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increase fog-of-war refresh rate

Posted: 04 Aug 2013, 00:05
by raaar
the current rate at which fog-of-war is drawn is too low. Fast units, namely aircraft, are able to outrun their fog "circle", which makes no sense.
fog_refresh_rate_fail.jpg
(224.77 KiB) Downloaded 6 times
i've been told that this is only a visual issue (internally LOS is updated much faster).

this should be fixed in the engine (fog of war has been standard in most rts games, and none of them have this problem)

fog update rate should be made faster (3-6 times per second, not 1), and/or made configurable through modrules.lua/tdf, the same way LOS resolution already is.

i put it in mantis


related old threads about fog-of-war/LOS:
http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=28062
http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=23366

Re: increase fog-of-war refresh rate

Posted: 04 Aug 2013, 00:08
by Beherith
Try extratextureupdaterate in spring settings (launch the spring.exe and select it in settings, the fastest rate is every 4 frames)

Re: increase fog-of-war refresh rate

Posted: 04 Aug 2013, 00:37
by raaar
experiment:
- use six year old computer (can play most spring games decently, but becomes unplayably slow in late game xta, or zk)
- spawn 100 arm peepers and put them on patrol on the cold place

- results
tried "ExtraTextureUpdateRate=45"
got ~50 fps

tried "ExtraTextureUpdateRate=4"
got ~50 fps


apparently it barely makes a difference. Why is the default rate so low...? I heard about that setting before. Players shouldn't have to touch such an obscure setting.

Btw, the max rate doesn't seem like every 4 frames, seems more like 3-4 times per second (every 10 frames maybe)

Re: increase fog-of-war refresh rate

Posted: 04 Aug 2013, 01:10
by Beherith
air los is circular los, non air units ha non circular los. your setup is likely gpu limited. press alt+b ingame to see the load caused by los texture update.

Re: increase fog-of-war refresh rate

Posted: 04 Aug 2013, 02:20
by Forboding Angel
Behe, I can confirm his findings. The visuals only update every few seconds no matter how low you set it.

Raar, game frames aren't the same as fps. In spring, 32 game frames happen per second, so that means that at a setting of 4, it should be refreshing 8 times per second, which it does not, as you have seen.

Re: increase fog-of-war refresh rate

Posted: 04 Aug 2013, 02:24
by Beherith
i just tested this, and while it is not ten times per second, it is about three or four.

Re: increase fog-of-war refresh rate

Posted: 04 Aug 2013, 02:46
by raaar
i knew about the 32/s game frames and was referring to those. But thanks anyway.

Re: increase fog-of-war refresh rate

Posted: 04 Aug 2013, 11:48
by Beherith
Actually, raar. I fully agree with your sentiment anyway. It would be great to have the los texture updated every frame. It would be even more awesome if it was done in a separate thread, maybe even delayed by 1 gameframe so as not to take time away from sim thread.

Also, thanks for reminding me that gl.Texture("$info") can be now used to bind the info texture!

Re: increase fog-of-war refresh rate

Posted: 24 Aug 2013, 17:49
by raaar
well....it was marked as resolved at http://springrts.com/mantis/view.php?id=3916

with "no change required"

...