11 Dias a Ixtlan: Tiempo Perdido

Tiempo Perdido: The Dark Arts of Framerate and the Downward Spiral of 3rd-Party Assets

So, after my last installment, I found myself compelled to spend a few days concentrating on my 'real' job, given that it was the season/fiscal year end and I had to meet with all the supervisory folks. A worthy diversion, given that it finances my development efforts ;)

With my responsibilies dealt with I thought I'd use my procedural techniques to finish up the ground cover and obstacles in my level and get on with the AI Implementation. I opened up the forest editor and went to town, adding in all the assets I'd collected for the project. After the first few minutes, I had the rock layer done, simulating fallen talus, as well as a sub-layer of small bushes and succulent plants, including the obligatory nopales.






I literally had used my tree brush twice when the lag got so long I couldn't continue. Using FRAPS to measure its performance, I saw that my beautiful new level was running at a whopping 9fps.

NINE.

To quote Marvin the Martian: "Uh-Oh, back to the drawing board..."

So then two more days of fixing assets. First step was to re-skin all of the rock models to use the same texture, adding a thread of consistency along with freed-up texture memory. While at it, I fixed some of the collision issues that could/would become problems for vehicles:






Another issue I had was that many of my models didn't have collision geometry, had holes in the models or both. Almost across the board I had to setup the materials as well. Here's one of the beautiful nopales from Dexsoft:






First, the transparency of this model's textures was fixed in the material editor 'advanced' pane so that it was no longer translucent. I then re-imported it into Max and used gasman's DoIt! to add LODs, collision and bounding box. After all the assets were re-assembled, I tried again. Still with the updates, framerates resembled an elephant dancing in mud. I was at a loss, as I had used the RRGTS trees, because they are some of the only drop-in foliage for Torque that have proper LODs, and look amazing. After some research I found this thread:

Framerate Post


DOH! After a couple of hours converting my .png and .jpg files to .dds, I went from 9fps to 24fps. Better but not better enough. Next step was to lose most of the rocks, and convert my 'bush' layer to groundCover instead of a forest brush. This got me back up to 30+fps, almost good enough, but likely too low once a few dozen bots and humans are duking it out. I used this resource to map my multiple-textured models to one UV-mapped file, gaining another 5-10 fps in the process. My biggest problem was that I couldn't seem to get the transparent files used for tree leaves to work with the UU3D 'Map UVs' function. Despite this, now my assets were optimized and much more useful. I added a tree ground cover to fill in the perimeters of the level, and then carefully added my tree layer. After considerable tweaking, I have it looking like the high desert terrain I'd envisioned, and averaging 55 fps. My system averages 62 fps in the busy demo levels such as Deathball Desert, so I'm accepting this framerate as usable for my eye-candy level. We'll see soon if it stands up to the AI bots and AFX effects I'm finally ready to add:







Day 7

Day 8