Spring RTS Engine

It's still pretty bloody awful, even with standing archers and no shadows. With 30 Archers firing during a given 3-second window, FPS drops from 100+ to 40-ish. The big problem, though, is that the framerate does not improve if the trails/explosions are offscreen. Which means that there's something at the engine level that's not being done very efficiently. I'll go over to Development and ask what, if anything, I can do to mitigate this.

This may sound stupid, but I hadn't played with the smoke-trails very much, so their incredibly ugly effect on framerate was a new one to me. I used to wonder why the Raven rockets seemed so laggy- the answer is... they are laggy, it's not just the "wobble".

Check the cpu usage graphs in debug mode.

Hmm. Going to try something, now that I have looked at smoke really close-up...

Yup, there is a solution, at least partway. Still sucks up FPS, still is bad with shadows on, but at least it's not a total framerate-killer. And it only looks slightly less good. Acceptable, I think, and with a few other optimizations, I could keep total speed about the same, and have this visual effect.

what did you do?


PS

I really think you should write some wiki articles about your knownlage about the game :) and the s3o format.

The short version of what I did was that I reduced the number of particles through a series of kludges. And now that I know it works, I will do some more kludges, because I know where the FPS is getting killed.

I would give a lot for the ability to make my own explosions at this point- while the default ones are pretty, I am pretty sure I could make them just as pretty, but not use as many particles

And I will be happy to share my "knowledge" when I feel I have some. I'm still reaching around in the dark, to be honest, and most of the time, my solutions are one-time-kludges, not permanent best-method solutions. Such is game design.

The relevant number is on the bottom left

This is with shadows off, of course, but it's still acceptable.

love the smoke and the mod is really sweet as well ... however with like 4 more units it wud probably the greatest mod out there

I dunno about that. At any rate, I do have more things planned.

ok i understand. Might u have any screenshots of the new map that u want to post cause im really interested in what it looks like

I'm waiting for Hrmph to take a last whack at it. He resized the colormap, but the metalmap, etc, aren't quite there yet. He's been busy with other things, but I don't want to release it in an unfinished state.

I could help model if you want. You'd probebly have to touch the models up and texture them, but at least its less strain on you.

Could you post the weapon tdf for those? Might be handy for AATA ballistic rockets too - although I think it would bork hightrajectory.

70 FPS is 'acceptable'
O,o
i run at 60 dropping to 25-30 ingame ;.;

@Drone_Fragger:

If you want to help, I need animators (scriptors) more than any other skillset. Modeling is the easy part, and while I would like to have another skinner, I can live without one. However, while I'm a fairly good animator, that part takes about as long as the modeling/skinning does, at least right now. I seem to be speeding up on that end, though... speeding up in general, really, now that I'm getting comfortable with everything I need to do.

@FLOZi:

What I did would definately break HiTrajectory, unfortunately, because I'm using a "guided missile" that is not really a guided missile, essentially. I'll post the TDF when I am sure that I've squeezed all of the optimization I can out, but it's definately acceptable right now. As you can also (hopefully) see, I have figured out that the smoketrail is based on a Z position on the model, not based of the missile_flare as you might expect. This is both good and bad. And I dumped the Flare bitmap by doing a couple of things. Now I just need to ask about Smoke, and figure that out. I will go to Development and do that.

Argh, if you want to change the explosions, smoke, flares, grass, smoke clouds, and more, try looking at the \base\spring\springbitmaps_v061.sdz. Ones in your mod file will replace ones from that directory. (You never noticed AA has different explosions? )

@Archangel:

Did some experiments, and my records are in Development already, just didn't document it this morning, was in a hurry to go to bed

0.35b has been released. Decided to make this one public, instead of semi-private.

Changelog: That's pretty much it, really. It doesn't sound like much, but the combined effects of these changes have resulted in a mod that's 100% more polished for human-vs-human play. Much thanks to everybody who has helped me playtest this week, and I will be running more playtests as the new content gets put in.

Link in fist post ins not working...

The link isn't working for me too. Maybe the file isn't uploaded yet?