[Mark]

I am in desperate need of increasing the FPS in the large outdoor area of my map. Since my original posting in a different area of the forums had 900 views but no responses, I deleted it from there and started it here hoping for a better audience

It drops to 12-15 FPS in many areas. Before going through all the time consuming trouble of trying out these fixes I was asking if:

1. Should I align all the tons of sector ceilings to the same height. Would it make the parallaxing in the engine run faster giving an FPS boost?

2. I wondered how much drag all of my sprites and models were dragging down the FPS.

3. And should I split the map into smaller chunks?

4. Is there a line of code I could add to cons or cfg to keep Polymer lights but not display normal and spec maps for textures, and would that give any boost?

Since the original post had no suggestions I just went through the painfull process of experimenting on a copy of the map.

By deleting all 2,569 sprites and models I gained back about 25 FPS.

I aligned only about 200 ceiling sectors. Way too tedious to do more. No difference in FPS. Either I didn't do enough or it makes no difference at all to the game engine.

I walled off and deleted about 1,000 sectors and 3000 walls of the 13,000 along the edges of the map. I gained back maybe 4-5 FPS.

The mostly point lights in the map have very little affect on the speed.

Other large outdoor maps suffer from the same slowdown. It would be great if we could narrow down the biggest offenders of FPS and try to avoid those techniques in map making.

[Master Fibbles]

I'm not sure how the lighting system works but it seems that lights are loaded even if you can't see their source or them. At least that is a theory as to why large outdoor areas can be slow.

My older brother and I made a map in old school Duke (before eduke and mapster) based in a theme park with huge open spaces and rides that actually worked (conveyors and lifts with gspeeds, very creative imho). The thing actually crashed Duke more than once so we did things to block the view of different areas and that worked with the old engine. I just loaded up the level to see and it runs at a steady pace of 5~10 FPS and drops to basically 2 when I do walk around the wall blocking the view to one of the most intensive rides (flame shooting sprites all over).

The engine was never designed for open spaces so this is an old hurdle.

[MetHy]

The only suggestion I have is to seperate the map into several maps, all linked by a HUD system so that all the data is saved and you can go back and forth anytime you want.
Each indoor area could be a different map for example.

[Forge]

If it's a large, outdoor map where you can see for long distances, you may be seeing too many sprites at once.

[Mark]

Yes it has a large outdoor area with indoor areas mostly in the walls around the edges of the map. In a copy of the map I already deleted those outer 1000 or so sectors and saw little increase in FPS in the outdoor area. So splitting the map that way won't solve the problem.

And if I try to split the large open area of the map ( a massive undertaking ) it will destroy the feel and atmosphere that is there now.

Since they are used heavily in the map, I also tried replacing all the hi-res textures that use normal and parallax textures with a plain low res type and saw no noticable increase in FPS.

So far the only real change came from removing all 2500 sprites. But the map is junk without them.

Thanks anyway for the suggestions.

[Forge]

Put in hills or walls, or sink some areas low to block the players view from seeing too many sprites at once.

[Mark]

I don't think it would help. Right now if I am in an enclosed indoor area and just look out a door or window at a very tiny portion of the outside, the FPS drops like a rock. Even if no sprites are visible. All it takes is the tiniest glimpse of anything outside to slow things down. Even if it is only the sky.

[Alithinos]

what reduces your fps most is an enemy.
try to reduce the number of enemies that are to show on the screen at same time.

If for example you placed 100 enemies at a single big room,try to reduce the number of enemies at that sector and transfer the rest of the enemies to other sectors (rooms) that are not viewable at the same time as the other sector.

[Mark]

The bad part is I have not even added the monsters yet.

[Alithinos]

Marked, on Sep 21 2010, 04:13 AM, said:

The bad part is I have not even added the monsters yet.

Oh!

Is there a possibility then that you have some wrong settings ?

I mean I used my graphics card's driver to apply forced 4x edge detecting antialiasing on another game,and I forgot to turn off antialliasing after I played and when I tried to play Duke with HRP I had such a lag I couldn't belive it.

Are you sure there isn't something like that happening to you too ?


BTW,can you tell us what's your system specs ?

[Master Fibbles]

The number of enemies has nothing to do with hit. I think it is the shear size of the map. The open spaces etc with the parallax sky may be the main offender. I think the best option is a hub map.

[Mark]

Over the weekend I aligned a whole bunch more ceiling sectors to the same height. That combined with the 200 or so I did before had no affect on the speed. I am fast coming to the conclusion that this map is going to sit idle on my hard drive unless some rendering miracle is added some day. I know you can't tell without seeing the map, but splitting up the outdoor areas is next to impossible as far as I'm concerned. Its my first map and I have been working on it part time for over a year now. A total re-working would set me back even further. Plus as I stated before it would ruin the look I was going for which is an impressive large Ancient Roman city. But I appreciate the suggestions you have all given so far.




I played around with the video card settings a while ago and couldn't come up with anything that made a huge difference. I'll double-check my settings again tomorrow night.

Intel Core2 duo 3.0 ghz

4gb ram

Nvidia Geforce 9800GTX+ video card

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