Monday, 18 August 2008

Fraser Fir Clusters; curse them all!

I have written about my forest areas performance problems by nighttime a couple of times. I've cut the forest into 7 smaller areas. I have removed all possible placeables and cut them out with the walkmesh cutter triggers. Then I've cursed, tried change the length of the night and cursed again. I've reduced the amount of threes to 40 per area. No luck! The games stutters at nighttime. I have even increased the memory in my computer to 3GB.

In a hysterical, wild and uncontrolled notion I did a batch replacement of all "FraserFirC" (they are nice an volumious) with a mix of "WestRedCedar (X1)" and "Scotch Pine - Cluster". To my surprice everything runs as smooth as anyone would ask for. The forest get a whole different mood to it but I'm not the one to complain. My wife says it look better. The sad thing is that it's 6 forest areas left to do it in. Lots of recoloring and adjusting textures for. But I'm a happy guy today! :)

Note: I should have suspected those fraser firs as I found out that the can be insanely performance craving when trying to help Wyrin with a strange crash in his DA2-module.

Thanks for reading, as always!
/A

10 comments:

Lance Botelle (Bard of Althéa) said...

Hi A,

Is it possible that if you replace all the fraser firs, that you can make the areas bigger again?

i.e. One area instead of seven?

Just a thought. I don't want to create extra work, but wondered if it was just a problem with that one particular tree.

Lance.

Wyrin said...

Ever since you helped me out with that area crash, I've been avoiding that FraserFirCluster like the plague! But you're right - it's just the right look for many forests, so not being able to use it is a real pain!

Zach Holbrook said...

Very interesting. I believe I'm using Fraser firs in some of my areas. Performance isn't too sluggish but it's not smooth as butter either--I'll have to check this out.

Anonymous said...

Just dropped in to "Wave hi" have no clue what the post is about. that is ok though! It tells me the project is being worked on hehe


"waves"

Liso

Phoenixus said...

Hmm,
I haven't had that much problem with FrasierFurClusters either.

Admittedly though I don't use them in batch form like that. I usually only use a few in any given pine area.

Normally for Batches I create my own pre-fab cluster and then place it down.

Frank Perez said...

I wonder if the problem with the Fraser Fir Cluster extends to the Fraser Fir (single tree). By Silvanus, performance testing is such a drag.

Amraphael said...

@Lance,
no I won't merge the areas. I like that the forest seems much bigger when doing the area transition. It also allows me to have different load screens at each forest part. It also feel a lot more like the text adventure where; "go west" takes you to a new location.

Amraphael said...

@wyrin, maerduin, Phoenixus and frank perez

After examining the Fraser Fir Cluster models I would say that it's about how many of them that resides in a "tile". 10 in a 4*4 area seems to be OK, 30 is not. At least in my setup. This model is intensive, many leaves that moves and a hug amount of shadows.

Using the single Fir don't seem as performance demanding as it's less complex.

In my tests the greatest problems occur during night and when the shadows grow long. Removing shadows makes it somewhat better.

Amraphael said...

@Liso,
Waving back!
You're right it's work hard all the day long (my last vacation week)

Wyrin said...

what i found more strange was that i could never get the performance issue son my end (and with my old machine, this was amazing!)

number per area is a good point - something i'll look into in the future