Possible Game Optimisation for Next Update?

[Gyrion]

Hi,

I posted a while ago about how I lag a lot with about 10ish fps in Alpha 22, when in Alpha 21 I could run the game well. I have tried playing about with the ingame settings but nothing still seems to fix my issue, I was wondering if there has been talk about optimisation of the game or some kind of performance boost for Alpha 23 when it comes out?

Would love to play online again but until the next update or a fix is found I am stuck on Alpha 21

 

[Stan`]

Hey @Gyrion, and sorry to hear that you are having issues running the game smoothly. 

Can you remind us what are your computer specs ? You can usually find a file summarizing all that in C:\Users\{YourUserName}\Appdata\Local\logs\system.info.txt if you are on Windows.

There will be performance improvements, but since the art has also gone a bit more beautiful it might counteract it. I will try to provide a low poly mod in the next months to see if that helps people with lower computer specs.

@elexis Is there any way he could run the profiler so we can know what is slowing his system down ? (In a simple way)

 

[Gyrion]

Hey @stanislas69 Thanks for the help dude, I won't lie I am not too good with computer specs and knowing what is good and bad, I tried using that file destination you provided with my name and I couldn't find anything in my Appdata file which had Local as a file.

I know a few of my specs if that could help

Windows 10 64-bit

Processor - AMD A6-7310 APU with AMD Radeon R4 Graphics (4 CPUs), 2.0 GHz

RAM - 4GB

DirectX Version - DirectX 12

[Stan`]

Ah my bad @Gyrion forgot 0ad in the path "C:\Users\{YourUserName}\AppData\Local\0ad\logs" That's why you should always read the wiki before speaking ^^

One thing you could try is to make sure that the game runs on the right GPU. Maybe something like this would help http://www.tomsguide.com/answers/id-3332228/force-dedicated-gpu-apu.html

[elexis]

Alpha 22 had many new high-poly models, but the engine didn't change relevantly. Installing the most recent graphics driver often helps.

If you want to do a better comparison between alpha 21 and 22, install both releases simultaneously, play the same map with the same mapsize and population limit and try to have the same amount of units on the map, because many things on the OS can change within that timeframe.

Does anyone know if the mesh and animation files support multiple levels of detail in the same file? If not, then a lowpoly mod could be the first step to a level-of-detail system without adding more work later to merge the files.

[Stan`]

Just now, elexis said:

Does anyone know if the mesh and animation files support multiple levels of detail in the same file? If not, then a lowpoly mod could be the first step to a level-of-detail system without adding more work later to merge the files.

Sadly it does not not. The game only supports one mesh per file. The animated models also bundle the armature with them. I think the best thing to do would be to re-rig every old mesh with the new armature, and just switch that in a mod. @Alexandermb Would you feel like rigging the old camel, the old horse, and the old unit meshes with the new armatures you made ? This way we could keep the new animations while not killing graphical performance. That would also reduce the low poly mod size.

[elexis]

If it remains at a mod, it sounds like it won't be updated anymore once Stan goes out of order. So we should try to find a way to get it into the public mod without increasing the filesize drastically. But I guess it would consume 100mb or more?

There are algorithms to reduce the polycount, but it's likely to look odd in some cases. It might be much less effort to try that when comparing it to all the maintenance required throughout the next releases then.

[Stan`]

1 minute ago, elexis said:

If it remains at a mod, it sounds like it won't be updated anymore once Stan goes out of order. So we should try to find a way to get it into the public mod without increasing the filesize drastically. But I guess it would consume 100mb or more?

There are algorithms to reduce the polycount, but it's likely to look odd in some cases. It might be much less effort to try that when comparing it to all the maintenance required throughout the next releases then.

One solution if a c++ programmer had the time to look at it would be to look at STK code. They have a LOD (Level of Detail System). One thing that could be done too would be to use the mipmaps we generate for no reason in the game so we could have low texture support. When we turn PNG into DDS we generate up to 8 sub resolution textures.

Maybe @fcxSanya would like to make the transition from STK to our game. You did a great job with STUN

[Stan`]

@elexis Also we do not have support for mods that do not change gameplay in the sense you can't join someone's game if he doesn't have the same mods as you right ?

[vladislavbelov]

11 minutes ago, stanislas69 said:

One solution if a c++ programmer had the time to look at it would be to look at STK code. They have a LOD (Level of Detail System). One thing that could be done too would be to use the mipmaps we generate for no reason in the game so we could have low texture support. When we turn PNG into DDS we generate up to 8 sub resolution textures.

Maybe @fcxSanya would like to make the transition from STK to our game. You did a great job with STUN

Implementing LOD for the current renderer arch will be a little bit hacky, so to go to LOD direction we need to improve the renderer, as @Yves mentioned  some time ago.

