performance question

[cassius]

The framerate gets low in parts of my game now sometimes dropping to 10 fps.

Apart from coding what is the best way to combat this problem?

 

hat effect does "collapse" have in model ditor?.

[Thirsty Panther]

What's happening in your game when you get the performance drop?

 

Is it spawning enemies, are there physics involved (moving platforms/ doors) is there a lot of lights in the scene?

[cassius]

No just a lot of geometry. My terrain size is 1024.Getting rid of some buildings and trees has helped but its disappointing as it means I can't develop it much further . I have abut 8 spotligts and 1 directional.

[tjheldna]

Have you set all the appropriate models view range and those models that dont move, shadow mode = static? Lights are set to Static+Dynamic+Buffered? Too many entities possibly?

 

Collapse can be used in the situation where I exported a model that has a number of children and you can collapse them so it's only one entity e.g. I create a building model. Window frames are all separate entities in the modeling program so there might be say 20 separate entities when exported. Collapse will turn all those separate entities it into 1 single entity.

 

Things I have checked in the past...

 

- Once I noticed a considerable fps drop, turns out 1 texture was 64mb in size and when drawn to the GUI dropped the fps. Just do a *.* search on the models and textures folder and sort by size. Just to make sure there is nothing too big. Its funny the actual source image was less than a MB in this case.

 

- CSG brushes used as triggers. I used a lot of these and used the invisible material on it. Make sure the shadows on that brush are set to none, else the shadow calculations will happen too often and drop your fps. I think Josh did look at that a while ago and may have put a safe guard in, I cant remember.

 

- Check all the things like draw distance, shadow modes etc, go over each node one by one

 

- If you have a lot of modular pieces, I would advise to combine them in your modeling program and export that. Piecing modular bits together in LE will create too many entities. If you export with all separate modular entities, this is where the collapse feature will shine and turn them into one entity.

 

- Check that only things like lights and characters have the 'occlusion culling' checked.

 

Hard to tell without looking at it. Hope this helps you locate the source of your problems.

[cassius]

THanks for those ideas. I will check them out.

[Slastraf]

This should be marked for similar threads in the future