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Re: Lots of entities = low frame rate [Re: Matt_Aufderheide] #45071
05/18/05 10:33
05/18/05 10:33
Joined: Jul 2000
Posts: 27,967
Frankfurt
jcl Offline

Chief Engineer
jcl  Offline

Chief Engineer

Joined: Jul 2000
Posts: 27,967
Frankfurt
Quote:

So basically if you have a lot of ents, you should make them invisible if they are not on the screen?




Definitely not. Attempting to determine by script whether an entity is visible or not will be much slower than letting the engine do that. Use clip_far to reduce the number of visible entities if necessary.

Re: Lots of entities = low frame rate [Re: jcl] #45072
08/17/05 15:53
08/17/05 15:53
Joined: Dec 2003
Posts: 401
Germany, Bonn
VampireLord Offline
Senior Member
VampireLord  Offline
Senior Member

Joined: Dec 2003
Posts: 401
Germany, Bonn
Sorry to bring this old thread up again, but I believe The Matrix has a point here. Now after the first trailer of TES: Oblivion and Gothic 3 is out where you can see in moving pictures what a lush vegetation is I am seriously trying to improve my visual quality. Some optimisation should really be done in this field. Currently I have some woods with around 500 trees and using heavy LOD meaning trees in 500 quants distance are a detailed 1000 quants they are only X shaped and 1500 quants distance they are | flat. Using a 1.7 Ghz Pentium M and a X700 I only have around 30 frames. Same as on my old laptop 1.3 Ghz Pentium M, Radeon Mobility 9000. So frames improved from 25 to 30.........wow
Testing a similar setting in TES: Morrowind I get acceptable framerates of around 60. I am no engine programmer whatsoever, but maybe there are different ( and better) approaches at model handeling would be an option.

Greetings
Sven Holtzhausen


"Feathers shall raise men even as they do birds, toward heaven; that is by letter written with their quills." - Leonardo da Vinci

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Re: Lots of entities = low frame rate [Re: Marco_Grubert] #45073
08/17/05 17:19
08/17/05 17:19
Joined: May 2003
Posts: 609
Rattenfängerstadt
Rigoletto Offline
Developer
Rigoletto  Offline
Developer

Joined: May 2003
Posts: 609
Rattenfängerstadt
Quote:

The engine still has to iterate over every entity in order to check whether you have made changes to its state (e.g. changed the passable or polygon flags, set its xyz coordinates etc).




Why not put an entity when it´s changed in a "changed" list so that not all must be checked? Or a pointer list to them? Thats quick!

added:
or just a changed-flag, so only one flag has to be testet if nothing changed...

Last edited by Rigoletto; 08/17/05 17:30.
Re: Lots of entities = low frame rate [Re: Rigoletto] #45074
08/20/05 01:32
08/20/05 01:32
Joined: Sep 2004
Posts: 260
UB,Mongolia
Olzii Offline
Member
Olzii  Offline
Member

Joined: Sep 2004
Posts: 260
UB,Mongolia
Hi jcl,

I am changing LOD entities using my own script /depending on player position and look direction/. 1st LOD is WMB, 2nd and 3rd LOD is MDL.

You said engine can handle visibility of entities better than custom scripting. Which is the fast ? Do I have to use engine LOD feature ? Is it faster ?


The Empire of the Mongols comprised the largest continuous land empire ever, reaching from Korea to Poland
Re: Lots of entities = low frame rate [Re: VampireLord] #45075
08/20/05 21:03
08/20/05 21:03
Joined: Jun 2003
Posts: 1,017
Germany
T
Thomas_Nitschke Offline
Senior Developer
Thomas_Nitschke  Offline
Senior Developer
T

Joined: Jun 2003
Posts: 1,017
Germany
Antwort auf:

Sorry to bring this old thread up again, but I believe The Matrix has a point here.



In deed an older thread but, hey! Thanks for supporting me! I hope there's something going to happen in the future. I've read so many posts regarding model issues and 90% of them were made out of a lack of knowledge - so I can definately not guarantee that I'm 100% correct here. Nontheless, what's the debug panel's "ent" column for, if it doesn't show the rendering time for entities but, e.g. the execution time for their respective script action or something of the like? I mean, that doesn't make sense does it?
Following that, there obviously IS something wrong with A6's entity handling. Yeah, I know there's a flag called "dynamic", but that seems to be no improvement here. This must have something to do with every model continuously tracing downwards to determine shadowmap brightness or something like that...
Please, JCL, say something! This is driving me insane!


Formerly known as The Matrix - ICQ 170408644 I've been here for much longer than most people think. So where's my "Expert" status?
Re: Lots of entities = low frame rate [Re: Thomas_Nitschke] #45076
08/22/05 03:09
08/22/05 03:09
Joined: Feb 2003
Posts: 6,818
Minot, North Dakota, USA
ulillillia Offline OP
Senior Expert
ulillillia  Offline OP
Senior Expert

Joined: Feb 2003
Posts: 6,818
Minot, North Dakota, USA
More extensive experiment results

I've rerun the experiment for the high entity count. This time, not only did I just post the results, I've got screenshots accompanying it with the debug panel visible and I've also tried it with sprites and terrains to see what kind of impact it has. Feel free to read through it and even download the objects used in the experiment so you can see for yourself. I've listed how the experiment was being carried out as well such as the criteria.


