Since I can't see if this was answered in that huge flamewar:REVENGE wrote:Oh, this brings me to ask the question, how can weapons effects cause lag? Is it from too many particles being spawned by CEG, or do custom textures for lasers / beamlasers cause problems as well?
The biggest lag I've noticed weapons cause is with explosions. I think that large explosions take some time to resolve because of all the units that are affected. The default explosion effect eats frames like mad, when Argh challenged me to a performance test of having 750 missiles fire at the same time the only major lag was when the shots impacted (especially with shadows enabled but since most people play with LOS view on at all times that's really no issue), this went away immediately when I set a custom explosion generator for the missile. Of course you CAN make megalag with a CEG if you use many and large particles but if you stay conscious of your particle count and use your textures wisely you can get a huge performance boost. Also the larger the default explosion was the more performance there is to gain, I've had single nuke-size explosions drop my framerate into the single digits with all that smoke and crap.
