CRNfix Engine Version: better replay performance

[gajop]

What if he lost the source?

[smoth]

then his fork would be even more a waste of everyone's time.

[AntiAllez]

interesting approach, how much time is probably connected that everyone together wasted by laggames? maybe a lifetime or even more?

[smoth]

Stop playing 8vs8 dsd lol

[FabriceFABS]

Not only.
Also *MAP*Metal games, and *MOD*Chiken games...

[scifi]

We can sit here to the end of times hearing about the so called 300% performance increase, if theres no source theres also no real credible tests to rely upon. And especially with a GPL violation on it.

Anyways i think the devs are working on a improved threaded release for Spring so hopefully we can get pass this and actually move on.

[smoth]

Pfft I am going on with my life, steadily making recent advances.

[jK]

blabla ignoring zerver blabla
back to topic!

Did some visual profiling and wrote a grapher that shows how Spring spends time:


You see that `Frame Grapher` which displays the last half second and its time slices:

• green are video frames
• red are simframes
• blue is swapBuffer (gpu/vsync)
• pink is lua gc

It directly shows that something is wrong in GC (sure ZK creates likely a lot of garbage but it wouldn't explain what we see), so I tweaked the GC a bit and got this:

MUCH better already (it likely solves 90% micro lagging in ZK, but it won't solve the ones in BA what spends much less time in GC even in 96!).
When you take a close look at the simframes you notice that there is a semi huge gap after each of it, those range from 1ms upto ~50ms (maybe something SDL or NetCode related) and are very likely one cause of microlags (additional to uneven simframe length, but that's another topic).
Atm I don't know what Spring is doing in those gaps yet, needs further investigation.

[gajop]

Nice post, pretty informative. Is information how people can do this kind of visual profiling available? It seems pretty useful.

[Beherith]

Excellent work, jK!

BAR uses more lua, especially more luaui, so it will definitely be a boon there.

[jK]

k seems to be multiple stuff in CGame::UpdateUnsynced that accumulates every now and then to peaks. Need to find the biggest of those now and why they relate to simframe updates.

[Silentwings]

Nice! Is that going to be the default view with /debug in 97.0?

[Google_Frog]

I like that visualisation and the GC tweak sounds great.

[muckl]

+1 for this visualisation