Warlords and Merchants Discussion

[IskatuMesk]

It is unlikely people playing it on the arcade will give a shit about the version on the non-arcade.

And stop caring about "stars". That mindset will get you nowhere but in rustled jimmies.

[Ricky_Honejasi]

It is unlikely people playing it on the arcade will give a shit about the version on the non-arcade.

During the beta Arcade, I perfectly agree. Like I said, it's minimal preparations for Day 1 when the real Arcade gets released. Which are done.

And stop caring about "stars". That mindset will get you nowhere but in rustled jimmies.

I don't care as long my map isn't constantly rated 2 stars off the bat then it becomes hard to get people to play the map. In other words, to NOT somehow be caught in a potential downhill snowball.


The stars for themselves purely I don't care that much. W&M isn't a map that I can honestly hope to get 4.5/5 stars or better anyway. It's one of those relatively audience-specific maps rather than one to reach all the general public.

[IskatuMesk]

A lot of otherwise good maps are going to suffer from this broken system. Rating systems are always untrustworthy. Just don't let that get to you.

[Ricky_Honejasi]

Personally, I expect the system to be more "what the generic lowest demonitator likes" in the grand scheme of things. Ultimately, I care much more to be able to have some W&M games with pubbies.

Also in totally other news, "Warlords and Merchants - Survival of the French" is coming very very soon in a Youtube Theater near you! Will I survive or will I fall? See to find out!

Your closest theater is : http://www.youtube.com/user/Honejasi?feature=mhee

EDIT : On yet, yet other news, the preload bank file bank.xml of the W&M map is 666 bytes as well. An hidden secret revealed!

EDIT 2 : "Warlords and Merchants - Survival of the French" is now uploaded but somehow Youtube still only got 480p quality for it.

[Ricky_Honejasi]

And so, Vetraeus seems to imply that the water in Exotic Garden generate considerable computer lag in his latest Youtube comment.

I would not be surprised but I would like to know how truly bad it is. It might mean that I might prefer to switch to another large terrain as the new main W&M terrain if only to have much less lag for the common player. I can always just keep Exotic Garden as an usual extra terrain anyway.

I had quite a few complaints regarding lag and map size.

[IskatuMesk]

Water would only lag if you're running a built-in chipset that can't handle reflections. If that was the case, turning down your graphics settings would be sufficient.

Minerals, on the other hand, are surprisingly one of the most insane GPU hits in the entire game. But W&M's problems are going to be all CPU due to the pathing and slow as balls trigger system.

[Ricky_Honejasi]

Minerals, on the other hand, are surprisingly one of the most insane GPU hits in the entire game. But W&M's problems are going to be all CPU due to the pathing and slow as balls trigger system.

Hmm, any idea to avoid or greatly minimize said GPU hit from minerals?

Triggers, I am not sure what much I can do without total rewrites for little gains and much higher odds that I screw up somewhere. Pathing is probably not that much controllable except MAYBE by trying to minimize collision flags as much as possible (which it's probably "minimal" already).

[Lavarinth]

I assume the mineral model itself is what causes the issue, could replace the model to see if it makes any difference.

[Mucky]

replace mineral fields with bob sapp's face

[IskatuMesk]

The minerals could have a few causes. The first and foremost is transparent shadows. Blizzard shadows are bad. Probably why they ditched having shadows at all in Diablo 3. But in sc2 they destroy performance. I can see shadows and reflection on water causing a hit but only with a lot of water.

I think the real problem with minerals lays in their materials and any related shaders. Blizzard's incompetent programmers have never been able to make optimized anything, and with complex and demanding shaders they probably made a bigger mess than usual.

[Vetraeus]

Just replace the minerals with the Doodad crystal.

[IskatuMesk]

Keep in mind such a thing won't stop the map from slowing down, since that's GPU related.

[Ricky_Honejasi]

Keep in mind such a thing won't stop the map from slowing down, since that's GPU related.

Yes, aware it's CPU. Just caring a bit for the GPU side as well.

Odds are I would be more banking on camera cutting to further minimize CPU process and maybe testing if less collision flags could help.

Btw, I remember those armed SCVs did cost "zero" or extremely little pathing CPU time by having zero collision flags while moving like 100-150 stacked at once. Although, obviously I cannot put zero collision to much stuff.

EDIT : As a random thought, it's possible the Charge ability on those Combo lings might just dip the CPU a bit too much since it's calculating pathing a lot AND checking the Charge validator on a lot of units at once.

EDIT 2 : Okay, this is 100% ridiculous. I just tried to mass patrol 1000 zerglings WITH and WITHOUT collision and my FPS was the absolute same. Obviously, the one WITHOUT collision clearly should have gave me +5 FPS bare minimum vs the WITH.

[Ricky_Honejasi]

So with initial tests :

- I can put the shadow radius of Units' Actors (specifically Marines/Lings) for Low Quality to 0.0 off the bat.
- With 1000 lings patrolling around, if I put SetCastShadows 0 to remove shadows for Medium Quality or better, I managed to have 32 FPS average instead of 27 when centering my camera on the most lings running around.
- Seems I could safely reduce further the Camera Farclip from 100 to 80 with no negative effect to help lag-related matters a bit more. Not noticeable FPS-wise in my test map but could be on W&M.
- No collision flags didn't seem to change FPS that much in reality. Thus, it seems it might be even the moving itself in the engine being CPU consuming.

EDIT :

- Zealot Charge doesn't seem to add much weight during moving/pathing.

[IskatuMesk]

Knowing blizzard's code, they probably run pathing calcs for stuff that doesn't "use" pathing.