[elexis]

12 minutes ago, stanislas69 said:

@elexis Also we do not have support for mods that do not change gameplay in the sense you can't join someone's game if he doesn't have the same mods as you right ?

That is correct for the mp lobby. We have decided to prevent people from joining lobby games since a "You likely can't play in that game, are you sure you want to join?" question would almost universally be accepted with Yes and people will not understand what is happening, report this to moderators in the lobby. There should be either some mod.json boolean or it should be derived from the files contained in the mod whether this mod changes the simulation state or not.

[Stan`]

18 minutes ago, vladislavbelov said:

Implementing LOD for the current renderer arch will be a little bit hacky, so to go to LOD direction we need to improve the renderer, as @Yves mentioned  some time ago.

Okay. To be honest I don't know. I just felt like if we had code like the one from STK just lying around for us to use it, why not do it :).

9 minutes ago, elexis said:

here should be either some mod.json boolean or it should be derived from the files contained in the mod whether this mod changes the simulation state or not.

Why do I hear leper in my head telling me that some idiot is gonna make use of that ?

[Rolf Dew]

Strange alpha 21 was a bit laggy for me, but alpha 22 runs way better for me even with high spec mods (hyrule conquest), I thought that alpha 22 was was optimised quite a bit due the significant lack of lag on my system (I am using a Mac though) 

[Sundiata]

7 minutes ago, Rolf Dew said:

Strange alpha 21 was a bit laggy for me, but alpha 22 runs way better for me even with high spec mods (hyrule conquest), I thought that alpha 22 was was optimised quite a bit due the significant lack of lag on my system (I am using a Mac though) 

For some reason, macs run this game quite smoothly... Runs like a doozy on mine as well.

[Stan`]

2 minutes ago, Sundiata said:

For some reason, macs run this game quite smoothly... Runs like a doozy on mine as well.

Can you tell us if A21 was faster ?

[Rolf Dew]

Yeah it seems Macs are smoother 

Edited April 22, 2018 by Rolf Dew

[Sundiata]

5 minutes ago, stanislas69 said:

Can you tell us if A21 was faster ?

I can't,  My 7 year old mac at the time was falling apart and I couldn't open A21 for some reason... A22 is way faster (and way better looking) than A20 though, that's for sure (but the new mac certainly helped that as well).

Edited April 22, 2018 by Sundiata

[Rolf Dew]

And mine is a macbook 2012 model 

[Stan`]

@Rolf Dew Can you tell me if it has gotten worse between A21 and A22 ?

[Rolf Dew]

Alpha 22 is much better for me, no lag , it doesn't even heat up my mac anymore (unless huge numbers of units are on the screen)

Before I ran it in a window on lowest settings and it would still lag a bit and make my mac heat up 

[Rolf Dew]

Now I run it on fullsceen (still in low settings though) 

[Rolf Dew]

Does having xcode installed help the game run smoother? 

[Sundiata]

@Rolf Dew, have you tried using Atlas though, because that's completely bugged on my end. Very frustrating to use...

@however has used Atlas on a macbook pro (13 inch, 2017 model, 2.3 GHz Intel Core i5, 8 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3, Intel Iris Plus Graphics 640 1536 MB)

• I can't delete anything, so everything needs to be done in one go
• some of my saved versions just disappeared after hours of work 
• I can play some map-versions I made in Atlas, but can't actually find them in Atlas later ?!?
• I can't type anything in entities/actor search without every letter doubling itself. I have to copy paste the word I'm searching from a text-editor (every freakin' time)
• Random and repeated crashes, even though the game itself runs like a charm
• adjusting water height on a large map causes crashes

[Rolf Dew]

@Sundiata I have not tried Atlas yet

[Alexandermb]

7 hours ago, stanislas69 said:

Sadly it does not not. The game only supports one mesh per file. The animated models also bundle the armature with them. I think the best thing to do would be to re-rig every old mesh with the new armature, and just switch that in a mod. @Alexandermb Would you feel like rigging the old camel, the old horse, and the old unit meshes with the new armatures you made ? This way we could keep the new animations while not killing graphical performance. That would also reduce the low poly mod size.

Could be possibly, nowadays the blender rigging options allows to auto influence however i don't belive the low 10 fps are related to graphics since my pc is quite old and the only zones i get 10 fps are in HUGE maps like Egypt or when the pathfinder do his things with 300 units or more.

Amd sempron 145 single core 2.80Ghz overclocked to Athlon x2 3.20Ghz
4GB Ram 2x2 Samsung
2 Sata drive Total 500gb
And Nvidia Geforce GT520