PlaneShift

Support => Technical Help: IN GAME bugs (after loading world) => Topic started by: red_come on November 25, 2005, 04:45:23 am

Title: WAY too much lag, what can i do to make it faster?
Post by: red_come on November 25, 2005, 04:45:23 am

Hi, this is the latest idiotic question by yours truely. I am having major problems with lag, it takes several minutes to move to a place that it should only take 1 min. It catches way too frequently for my likeing and i was wondering if there is a way to make it run faster?

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Post by: DaveG on November 25, 2005, 05:34:51 am

You can try enabling the adaptive distance feature in the options menu.  It\'ll try and maintain a framerate by not rendering farther away objects.  You should also try updating your graphics drivers, in case you have some old incompatibilities or something.  If nothing helps, post your system specs here, and maybe we can come up with something else.

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Post by: LigH on November 25, 2005, 10:45:23 am

Similar problem for me; from my experience, my bottleneck would be not the graphic rendering as such (playing with the same stop-and-go effect at 800x600 or 1280x960 with a GeForce2 GTS), but instead the reloading of some data from the harddisk:

Each time a player or NPC comes into visibility range, my harddisk starts to rattle like a snake. The game seems to read lots of details (probably the whole 3D model with all textures) over and over, and has to uncompress them from a compressed ZIP archive.

I will try to repack all ZIPs with \"no compression\" and see if that helps or makes it worse for me. Either my RAID controller for disk access (seems to lack of DMA support) or my CPU for decompression (Duron 800) are the bottlenecks.

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Post by: Wired_Crawler on November 25, 2005, 01:56:50 pm

Yep, the same here, it is particulary annoying in Hydlaa. It has started after last \"major\" update. For some period of time the worst place were the stairs leading to tavern in Hydlaa, then it was fixed somehow, but not entirely.  I also thought, that it was related to DMA settings, but it is not, however it really looks, like client stops updating the screen, when a hard drive is accessed (and I am using Linux).

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Post by: Seytra on November 25, 2005, 05:49:03 pm

Back when there was the issue with the tavern level, I didn\'t notice increased hdd activity. However, this doesn\'t mean there was none, just that it likely was linear acess so I didn\'t hear any seeking. If it existed.

However, it looks more like a memory management issue that only results in increased hdd activity due to extreme swapping when the system doesn\'t have lots or memory.
In LigHs case, I think the reason is different from the tavern lagging one, though. It seems to be that indeed models, and more importantly, textures get loaded. These don\'t just have to get loaded into main memory, but also into the gfx cards memory. If that card has only few memory, then it will have to be swapped more often. That will need to go through the systems bus and thus will stall most system functions during that time.

I, too, have little freezes (about 1 second) when exiting the tavern, the library or the dungeon. Also, when I approach the plaza for the first time after a login, it tends to stall a bit. None of that is new, however, and the tavern level lag issue has been removed for me since a while back (IOW, the lag is random again).

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Post by: steuben on November 25, 2005, 06:00:08 pm

Quote

IOW, the lag is random again

the lag monster prowlth again. he no longer has a lair. fear once more is in the land. ;(

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Post by: Virtutes on November 26, 2005, 02:04:27 pm

I have problems playing planeshift too. I had them months ago too. Back then it was a problem with hardware acceleration and i fixed it. I know this time it\'s a other problem because i don\'t got a message \"no hardware acceleration\". But do you guys know what the solution is this time. I tried the things you said.

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Post by: Wired_Crawler on January 01, 2006, 09:18:19 pm

Quote from bugtracker:

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This is about this annoying graphics lag. Every few moments client pauses for a second or two, especially at crowded areas. I have noticed, that it does not happen, when I am alone on local server. Apparently player/npc models are causing it. So - I used setup visible on attached sreenshot. Then I went to the arbour near temple and started to move towards arena. Every time new NPCs become visible to me screen freezes for a moment, than new models pop up, after next step there is another freeze and next models pop up... The more new meshes appear the longer freeze is. This is also true for items, so players carying weapons cause more lag. It looks like client reloads meshes/textures (from a disk?) every time new object comes in visible range, instead of using objects cached in memory.
Tested with cvs version from 31.12.2005

(attached image)(http://img419.imageshack.us/img419/329/shot790xk.th.jpg) (http://img419.imageshack.us/my.php?image=shot790xk.jpg)

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Post by: Falzaek on January 11, 2006, 11:37:17 am

This happened to me. I fixed it by  seting my display settings to 32 bit.

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Post by: Wired_Crawler on January 11, 2006, 09:45:10 pm

FYI: The answer for the above bug report was: it is mostly due to poorly made name labels. And yes, entity labels cause the lag, I\'ve checked it empirically by comparing behaviour of older and newer versions of Planeshift (before/after change of entity label system).
Well, it is still pre-alpha, I\'m sure many performance related things will change.