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The mission has low fps. Searching for a solution.


Gadavre

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Hello.  I really want to play this mission properly. And my video card can keep a stable fps.  Please advise what variables should I change so that my fps is always 59-60 ?

The Dark Mod version 2.09

Mission: Blackgrove Manor (2021/03/14)

 

Edited by Gadavre
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  • Gadavre changed the title to The mission has low and normal fps. Solution methods

I'm afraid your settings are already fairly low. It's unlikely you'll be able to achieve a significant increase in framerate. You could always reduce renderscale further, but depending on what your actual bottleneck is, that may not actually do much.

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On 4/19/2021 at 9:14 PM, cabalistic said:

I'm afraid your settings are already fairly low. It's unlikely you'll be able to achieve a significant increase in framerate. You could always reduce renderscale further, but depending on what your actual bottleneck is, that may not actually do much.

I noticed that the fps exactly drops when the player moves away from the water, walks around the mansion.  in rooms everything is already normal.

Maybe there are variables that reduce the quality of water? water apparently consumes a lot of VRam I'm ready to experiment. the mission is very nice and beautiful.

If there are no such variables, then it might be possible to add them?  I doubt that the author of the mission will want to make water in low quality

Edited by Gadavre
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I doubt it's the water. The drops coincide with when you face the mansion. It is much more likely that the engine is trying to draw a lot of the mansion even though much of it is technically not visible. But determining visibility is no trivial task, and there are always scenes where it doesn't work so well. This may be one of them.

If the mission plays fine inside the mansion, I would just ignore this beginning.

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You can check the triangle visibility via r_showTris 2.

It may be worth pinging the author about this since he might be able to use a func_portal to better occlude the manor.

Oh!

Try enabling "Frontend Accelleration" and set your shadow implementation to "Maps" then also set:

r_shadowMapSinglePass 1

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16 hours ago, Gadavre said:

I noticed that the fps exactly drops when the player moves away from the water. on the territory of the castle everything is already normal

Maybe there are variables that reduce the quality of water? water apparently consumes a lot of VRam I'm ready to experiment. the mission is very nice and beautiful.

If there are no such variables, then it might be possible to add them?  I doubt that the author of the mission will want to make water in low quality

Please post getviewpos of your problem, as well as your system config

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8 hours ago, duzenko said:

Please post getviewpos of your problem, as well as your system config

What does this mean (getviewpos ) ? And how to do it?  I posted the video above. this is the beginning of the level. Everything is fine inside the castle

Windows 7  (64-bit)

Core i5 4430

Nvidia GT1030 2GB VRAM

16 GB RAM

 

I noticed that this variable in this value adds about 10 fps, but this does not solve the problem

seta r_usePersistentMapping  "0"

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5 minutes ago, Gadavre said:

What does this mean (getviewpos ) ? And how to do it?  I posted the video above. this is the beginning of the level. Everything is fine inside the castle

Windows 7  (64-bit)

Core i5 4430

Nvidia GT1030 2GB VRAM

16 GB RAM

 

I noticed that this variable in this value adds about 10 fps, but this does not solve the problem

seta r_usePersistentMapping  "0"

Open the console "CTRL + ALT + TILDE"

Then invoke con_noPrint 0 so that the console data will render at the top of the screen

Then invoke getviewpos 1

Then leave the console and capture a screen-shot and revert these settings.

 

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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On 4/20/2021 at 4:48 AM, nbohr1more said:

You can check the triangle visibility via r_showTris 2.

It may be worth pinging the author about this since he might be able to use a func_portal to better occlude the manor.

Oh!

Try enabling "Frontend Accelleration" and set your shadow implementation to "Maps" then also set:

r_shadowMapSinglePass 1

I have visportals around the manor although I don't know how optimally placed they are. The starting dock when facing the manor is the most demanding in the whole mission as there are quite of lot of draw calls and the only closed portals for the exterior are at the rear of the estate. Since the manor is visible from the dock and the front walls have a couple of see through gates, occluding the manor without obvious visual pop in might get tricky. Unfortunately the mission was designed more for aesthetic with performance being an afterthought.

If anyone knows if there are better ways to visportal/optimize the exterior I'm happy to try and create better performance.

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5 hours ago, ddaazzaa said:

If anyone knows if there are better ways to visportal/optimize the exterior I'm happy to try and create better performance.

I remember how I got an excellent idea how to place visportals in starting outdoors area of "Hidden Hands: The Lost Citadel".
Spend several hours on putting it into place (I'm not a mapper), but in the end it did not make considerable difference 😞

I'd suggest asking some experienced mapper to take a look...

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Visportals won't work here since there are too many gaps.

This can only be helped by func_portals with textured patches that look like the scene behind them. ( Manual billboarding )

( Engine wise ) For this use-case, an automatic billboard system would be helpful.

