OFPEC Forum
Editors Depot - Mission Editing and Scripting => OFP - Editing/Scripting Multiplayer => Topic started by: fenster on 23 Jul 2003, 14:05:11
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well i have played flash for some time and im wondering if someone could explain what cause lag on mp games now i know you will say " dumb ass " but what i mean is if you take for instance a good example the "bas mission " where you take the airport has helicopter armour and well over 60 guys on the map
but when i seem to make mission with half that amount on it seem's to lag so the question i am asking is
1. do the model you use ie : bas delta , lsr spetnaz and the island chetyna have a effect on lag or not
2. do user mad island have any effect or not the same goes for user made vech
what is the secret in making a smooth mission
the mision i had was a set of players verus ai and a human element to add to diffculty please enlighten me if you can please no insulting posts as it si very easy to offer critism but harder to offer help
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1. Yes different models use different texture resolutions, and different amount of custom sound effects, which determines how many memory they take up. Once all available RAM is taken up, the virtual memory manager starts purging blocks of memory and writes them to the HDD to free some RAM. Once the purges memory is needed again (for example, it could contain parts of the landscape model data), ofp has to load it from the HDD. The problem is that the HDD is one million times slower than the RAM, so thats why you get horrible lag once you're out of RAM.
2. Yes, for example, Nogova is significantly more resource-hungry than Malden. The reason is that it uses high-res textures, and has much higher geometry resolution (i.e. more vertices).
The secret in making a smooth mission: Use as many units as you like, but as few unit types as possible! For example, adding 40 Abrams tanks to a map will cause only a fraction of the lag that you will get when you add, say, 10 Abrams, 10 T-80, 10 T-72, and 10 BMP. The reason is that for the 40 Abrams tanks, ofp loads the model,texture and sound data only once, whereas the different tanks all have their own sound, model and texture data, which needs to be loaded.
Use the "setViewDistance" command to reduce the view distance; it also helps a bit to reduce lag.
If you have the necessary scripting knowledge, handle your units dynamically, i.e. use "createVehicle" and "DeleteVehicle" to add units only where they're needed, and delete them from the map once they're dead and the player is far away from them. In an average mission, the player will probably not see more than maybe 5% of all units at a time, so handling the units dynamically bears a great potential for optimization.