behind the scenes shadows( performance issue ?)

[commander elite]

ive been playing warzone for a month or a while, and im quite a good player.

once i got bored and peeked a the side of the map, (in the nnon end darkness ) and i realize the shadows of some buildings,units, under the map on an invisible platform. i dont know but, does this affect performance ?

might help development ;D

[NoQ]

Old story. Not sure if it's fixed in 3.1 or not.

[Emdek]

AFAIR not fixed yet.

But after talking on IRC about low FPS (around 5 - 6 only, while I got usually 60 FPS usually - this is Radeon HD 5570, not i915 anymore ) in last mission of campaign before final one (I've got lots of towers left, not destroyed by lassat) I've got instruction to try to change amount of rounds spent on drawing shadows for structures (AFAIR, I'm not 100% sure since that was in January) and I've got only one FPS more after applying it (but I've not seen any changes in graphics effects too).

[cybersphinx]

I think those "extra" shadows are just an artifact of how the shadows are done: projected onto things below them, and so they appear below the map as well. Doesn't take any more performance than the shadows themselves do.

[aubergine]

I'd be interested to know, as a summary, what elements of the 3D interface are most essential for performance.

Specifically, I'm toying with an idea to use JS for a significantly larger proportion of the game code (just as a pet project) and was wondering what elements are most vital in terms of performance (and should therefore be left in C++ code).

So, I assume things like the following will be best left to C++:

* pathfinding
* movement of objects (droids, projectiles) across the map
* motion of model components (eg. howitzer turning to face target, gun elevation, radars rotating, etc)

Are there any other key things that need to have "balls to the wall" performance?

[Cyp]

Anything that can affect game state probably needs to be in C++ for now, since game state must be deterministic to keep multiplayer in synch, and (as far as I know), the exact behaviour of floating point numbers in Javascript might depend on which CPU it's running on. At least, in C++, it did, there was no way to get the windows version to treat floating point in a standards-compliant way, so had to either remove windows support, or remove all floating point numbers completely to make it deterministic. And for some weird incomprehensible reason, people preferred removing floating point numbers to removing windows support.

[aubergine]

Those pesky Windows users, eh?

Could you elaborate on "deterministic" a bit more please?

[cybersphinx]

Could you elaborate on "deterministic" a bit more please?

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1 ... hp?print=1 is pretty much what we do I think.

[Cyp]

Could you elaborate on "deterministic" a bit more please?

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1 ... hp?print=1 is pretty much what we do I think.

Looks like it. (Except that we don't support replays yet.)

[Emdek]

[...]the exact behaviour of floating point numbers in Javascript might depend on which CPU it's running on. At least, in C++, it did [...]

It shouldn't, if it would do then ACID3 like test wouldn't make sense as those would give different results on different platforms.

[commander elite]

thanks for the reply guys !

and if it would help by even 1 fps, then yes, its a major advance in warzone, by total if i ( or we if you want ) continue finding these small bugs, we can atleast add up 10 fps in total,

every fps counts

[aubergine]

@commander - what happens if you disable rotating radars in the game options? (or graphic settings in recent release IIRC)

I always wondered how much of an effect constantly animated stuff has...

[Emdek]

Such animations shouldn't cause such performance issues, and if they would then I would have always low FPS.

[aubergine]

Maybe if FPS drops too low the constant animations could be disabled or slowed down? Not sure if it would help, but...

[zany]

in all RTS games I have played the more units you have the slower it gets and if you play consoles you can see how much they unit cap to prevent any slowdowns