• MIK
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Topic: Graphics Req. - Unneccesary draws.

Hello, magical DEV's - I have been running into problems with the draw distance in-game.

it would seem that when you turn the draw distance right down to nothing.... it doesn't activate on "certain" landmarks - i.e. if you get the strange wine bug i have encountered recently, you can see all of the highway-accelerators, terminals,  and teleports on the map. - this is not normal behaviour obviously, but it tells me the game was normally drawing them behind the terrain.... BADDDDDDDD.



i look around... i can see EVERY teleport EVERY terminal, and EVERY highway accelerator.(some highway arms DO get clipped, but not all of them)

my poor little laptop cringes.

i look in the direction of *no teleports, terminals, or arms - my laptop pulls a smooth 30fps, just enough to enjoy the game. regardless of what else is on the screen.



and yet, draw distance, and terran detail are both set to nothing... and you can see the very obvious limit of the setting... and many things drawn outside of this range.


could this have something to do with my massive graphics lag?? i think so!!! - i play on a GTX560 most of the time so not an issue,, but the laptop i would normally play on the road, and at mates houses (corpies big_smile) doesn't like perpetuum due to this one simple little fact - i only have a mid-range card in my laptop, and the game is wasting it on stuff that i don't need to be drawing


i noticed the fact that the game draws these things thanks to a bug i encountered testing wine - i lost the terrain, but could see dampalor teleport from shinjalaar terminal.... hmmmmmm....... if any devs care about optimizing the game engine - i would think these were supposed to be clipped by the draw distance setting(maybe they got left out) - if they get clipped, then it  will majorly impact on the system requirements for the game( unneccesary draws == unneccesary lag == unneccesary requirements)


I'm hoping somebody takes interest in this, because it is ticking me off, and i am sure there are millions of people out there wondering - just like me - why their machine that will play seemingly more graphically intensive games has a major problem with perp.



screenshots available if needed - just ask/

  • DEV
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Re: Graphics Req. - Unneccesary draws.

Screenshots would be appreciated - please make sure to send one of your graphical settings as well.
Teleports and bases are visible from far away as they are the most important landmarks.

Also please test the game at the highest possible resolution supported by your laptop and at 1024x768 and let me know the change in framerate this produces (showfps 1 console command, please use the ms value and NOT the fps one)

3 Reply by Mikrochip (edited by Mikrochip 2011-11-17 01:08:27)

  • MIK
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Re: Graphics Req. - Unneccesary draws.

screen shots still coming if you need them(havent been playing much the last couple days)..


i think maybe this is a null issue anyway mate, me just being picky... i had another look and your right, it is only teleports and terminals...  i can EASILY solve the problem by jumping on my big PC...  and upon more thinking about it, the impact on performance couldn't be any more than 5-10%, due to the fact that the unneccesary draws compared to normal draws is minimal anyway.



my laptop sees 80m/s a frame, 20fps on low graphs


something like 4 or 5 fps at full graphics...(400-500m/s a frame) but im not drawing terrain on the laptop(not that i can see anyway) so i dare say the REAL result would be lower.

***edit - Resolution difference between 1024, and 1440 is about 3-4fps(minimal) WINE doesn't have too much issue with higher resolutions......

if you ar einterested to see the terrain dissappearing bug - i can still post Screen shots, though i have only reproduced it under WINE, and the same game folder runs perfectly under windows. would like to see those distant teleports/terminals clipped one day though... it put me off first time i played with draw distance i thought nothing had happened.........

  • DEV
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Re: Graphics Req. - Unneccesary draws.

Ok, let me first explain why I asked you to tell me ms values and not fps values.

If the game runs at 100 fps and you experience a 5 fps rise with a resolution change that means the change is around 5% and is truly minimal. However if you have the game running at 5 fps and you experience a 5 fps rise, you get 100% better performance which is NOT minimal. The same values in ms are 10ms->9.5ms vs 200ms->100ms, the first one being a .5 ms change and the latter a 100ms change which in itself is very solid data (fps change in itself is not as you can see because both values were caused by a 5 fps change).

The reason why I asked you to change the resolution is not because of wine - it is to eliminate fillrate dependency on your laptop as the cause of the slowness. If the game is heavily fillrate dependent on your system, changing the resolution to a lower one would result in a proportional speedup - so if you change from 1440x1050 (1.5 million pixels) to 1024x768 (0.78 million pixels) the pixels to draw should roughly be halved and your speed should roughly double.

The disappearing terrain issue is only happening in wine which we don't officially support due to the lack of manpower on the team.

Also the draw distance setting is value should be set to middle or lower on most configurations, the two options above the middle one should be called "overkill" and "insane" smile

  • CIR
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Re: Graphics Req. - Unneccesary draws.

DEV BoyC wrote:

Also the draw distance setting is value should be set to middle or lower on most configurations, the two options above the middle one should be called "overkill" and "insane" smile

And here I was hoping to go even more insane... big_smile