PlaneShift
Support => Technical Help: IN GAME bugs (after loading world) => Topic started by: nightmarcus on April 26, 2006, 12:44:22 pm
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When I leave Hydlaa and try to head for the next town, through the woods and across the grassy valley, it gets extremely laggy when I enter the grassy vally. I mean it's "playable" but my framerate has to be at like 10 fps. A guy there said it was laggy for him too. I posted this here because since I meet the recommended specs I thought maybe it is an issue with those textures being rendered or something. Here's my system specs:
Operating System: Fedora Core 5 Linux
Kernel: 2.6.16-1.2096_FC5 i686
Memory: 1 GB Dual Channel DDR1 SDRAM
Processor: 2.2 Ghz Intel Celeron
Video Card: 256 MB Nvidia GeForce FX 5500(not overclocked)
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My system isn't anything like yours, but I get just about equal lag. After about 2 hours playing, I'll start freezing on loading sectors. After about 3 hours, I freeze just walking normally or when opening my invintory. At this time I have to restart my computer, and then it starts back at simple lag spiking for 2 or 3 seconds. Either way, it gets a little annoying. I used to be able to play the game with no flaws, what happened? =X
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I noticed everytime I walk over those ugly specks of green grass(Like the ones situated in front of Laanx temple) I lag a bit. Not unbearably, but still, it is a bit odd. That grass is what you're talking about, right? Hmm...wonder why. Maybe because there are so many! Or maybe not.
~Amanatay
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You could try to go to options in-game and set the adaptive distance a bit lower.
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You could try to go to options in-game and set the adaptive distance a bit lower.
Another option would be relax the target fps to achieve (it's set on default to 62 I think)
You can try lowering it, there have been good reports of it when it's 20 fps, I personally I'm running it at 30 fps right now.
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- everything lags for me - when i click on a command it takes 2 - 3 seconds for the function to happen - same w/ walking - ive reduced the adaptive distance to 75 and the fps to 22 the lag stoopped for a minute and then same lag set in again -
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Have you checked that you meet the minimum requirements as well, and your graphics card drivers are updated?
Can you please post your system specs?
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I have noticed it too especially outside the Laanx temple...
I have a WINXP SP2 Semperon 3100+ with a Geforce 6200
If I play for a few hours. I end up getting a message from the Windows OS saying my page file has run out of space..
(I know the maps load dynamically as you move from section to section and I have it set to keep the maps in memory so I expect the memory usage to increase as I move around to different areas, however this page file issue seems to be related to the length of time you spend in the game not the amount of areas you visit)
I have 512 MB of ram..
I suspect theres a memory leak somewhere..
oh and I forgot to mention Restarting the Game doesnt help.. you need a full reboot in order to bring the game back to smoothe stability.
good ole windows memory management at its finest ;)
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I'm wondering whether there are still problems with the sound system - do you experience such "leaks" as well with sound disabled?
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I haven't turned it completely off.. would you like me to do that and play the game for a bit ?
I'll also try the game on my laptop which has a Radion 9000 IGP and see if that makes a difference..
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I would say give it a try :}
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ok I tried PlaneShift using a 2.8 GHZ Celeron laptop with a Radeon 9000 IGP..
and to my surprise the game was completely unplayable in the open grassy areas... down to about 2 frames a second
I turned down all the graphics features to as low as possible 800x600 then going into Catalyst Control Centre and turning all the enhanced freatures off..
the game was still unplayable...
now my laptop isnt the fastest machine around.. (on other 3D games it runs at about half the frame rate of my Geforerce 6200 system)
but it seems that there must be a feature thats being used in the 3D outdoor terrain thats causing the older Graphics cards to really struggle
I ran into the cave entrance of the wilderness area and as soon as the Renderer didnt have to draw the Lanscape the graphics card sped up dramatically.. then as I turned around to look out at the grassy hills the card shuddered down to snail pace..
I can only conclude from this that there must be an enhanced efffect being used in either the sky or the grass that causes the CS engine to Render those effects in Software mode on older cards(due to no hardware based support for that technique)..
it would be nice if we could turn some of those features off for older machines..
