Horrible Lag and I Meet the Recommended Requirements

[Alphi]

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..

[nightmarcus]

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.

[Alphi]

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..