Niborius on 28/8/2019 at 12:15
Hi,
So I'm working on a mission with a large open space with quite some trees and grass objects. When I look over this field in Dromed's 3D window it will begin to lag quite a lot. What is this usually caused by? The area has a large air brush with some detailed spike brushes (up to 32 sides) a mix of png, dds and gif textures (I will work on getting them all to dds if you think that helps) and the tree and grass objects are transparent.
In-game it works fine, but then again I have a high-budget gaming pc so I'm afraid it will lag on lower-end pc's.
The mission is in an early stage so I can still change the lay-out as well, for example making the area less-open if that's necessary to reduce the lag.
And for those wondering, I will finish my current mission Secrets of the Old City very soon, but I needed a little distraction from it ;)
Thanks in advance!
Edit: By lagging I meant that mostly the 3D window will appear much slower when moving or rotating the camera. The lag is gone when I obstruct the 3D view with a solid brush.
Yandros on 28/8/2019 at 12:47
Most likely is a combination of lots of objects with transparency (trees etc.) and higher res textures. Some ways you can address it:
* Convert all larger textures to DDS (I know you mentioned working on that). I did this in Waterfront Racket when we were fairly far along and had been using mostly PNGs, and saw a dramatic improvement in FPS in game mode (10-15). We weren't noticing lag in Dromed's camera view, though.
* Reduce the size of textures where it won't be noticed much in game, i.e. use the smallest resolution you find acceptable.
* Add solid terrain if possible to block views of the trees so there aren't as many visible at one time.
* Consider using LOD for the trees. This replaces the tree models with lower-poly and/or models that use lower res textures when they are a certain distance away. You would need those models and textures, though, naturally.
Unna Oertdottir on 28/8/2019 at 13:17
Quote Posted by Niborius
Edit: By lagging I meant that mostly the 3D window will appear much slower when moving or rotating the camera. The lag is gone when I obstruct the 3D view with a solid brush.
It's just the editor which can't render too many polys. This doesn't influence gameplay. Enable show_stats, go in game mode. If fps is more than 30 and is never less than 25, it's okay.
Otherwise do what Yandros told you.
Tannar on 28/8/2019 at 14:50
Btw, if you just want to be able to move and look around faster in the 3D window, just zoom way in on the wireframe and that will reduce or even eliminate lag in the 3D window.
Yandros on 28/8/2019 at 14:57
Quote Posted by Unna Oertdottir
It's just the editor which can't render too many polys. This doesn't influence gameplay. Enable show_stats, go in game mode. If fps is more than 30 and is never less than 25, it's okay.
I mostly agree with you here, but my concern was he mentioned he has a powerful rig and was concerned with players who have old, slow PCs. If he gets 25-30fps then some players might only get 10-15.
Niborius on 1/9/2019 at 08:37
Sorry for the late reply. Thank you for the list Yandros, that's very helpful. I've added some solid terrain and that drastically improved the framerate in the editor. I'm not bothered a lot by lag in the 3D window, but I thought it might be a sign that it would lag for some players in-game as well.
I noticed that the filesize of the textures converted to DDS go down drastically as well with no loss of image quality (at least not that I could see).
@Tannar I tried to do that as well but it had no effect to me for some reason. I think it's what Unna said, that the editor can't render too many polys.
john9818a on 1/9/2019 at 09:53
Even though the rendering processes might be different between the dromed 3D window and in game, I've often noticed a difference in frame rate between a game played in a window vs. full screen.
bjack on 1/9/2019 at 15:48
Niborius, I am very pleased to find your posts on this subject here and the that fact other Dromed-ers are helping out so well. You are taking care to make your FM play well. Wonderful ! Thank you. And thanks to all FM creators that take this level of care to heart.
ZylonBane on 2/9/2019 at 01:46
I wasn't aware bjack was a Nigerian prince.
Niborius on 2/9/2019 at 10:58
Quote Posted by bjack
Niborius, I am very pleased to find your posts on this subject here and the that fact other Dromed-ers are helping out so well. You are taking care to make your FM play well. Wonderful ! Thank you. And thanks to all FM creators that take this level of care to heart.
That was nice to hear. :) But yea I would hate to see that I spent countless hours on a mission only to find most players can't enjoy it because of an unacceptable framerate.
You've been a great help to other upcoming mission as well. It's about 99% finished but I keep running into small things so I still have some work to do. The beta testers are doing a great job :)
