Major... Lag?

[arckeda]

As taken from my Ubuntu thread, I am on Feisty.


Hello, I recently installed planeshift under my user account, I played through the tutorial well enough, but when it teleported me to the city, I couldn't move for all the lag, any ideas on why that map lags but the tutorial is fine? Someone said it had something to do with grass and I can get grassless maps, but I lagged out before that, my cpu was at 100 percent all the time even if I waited for 5 minutes! Any ideas? Thanks.

-ARCKEDA

[zorbels]

It could be the grass in Hydlaa slowing you down. Try this If you find the game slow, please download this file ...   just follow the instructions and back up your original file just in case it doesn't work.

[arckeda]

Tried using the grassless maps, it doesn't help!

[Caarrie]

have you upgraded your graphics card drivers?

[Vornne]

OK, I think the slowdown in the latest version is due to a combination of things:

- Partly entity label drawing code, I have profiled and seen it myself, also seen the speedup the new (svn trunk) system gives.
- Probably due to increased memory usage from lighter2 maps, I have tested alongside the old types and the new ones make planeshift use more memory, possibly pushing other applications or parts of planeshift into the swap space. Xordan said this is likely a bug or two in CS, that he's working on.
- The addition of grass to most of the hydlaa maps, this is not all of the slowdown, but for me there is a big difference in some places, like standing at harnquist's looking at the cliff side, but not much difference in other places where particles or a lot of models are in view.
- The sound system, the major thing that shows up while profiling - try turning this off in pssetup, at least until the code for it is redesigned, soon^TM.
- Possibly due to a buggy version of lighter2 being used on the maps, this is only something I have heard, I have not tried relighting any maps myself.

[Aiwendil]

There is another thing you can try. In the pssetup application is a switch called "preload Model". If this is turned off try to switch it on. I have some problems with it turned off. When I enter a map with a lot of players, my computer slows down for some minutes and makes the game unplayable for this time. Everything works fine for me, if it's enabled

[Lanarel]

Another big cause of lag (for me it is much bigger than that due to grass or labels), and very Hardware dependent, is the amount of polygons in view. WHen drawing the frame, the graphics card sorts everything it sees so it knows which parts are hidden by others. So for me, in hydlaa plaza when looking to the smith, I get close to 20 fps. But when I look to the tower (with all the buildings in front of it) frame rate drops to 4 fps. There is an option under graphics, where you can set adaptive distance, which only draws things withing a certain range. This will speed things up, but I personally think it is irritating to see whole buildings suddenly materialise.
Today I discovered that the new fog, which looks very nice as it gets thicker with distance, also autmatically clips the view, so parts that disappear in the fog are not drawn. Standing in hydlaa plaza at 4 fps, making a very thick fog made it go up to 45 fps!! Of course I could not see anything but fog then. And a lighter fog did not have so much effect. Still, it clearly shows that my problem is polygons, not grass.