Wolfire Games did something similar:

http://blog.wolfire.com/tag/game-tech/5

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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18 hours ago, duzenko said:

@Gadavre this is not a problem with the game itself, but the particular map. Please ask the mapper to fix it. This thread should be closed and all further discussion continue in the map thread:

I understand you. I generally have a drop in performance in all new missions made since 2020. Of course, someone is to blame for this.  Then I stay on version 2.07 and only play the old missions. they are better optimized...New missions can't be optimized by mappers, as they don't have the knowledge  to do so. They don't know how to optimize the outside areas for the game version 2.09. you can teach them this, since you are the developers.

note

William Steele 4: The Warrens.  Author: Grayman

The big city is optimized perfectly. With shadows stencil fps normal (59-60). Тested in 2.07

William Steele 6: Balefourd Museum.  Author: Grayman

The territory is no bigger than the previous mission, but on the streets (exterior) fps drops heavily.   FPS increases only by disabling shadows.  But playing in this case is pointless. The author could not optimize this mission for the game versions 2. 08-2.09

The Hare in the Snare.  Author: frost_Salamander

FPS also drops in the exterior area in version 2.09

 

I did a bunch of tests on different maps, your new "map shadows" technology does not give an increase in fps.....

 Frontend Acceleration doesn't help either. Perhaps this option is not needed at all....

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  • Gadavre changed the title to The mission has low fps. Searching for a solution.
2 hours ago, Gadavre said:

I understand you. I generally have a drop in performance in all new missions made since 2020. Of course, someone is to blame for this.  Then I stay on version 2.07 and only play the old missions. they are better optimized...New missions can't be optimized by mappers, as they don't have the knowledge  to do so. They don't know how to optimize the outside areas for the game version 2.09. you can teach them this, since you are the developers.

LOL, I'm wiping tears of joy

It's _my_ job to teach _every_ mapper I know of or _not_ to optimize maps to run on _your_ PC 🤣

Seriously, though, you should understand that mappers always target their own system for performance. And some even consider 40fps to be good enough. Pretty much every mapper has at least a $200 card (before the mining craze). I'm sorry that you don't, but this is reality.

There are ways _you_ can "solve" it

  1. Buy a faster GPU.
  2. Contribute to the game code so that it can intelligently drop entities in scenes like that
  3. Learn to map and help the map authors to optimize
Quote

note

William Steele 4: The Warrens.  Author: Grayman

The big city is optimized perfectly. With shadows stencil fps normal (59-60)

William Steele 6: Balefourd Museum.  Author: Grayman

The territory is no bigger than the previous mission, but on the streets (exterior) fps drops heavily.   FPS increases only by disabling shadows.  But playing in this case is pointless. The author could not optimize this mission for the game versions 2. 08-2.09

This, again, needs to be discussed in dedicated map threads

Quote

I did a bunch of tests on different maps, your new "map shadows" technology does not give an increase in fps.....

 Frontend Acceleration doesn't help either. Perhaps this option is not needed at all....

It's supposed to help with CPU load, while you're limited by weak GPU

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duzenko

Suggestion

Is it possible to update the shadow rendering in the new version? For example, so that the player through the config can specify the distance from the player at which the shadows (all shadows)  can be drawn.... This would greatly improve performance. This feature has long been used with success in Cry Engine

 

Otherwise, only rich people will be able to play the new missions. You see, that many Mappers have good hardware and  create only   missions  with high system requirementsс

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20 minutes ago, Gadavre said:

duzenko

Suggestion

Is it possible to update the shadow rendering in the new version? For example, so that the player through the config can specify the distance from the player at which the shadows (all shadows)  can be drawn.... This would greatly improve performance. This feature has long been used with success in Cry Engine

 

Otherwise, only rich people will be able to play the new missions. You see, that many Mappers have good hardware and  create only   missions  with high system requirementsс

It won't help in this particular scene, and most others

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I have tracked down a performance issue due to the map wide fog. It seems to increase draw calls by 40%. There is a no fog version in the link below which should improve performance quite a lot. Let me know what performance is like with this version:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iXE4-W0jucFSUrDQ415XsBehCLuX8gzd/view?usp=sharing

I'm currently seeing if I can reduce the performance impact of the fog.

 

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On 4/21/2021 at 5:04 PM, ddaazzaa said:

If anyone knows if there are better ways to visportal/optimize the exterior I'm happy to try and create better performance.

I have looked into the outside visportals in the map.

The visportals on the left/right of the castle are pretty good, I think they do their job well.

The visportals in front of and behind the castle are strange, they don't help rendering in my opinion. Since I doubt they help with sound propagation too... it seems that removing them will not changed anything.
Remove them all. If you have vast space without notable blockers, everything is generally visible from everywhere, and sound travels straight, then there is no reason to put any visportals.
Another problem with these portals is that they seem to be intersecting. I think intersecting portals is a very bad setup in any case.

Now here is the idea of what might actually help.
It is a great luck that your map includes a fence/wall in front of the castle, which reliably blocks the whole castle in the mentioned camera shot. We just need to put portals in such a way that they don't allow light to go through this wall. To achieve it, add two portals in the plane of this wall:

  1. One huge portal just above the wall. From below, it should contact the top of the wall. On the other three sides, let it span over the whole map.
  2. One small portal where player enters the yard (goes through the wall). UPDATE: Actually, there is more than one entering, an each one should have its own portal of course.

With such portal setup, anything which is not behind these two portals will be culled away, which should include the whole castle.

UPDATE: A rough plan:

Spoiler

blackgrove_portals_general.jpg.c9917772f4bc30f580938d98854caff8.jpg

 

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