slowdown when fighting with big armies

[sanderd17]

I know it's perfectly normal that there's a slowdown when you and your opponent both have big armies. It asks more path calculations, more animations, more memory etc.

But it becomes worse when you are constantly killing each other.

I have noticed that, when you kill a unit, It takes about 3 minutes before it starts sinking in the ground. After 3 minutes of sinking, it completely under the ground, even for the most steep surfaces that are still accessible, but it's still sinking further for 2 minutes (you can see it in the atlas creator, where you can zoom below the ground).

So combined, it takes 8 minutes from death till the unit can be removed from the memory and the animation stops. In those 8 minutes, a lot of new units can be created, causing to use up more memory than the original population cap of 300 would ever allow.

I think that the last 2 minutes may be removed, and the first 3 minutes maybe brought to one minute. That would half the time it takes for a killed unit to disappear from the memory.

Are there people who agree with me? Or have a different opinion?

[Pureon]

Are there people who agree with me? Or have a different opinion?

I agree the unit shouldn't be around for 8 minutes after it's death. However I'm not sure how much of an impact this has on the slowdown. AI and pathfinding are known to be the main causes of it, neither of which are affected by the dead unit I believe. A dev will probably say I'm wrong though

[zoot]

I agree the unit shouldn't be around for 8 minutes after it's death. However I'm not sure how much of an impact this has on the slowdown. AI and pathfinding are known to be the main causes of it, neither of which are affected by the dead unit I believe. A dev will probably say I'm wrong though

Though I have done no work whatsoever on that, you are absolutely right. Dead units have practically zero impact on performance. They only fill up a tiny spot of memory, of which there is plenty. The reason for the 300 pop cap is not to conserve memory, but rather to conserve processor cycles going into all the long-winded calculations (pathfinding, AI, etc.) that must be done for living units (only).

[plumo]

How little memory are we talking about?

[zoot]

A few bytes? Maybe not, but it's something on that order.

[sanderd17]

A few bytes? Maybe not, but it's something on that order.

Maybe memory isn't a problem indeed, but most of the time, it's animated, while you don't see the animation animore after it sunk into the ground.

anyway, I believe you guys when you're saying this doesn't cause slowdown.

Edited January 15, 2013 by sanderd17

[VladimirPootin]

Could it be impacting graphics rendering simply by having all these dead units on screen but not visible?

[zoot]

It has some kind of impact on rendering performance, but not the type of lag that most people are seeing (which is CPU lag).

[WhiteTreePaladin]

Entities slow the game down because they are part of the simulation. Entities reference the actors which represent the graphical portion of the unit. Actors are just rendered, and are fairly cheap as far as performance goes. Animations can be more costly in terms of performance. However, the sinking into the ground is just a translation of the actor's position downward; it is not an actual animation and is pretty efficient. If you'll notice on the random maps with lots of unreachable trees, the unreachable trees are often just actors, and not actual entities. You can't click on them and they have no real impact on the simulation performance. Right now, there are some CPU related issues that need optimizing. The game runs OK on an average graphics card, but even with a high end processor, it can struggle on a small map with two players if the map design makes pathfinding difficult.