Your experience with 'Edge Tiles'

[Legacy_ehye_khandee]

               I was recently chatting with a fellow NWNer and they suggested that edge-tiles (the tiles along the outside edge of an Area) which were 'open' (visually seeming to allow a PC to walk off into them, visual 'shadow' on the projected space beyond the actual mapped Area) might cause lag.

This is a form of lag I've not yet encountered and I was wondering if it might be due to some other factor. If anyone else, PLAYER, BUILDER or CC guru could share their experience in this regard I would appreciate it. Have you seen such lag?

Be well. Game on.
GM_ODA
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_NWN_baba yaga]

               I dont think i ever turned on shadows for any mesh within my edge tiles... which i left out almost anytime lol. The more complex the mesh is the more i tend to not use a shadow at all. But to your question... i dont realy know, never dealt with it.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Rolo Kipp]

               <thinking of his own...>

ehye_khandee wrote...

I was recently chatting with a fellow NWNer and they suggested that edge-tiles (the tiles along the outside edge of an Area) which were 'open' (visually seeming to allow a PC to walk off into them, visual 'shadow' on the projected space beyond the actual mapped Area) might cause lag.

This is a form of lag I've not yet encountered and I was wondering if it might be due to some other factor. If anyone else, PLAYER, BUILDER or CC guru could share their experience in this regard I would appreciate it. Have you seen such lag?

Something Zwerkules pointed out in his Medieval City thread...

I found the cause for the frame rate drop. For my trees terrain I used the trees made by Helvene, because they look much better than the Bioware trees. However her foliage meshes sometimes have over 10000 unwelded tverts per tile. For that forest exit tile there were two foliage meshes with over 6000 tverts each which after welding the tverts only had about 400 each. I'll have to check all the trees to see if they all have that problem.
I guess I can halve the size of some the tree terrain tiles. That will not only speed up loading and improve performance, it will also make the hak smaller.

Edit: Only four more of the tree terrain tiles were as bad as the forest exit, but for some the filesize went down to 85 kb from 181 kb. The unpacked hak is now one MB smaller.
Possibly the worst thing was that the tile that had the most unwelded tverts was the forest edge tile. Walking towards an area edge with tree terrain should go a lot smoother now.

I started using Medieval after that and haven't experienced any of that lag.  But I *did* have an incredible amount of tverts on my Vault tile (which Pstemarie fixed for PQ ;-P ).

<...mistakes and shrugging>
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_ehye_khandee]

               tverts ??
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Rolo Kipp]

               <throwing buzzwords around...>

Texture Vertexes, er, vertexi... Verts! :-P

When you lay a map on a face, the face vertexes are in xyz space. You have to have a different coordinate system to talk about the texture verts, so they are in uvw space. Anyway, a face with a texture on it has two sets of coordinates: The xyz for it's 3D geometry and uvw for where it is on the texture map.

Just like verts (in 3D space) tverts should be welded (consolidated) - say you have a spot on the model where 6 different faces meet at a point. Each face has 6 coordinates at that point (36 different floating point numbers). Welding that vert reduces all the xyz values to a single xyz value. But sometimes people forget (guilty!) to weld the tverts, too.

<...hoping one or two hit the target>
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Khuzadrepa]

               

ehye_khandee wrote...
I was recently chatting with a fellow NWNer and they suggested that edge-tiles (the tiles along the outside edge of an Area) which were 'open' (visually seeming to allow a PC to walk off into them, visual 'shadow' on the projected space beyond the actual mapped Area) might cause lag

Just to clarify, the 'shadow' that you see on an edge tile isn't actually a shadow... it's just a lack of light.  Typically, there are no light sources on an edge tile, thus making it appear to be shadowy.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_ehye_khandee]

               OK, while I appreciate the replies - I'm still not seeing anything about lag in any of these save the OP - am I missing something here? Zwerkules seems to have lightly touched on lag with edges but only with a tile set that was not original to the NWN game and one not in my CEP version (cep 2.1) so I really don't know what to make of the whole at this point.

Have you any reason to believe that such things cause lag? Any links to any resource that would indicate such?

Be well. Game on.
GM_ODA
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_NWN_baba yaga]

               a lowpoly tile with shadows shouldnt cause any lag. High poly meshs, dynamic lights and unnecessary shadows (like complexe ground meshs with shadows....) can all cause lag for edge tiles because they are spread in 3 directions in a high number.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Khuzadrepa]

               

ehye_khandee wrote...
Have you any reason to believe that such things cause lag? Any links to any resource that would indicate such?

Be well. Game on.
GM_ODA

No, I have no reason to believe it causes lag. And I've done a lot of tilesetting personally. In fact, I haven't even heard this brought up before in my years in the community.
An edge tile is just like any other tile, except it has even LESS going on. It has no walkmesh and no lighting ( and therefore no shadows.) The only difference I can think of is that they aren't painted in the toolset; they are generated by the area on load. However, there are only a few of them repeated and it's on load, so I can't see that being a lag inducer.
As baba pointed out, if the tile itself has high poly counts, that can be a problem. But that's an issue with any tile, and isn't edge tile specific.
Hope that helps!
               
               

               

                     Modifié par Khuzadrepa, 08 novembre 2012 - 01:59 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_ehye_khandee]

               OK, one last question in this direction - of the original tiles to NWN, are any of them in the group that would be lag inducing by the definition in the above post?

Thanks in advance.

Be well. Game on.
GM_ODA
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_NWN_baba yaga]

               to figure out the problem your fellows have it would be good to know which tileset they used that caused the lag. Otherwise we are trying to "hunt down a ghost". To me none of the original tiles can cause such an experience, i never had any issue with them but with modern tilesets like tno, seasonal forest or rocky mountains where the problems are very clear to me but nothing i can do about.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_T0r0]

               "Just to clarify, the 'shadow' that you see on an edge tile isn't
actually a shadow... it's just a lack of light.  Typically, there are no
light sources on an edge tile, thus making it appear to be shadowy."


So are you saying that if you add in the ml lights you won't get the shadow effect ?
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Khuzadrepa]

               

T0r0 wrote...

"Just to clarify, the 'shadow' that you see on an edge tile isn't
actually a shadow... it's just a lack of light.  Typically, there are no
light sources on an edge tile, thus making it appear to be shadowy."


So are you saying that if you add in the ml lights you won't get the shadow effect ?

Depends on which shadow effect you mean. If you mean polygons casting shadows, I believe that you would then get those if you add mdl light sources.
If you mean the general darkness of the edge tile, then I believe you are right, those edge tiles would no longer be darkened (i.e. shadowy.) It should then look like any other tile.
I'll try to test that next week to reconfirm, but I'm pretty sure I'm remembering correctly (it's been a little while.)
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Shadooow]

               

ehye_khandee wrote...

OK, one last question in this direction - of the original tiles to NWN, are any of them in the group that would be lag inducing by the definition in the above post?

Thanks in advance.

Be well. Game on.
GM_ODA

none of the original, though castle/rural from 1.69 (tno think its internal name) is quite higher poly than the vanilla nwn content and is loaded visibly longer even on newer machines (12x12area), which I dont say comes from being high poly - this as well might be from total number of tiles in tileset or other factors

still nothing edge related...
               
               

               

                     Modifié par ShaDoOoW, 09 novembre 2012 - 05:46 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_T0r0]

               "If you mean the general darkness of the edge tile, then I believe you are right, those edge tiles would no longer be darkened (i.e. shadowy.) It should then look like any other tile."

Interesting....hypothetically would this be good? In other words, would it add confusion or realism ?