Placable Lag?

[Legacy_Jenna WSI]

               I have an area that's quite laggy, and I'm not sure why. I thought only the animated plcs caused much lag, out of the CEP stuff.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Jackal_GB]

               All placeables can cause lag if you use too many of them. Check out Red's "Jungle Village" prefab on the vault to demonstrate lag vs placeables.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Jenna WSI]

               Do any create more lag than average?
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Jackal_GB]

               Placeables and creatures with high poly counts can cause the most.  In other words, the highly detailed models require a lesser number to cause lag.
               
               

               

                     Modifié par Jackal_GB, 19 décembre 2010 - 05:37 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_Fester Pot]

               Avoid using some of the new trees added to 1.69. They cause nasty hiccups, like horses do, due to their high poly count.



FP!

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Jenna WSI]

               I didn't use 1.69 plcs, just CEP. The CEP trees may be the issue though.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Frith5]

               It's been recommended that one avoids putting down placeables on grid lines, as this causes lag too. So, if you can avoid crossing a grid line with your placeables, do so.



Regards,

JFK
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Frith5]

               oops, double posted.
               
               

               

                     Modifié par Frith5, 19 décembre 2010 - 04:04 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_TheSpiritedLass]

               From the 1.69 Lexicon tutorial done by Funky called "How to Make Your Server Run More Smoothly"  Basically what has already been said in this thread with a little more detail.



"5.  Review Placeable Use in Your Areas



Aside from massively bulking up the size of your area files, using lots of placeables can come with other risks. Most importantly, you do not want to place placeables with walkmeshes across tile boundaries. A placeable with a walkmesh is one that characters cannot freely move over - think furniture, not carpet. The reason for this is that the pathing system uses these tile boundaries, and blocking access to them with placeables generates blocked pathing calls, which are enormously expensive. So, you can break this rule when spawns will not be crossing the space in question. We also break it in order to allow our PCs to summon walls via spells, but it is very pricey to do so. Pathing lag is entirely server lag. Another issue to be aware of is that putting many placeables together in an area can generate both massive graphics and server lag. Graphics lag, because more places mean more polys for the client to render, and server lag, because the server loads the description of all non-static placeables when they enter PC perception. Piling a few hundred placeables into a small space can cause enormous load, especially if players are repeatedly moving in and out of perceptual range."
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Eradrain]

               Setting placeables to static functionally makes them part of the tileset, as far as the game is concerned, which drastically cuts down on lag.  You should be setting every placeable you don't directly want the player to interact with, to static.



Also avoid putting placeables on the red lines where tiles meet, because the game thinks it has to load them twice (or four times, if you put it at the intersection of four tiles).
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_TSMDude]

               

Eradrain wrote...
Also avoid putting placeables on the red lines where tiles meet, because the game thinks it has to load them twice (or four times, if you put it at the intersection of four tiles).

I completly agree on the first thing you posted but am not sure on this as I have heard it more than a few times and think this might be false. This was even pounded into me years ago by another builder but in very generic testing I do not think this is true....

(Not attacking just asking if anyone knows if this is indeed true as I think not crossing the grid lines is more due to pathfinding than anything else.)
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Fester Pot]

               It's not false.



BioWare was the one who mentioned this to the builder community on the old nwn.bioware.com forum. From what I recall, it has to do with how the placeable itself is processed by the area/engine. If it's off the grid line, it's processed once. If it sits on a line, it's processed twice. If it sits on a +, it's processed four times. Pathfinding becomes confused and generates a hiccup as it calculates how to get around it, in terms, lag for the player.



FP!
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Eradrain]

               

TSMDude wrote...

I completly agree on the first thing you posted but am not sure on this as I have heard it more than a few times and think this might be false. This was even pounded into me years ago by another builder but in very generic testing I do not think this is true....

(Not attacking just asking if anyone knows if this is indeed true as I think not crossing the grid lines is more due to pathfinding than anything else.)

It's worth bearing in mind that isn't a gamebreaking concern, it's an issue of efficiency.  The difference between 1 placeable and 2 isn't that great.  Even the difference between 1 and 4 is only three placeables, and when an area can (on my computer at least) load comfortably with half a thousand placeables in use, that doesn't make much of a difference.

It begins to become an issue when a builder who doesn't realize this ends up placing dozens, maybe even a hundred placeables, along grid points.  Suddenly your game is mistaking that half-a-thousand-placeable area it's trying to load for one with 800 placeables, and that's too much, and the game crashes, or shudders to a near-halt.

So it's not surprising if people have deliberately tried testing this and found that there wasn't any change in performance.  Placing 2-15 placeables along grid lines isn't gonna tax your system any more than having 4-30 placeables placed correctly.  It becomes an issue when you vastly increase scale.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_FunkySwerve]

               

Eradrain wrote...

So it's not surprising if people have deliberately tried testing this and found that there wasn't any change in performance.  Placing 2-15 placeables along grid lines isn't gonna tax your system any more than having 4-30 placeables placed correctly.  It becomes an issue when you vastly increase scale.

For load times, thatmay well be true - I know little about that. For pathing, it's a different story. There used to be a running joke on HG that you could tell when someone was in the drow areas (with atrocious placeable placement) because of the noticeably poorer server performance. Frankly, it had never occured to me that placing across gridlines would increase loadtimes - I guess I never noticed, after factors like area size and placeable count in area, which, so far as I've ever noticed, have a far greater impact on load times (that is to say, an impact I HAVE noticed  ). Anyway, we still get away with some atrocious placements (especially with our epic wall spell), but the performance hit from it is very noticeable, even on a small scale (10 critters scrambling against some 30-40 spawned in blocks is ugly). As servers improve their performance, though, this is becoming less of an issue.

Funky
               
               

               
            

[Legacy__six]

               Also bear in mind that on certain video cards introducing a texture onto a placeable that is greater than 512x512 in size will cause quite large framerate drops if there are more than one in the scene. Not sure why, but it does so on my graphics card quite nastily when having larger textures on placeables even though I can get away with 1024x1024 or greater on creatures, items or tiles quite happily.