2.8 GHZ celeron with a radeon 9000 is hardly what I would call outdated.. it sitll manages to run ROME TOTAL WAR OK (not spectacurlarly but its playable)
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my laptop has radeon 9000 and its perfectly fine everywhere for me
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The major lag problems assosiated with the Laanx Temple area are mostly flame effect induced.The fire pits there affect the whole Plaza area because of memory leakage.Try just standing still there for half an hour then move.The grassy clumps do slow you but I think that the effect would be unnoticeable if the fire pits were disabled.
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I run planeshift on Fedora 5 newest kernel, i have an asus tbird 1400 mhz and a nvidia geforce mx 400 ( 64 mb ) with 512 ddr ram. I dont have your problems, the only glitch i get is when i walk out of the arena and turn to face Hydlaa plazaa or when i'm at the spawn point and try to walk away, that lasts about 10 seconds and after that its all fine for me. I do not use adaptive distance at all ( its disabled )
I run PS in windowed mode with a 1024/786 window. I have all sounds turned off, the vertex buffer is set to OFF and i have the keep maps loaded option enabled.
Next to that i have xmms open and playing usually a mail client an irc or msn client and a browserwindow or 5.
I DO have all the chat stuff that comes in from the battles that others wage turned to filter, nothing of that shows ( only the report that they killed someone ) with these options set to normal ( eg all enabled instead of all disabled ) i lag a lot aswell. Try disabeling some stuff there i bet you will get better improvements. If my hardware can support this game then the stuff you guys are using sure as hell should be able to run it smoothely.
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Just finished my testing...
I have discovered the following...
FOR Windows XP
YOU need a huge page file.. if its too small the game will crash after a while. .. say if you have 512 - 768 MB of ram your page file should be about double that
I tried Playing with the adaptive distance reduced and it does make a huge difference in all areas except the wilderness..
What I have noticed is that the wilderness area seems to be the only place where it still tries to draw the entire landscape (hills etc) no matter what setting your adaptive distance is on.
the trees, shrubs and other objects arent drawn past the adaptive limit but the hills ARE.
All other areas filter out the objects like walls etc past the adaptive distance limit and so they arent drawn... (speeds things up nicely)
I presume the Rolling Hills wilderness area doesnt do this because the Adaptive distance probably works on an Mesh by Mesh basis... and because the hills are one big Height Field Mesh.. it just tries to draw the whole thing...
And so for users with limited memory... in their cards.. I dont think you can optimise the Wilderness much..
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Ok, I noticed that it's not the grass as earlier speculated because I just stood in the middle of some flaming torches with those little shrubs around and noticed no performance degredation at all. I'm going to agree with you in that it's the fact that it's trying to draw everything at once and I need to turn down the adaptive distance, that way when I get out of the forest and into a wide open world it's not trying to draw stuff 5 miles away.
Edit: Just tested, it is the fact that the hills in that area are one solid object and not seperate ones. I turned the view distance down so low that the pieces of the forest road barely loaded before I got to them, so I know that the road is seperate meshes, and 4 or 5 of those can be left out in the distance without affecting the ones around you. However when I went outside the entire area loaded as one huge object and thus the lag started, view distance reduction just made objects in the distance disappear, but the ground stayed and so did the lag. At least now we know what is causing the problem.
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I wonder if there is a way that you can split the Lanscape Height Field Mesh up into little Quadrants.. then the adaptive loader could load only those within range..
I think this is going to be a big problem if the Team is considering using more and larger outdoor areas.
I mean ether way it would look silly to have mountains just dissapearing and re-appearing past a certain point but atleast the game would be playable in the open areas...
(hence why I sugested fog in another thread)
Also maybe asking the CS team if they could implement progressive mesh... which reduces the poly count of far away objects.... I've noticed that the curvature and smootheness of hills far away stays pretty much constant as you move toward and away from hills... which suggests to me that a hill 500 miles away is rendered with the same polycount as if it was right next to you... This could reduce the kind of intense lag we're seing in the wilderness areas..
A game like FarCry uses progressive meshes on their landscapes. If you look closely the mountains appear to change in form slightly as you move closer and further form them...
This is the alrogythm in the background reducing the polygon count of further away mountains..