ In Maniaplanet 4, depending on the distance between the block and the player, the LOD (level of details) displayed on the block will vary.

3/ The quality of blocks modelisation will change too. If you choose “Very fast”, blocks will slightly be of lesser quality than in Maniaplanet 3. But, the “Very nice” option will ensure a better quality with no additionnal ressources than before.  At last, in some situations, non visible sides of blocks will be deleted.

Maps faster loading times

Maniaplanet 4 will significantly improve maps loading times, mainly during the first loading**. These gains on time are possible thanks to:

  • operations taking advantage of multi-core processors, such as decals generation or script compilation.
  • several modifications made on the very process of loading maps,
  • the increase of datas precalculated when you open an environment.

Further more, it is notable that this loading time optimization comes with a greater computer data storage which will accelerate loading times between maps.

The table below gives examples of loading times. Durations are estimated and vary with computer configuration and alpha status of Maniaplanet 4. Here are averages after 3 tries.

MP4---loading-times

Lightmaps rendering

Lightmaps rendering will be changed in Maniaplanet 4, following the upgrade from DirectX9 to DirectX11. For now,  lightmaps rendering varies with the map itself and the quality of selected shaders. At that moment, lightmaps rendering is optimized for “day” maps only. We are still working on this subject to make this optimization available on all moods, the objective being to to get lightmaps with a quality at least equal or superior to the one in Maniaplanet 3.

lightmaps

*Maniaplanet 4 is still in Alpha, numbers can change at the release of the update.

**PC configuration used to calculate loading times:

  • CPU : Intel Xeon W3550 @ 3.07GHz
  • GPU : Nvidia Geforce GTX 480
  • RAM : 24Go DDR3
  • Resolution : 1920*1080 @ 60Hz
  • OS : Windows 10 Pro
  • Maniaplanet settings : Very Nice

***Work in Progress