Blue Window Frames and FRAPS Test

Finally got the second floor of the museum finished, including all textures and the final changes to the meshes. Although I will be adding several more models for the prototype test (e.g., medieval tower and some traffic signs one would normally find in a pedestrian zone in Germany), I wanted to do a quick test to see how the framerate for the game was. I exported what I had as a Windows executable file, ran the game from my laptop (Dell XPS M1730) in 1280x 1024 windowed format, set the graphics quality for "beautiful," and let FRAPS record the information for me. This is what I got:

Frames: 2739
Time (ms): 48159
Min fps: 49
Max fps: 76
Avg fps: 56.874

Still a better framerate than television (~30 fps). And here is a screenshot of the test, showing the completed second floor of the museum and the remaining meshes that need to be textured:

I noticed in earlier tests that the .png texture format was just too large and caused the game to slow down too much; I switched all textures to .jpg format, which seems to render much more quickly. All in all, a pretty good test, I suppose, although I wonder what the framerate will be on my students' computers when they test the game next semester. They may have to set the graphics quality for "good," or perhaps the game will lag too much. One other thing to test out before the prototype is deployed.

I thought a day or so about what I should do with the second floor window frames on the museum. Although I could have done them in a regular brown wood texture, I didn't know whether this would be as optically interesting. Then again, I didn't want to add something that one wouldn't perhaps find in Germany. So, after searching a while "Fachwerk Fenster" in Google Images, I discovered this nice picture:

I thought the blue color added a nice touch, so I sampled the color inside GIMP and created a texture map for the windows. I didn't put too much effort into the frames, however, since I'm guessing that most players won't spend too much time looking at the second floor of the museum and I needed to quickly move on to other aspects of the project, such as programming the whole thing in C#.