"You level up the fastest and easiest if you do things at your own level and no higher or lower" - useful tip My 2D game - release on Jun 13th; My tutorials
Re: Lots of entities = low frame rate [Re: ulillillia] #45077
08/22/05 06:45
08/22/05 06:45
Joined: Oct 2003
Posts: 4,131
M
Matt_Aufderheide Offline
Expert
Matt_Aufderheide  Offline
Expert
M

Joined: Oct 2003
Posts: 4,131
Quote:

Following that, there obviously IS something wrong with A6's entity handling




No there is not 'obviously something wrong' with how A6 handles entity.. do you know how a 3d engine actually draws entities?

There is a sort of list called genreally a draw list..its bascially big array of structs or objects, each struct has its flags and mesh pointers etc. So the engine has to first determine what objects are potentially visible. This is easy when you are in BSP level, but not so obvious in a big outdoor area..OCtree will make this better. In any case, the engine needs to loop through each object thats in the current visiblity set, and update the world matrix and finally end each mesh or vertex buffer through the pipeline. Another reason lots of eneites of low poly can be slower than a few very high poly entities, is the way 3d hardware works.

Each d3d draw primtive call send a cetain number of vertices throughthe pipleline, transforms, shades, and renders them. The more vertices you can send thorugh in one batch, the better ytour performance is.. but if you havea bunch of individual meshes, you can't batch them all together (unless you use some sor of wierd methods i dont know about), so you ned more draw calls.

The 3d pipeline is wired to send tons of vertices through the pipelina, but not many draw calls.. so it follows that the more models you have, the slower the performance will be, often indepenedent of how many polygons are on screen.

Batching is a big deal in 3D engine development...and also non-bsp visiblity sets.. Oonce Octree is implemented, i would expect to see perhaps dramtic improvment of handling of large numbers of entites in some situations, such as trees.. but using LOD for instance, to suppress the model at a cetrain distance entirelty is a very fast solution for right now. And yes, turing off dynamic can make a big difference.

Re: Lots of entities = low frame rate [Re: Matt_Aufderheide] #45078
08/22/05 12:19
08/22/05 12:19
Joined: Jun 2003
Posts: 1,017
Germany
T
Thomas_Nitschke Offline
Senior Developer
Thomas_Nitschke  Offline
Senior Developer
T

Joined: Jun 2003
Posts: 1,017
Germany
Ok, thanks for clearing those things up Matt. You know, this is why I announced...
Antwort auf:

so I can definately not guarantee that I'm 100% correct here.



This had a reason
Nontheless - I'm not convinced as to why this impact on the frame rate occurs when only drawing, say 350 entities. This is not too much, and, although using other engines as an example is really murderous on these forums , how in hell then do other engines manage to draw even more entities at higher frame rates? I believe acknex does far more than what you described with its entities, far more than is often necessary if you only want to use entities als little details, e.g. as vegetation.

Last edited by The Matrix; 08/22/05 12:19.

Formerly known as The Matrix - ICQ 170408644 I've been here for much longer than most people think. So where's my "Expert" status?
Re: Lots of entities = low frame rate [Re: Thomas_Nitschke] #45079
08/22/05 15:04
08/22/05 15:04
Joined: Oct 2004
Posts: 1,856
TheExpert Offline
Senior Developer
TheExpert  Offline
Senior Developer

Joined: Oct 2004
Posts: 1,856
The results are really not good.

And like other said, yes others engines have high frame rate for
same number of ploygons/entities displayed.

Could Conitec rewrite the core Engine Display ?
And perhaps introduce nodes for scene management display that we could control
for agressive culling/portals etc ... ?

Because , i could with some DirectX9 book 3D programming,
do a basic display engine , really easily that would allow to load and display static 3DS or .X models.
And i can guarantee the frame rate will be 100 times faster than 3DGS
for a same simple static scene

Well ... perhaps one day Conitec will rework the engine core display

Re: Lots of entities = low frame rate [Re: TheExpert] #45080
08/22/05 15:26
08/22/05 15:26
Joined: Dec 2003
Posts: 401
Germany, Bonn
VampireLord Offline
Senior Member
VampireLord  Offline
Senior Member

Joined: Dec 2003
Posts: 401
Germany, Bonn
Another question I have regarding this is: When switching the entity to static mode, does it still contain all skills and flags? Because this is totally useless and a simple plant pot or tree does not need 100 skills. 3-6 would be enough.

Greetings

Sven Holtzhausen
team-blacksun.de


"Feathers shall raise men even as they do birds, toward heaven; that is by letter written with their quills." - Leonardo da Vinci

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