Islands and Lag

[Panther 222]

I have some questions concerning lag

1. What is lag exactly?
I have noticed that when people talk about lag that they do not always mean the same thing. It would be helpful if we are talking about the same thing and get a good definition of lag.

2. What causes lag?
Sometimes comments on new islands and/or new addons boil down to: "good work, but this going to lag like hell". (Recently I have read comments like this concerning the field-addons of WWIIEC and the Tonal-island, see http://ofp.gamezone.cz/index.php?comments=5357). It's all very well to make a statement like that but what I would like to know is why some islands and addons are going to lag

3. How can we avoid lag?
You can spend many hours on making a beautiful island but when it is not playable because of lag, all your efforts are in vain. So what can an island-maker do to avoid lag?

[SideWinder]

My definition of lag is 'Jerk-O-Vision' which means that the screen moves in
shocklike fashion, jumping from one frame to the other in non-fluid motion.

Some island designers are too enthousiastic and put too many objects on their island, like making their island a giant city or something. Of course it
depends on your system performance how many objects you can put on your island without causing lag. I don't think the actual size of the island makes a difference. I think it's what's in your viewing range that's taking up most computing resources.

[Kaliyuga]

 thing is.. no matter how good your pc is ofp will only allow for a max of 256 objects on screen at any one time....  

so I think lag on islands comes when the computer has to start trying to decide what to draw and what not to draw once it starts to hit that 256 limit..

now of course when you're in a chopper/plane the lag becomes more noticable  because your viewing distance is increased by quite a bit just by being higher off the ground.

lots of beta testing on as many comps as possible will help ya sort out whether  your island should lag or not.

 IMO from making my own island its always easier to make it as detailed as you want from the beginning and then you can go back and delete a few things later if you do get some lag..

of course lag can be battled by turning down the viewdistance or upping the fog on an island..


my own island lags a little when you're in the air.. and flying over one of the larger cities too.... but if you're on foot.. then there are no problems ...

:cheers:

[m21man]

Lag is generally when the game looks hideously choppy. It's usually a phenomenon that occurs when you're overloaded with objects. Overloading with foliage, which can be very strong, can be avoided by making forests instead of individual trees, which is required when making jungles (Like the Colombia island I'm currently making, it'll be about 90% jungle when it's done). The same idea would apply to crop fields. Also, if you're using jungles (I know, I'm obsessed with jungles ), then you don't need to make your terrain rolling. It can be primitive and angular, but it'll look great when it's covered in forest. This technique is good anytime you want large collections of foliage in one area.

Some islands, especially jungle islands or islands with crop fields, need large amounts of objects to look good. When you're designing an island like this, you simply can't please people who are either too cheap to either improve their system or buy a new one. These are the people who instead bitch that "This island is too laggy on my 600MHz. Your island sucks, it's a piece of shit". You can see this charming type of response by looking through virtually any board about Tonal. Apparently, the whiners live in their own little world where everything must be dragged down to their level in order to be good.

[Panther 222]

thing is.. no matter how good your pc is ofp will only allow for a max of 256 objects on screen at any one time....  

so I think lag on islands comes when the computer has to start trying to decide what to draw and what not to draw once it starts to hit that 256 limit..

now of course when you're in a chopper/plane the lag becomes more noticable  because your viewing distance is increased by quite a bit just by being higher off the ground.

(snip)

my own island lags a little when you're in the air.. and flying over one of the larger cities too.... but if you're on foot.. then there are no problems ...

I would really love to see a real large city in OFP. Reading you're comments on lag I suppose that this simply not possible (unless you want to make it a no-fly-zone). However, and this might not be a very new idea, it could be possible to make very large city-objects. For example 250 x 250 meters with buildings/houses and streets on it. 16 of these objects would give you a square kilometre of city. Of course such large object have their own specific problems (damage, for example), but I wonder if this idea might work

By the way the same idea can be used to make trenches.

[Pathy]

Exactly...thats why BIS used sections of forest rather than individual trees...because its  number of objects as opposed to number of faces....if you know what your doing you can cover a map with vegetation with absolutely no lag at all.... ;D

[Leone]

Objects can only really be 50x50x50m (maybe a little larger....but 50 is a good practical limit). So you couldn't make a working object that was 250x250m.

[Pathy]

You can, but you need to setpos the Geo lods, which is more laggy than building it normally....

[shinraiden]

Another thing to consider is the types of buildings. Compare CAT's afgan buildings, with a high percentage of complex enterable buildings, with Tonal's simple blocks with good textures. This is still a pain for the clipping engine, but the 3d engine has a lot less to worry about.

[Pathy]

But cats afgan map never lagged on mine, in all its versions (i was at nomad, so got exclusive testing rights). Thats because the map size was smaller.

[Gielovic]

i think most of the lag is because of large amounts of texture memory. A tex of 4096*4096 needs 51 mb of texture-memory (or something like that)

[rom]

But cats afgan map never lagged on mine, in all its versions (i was at nomad, so got exclusive testing rights). Thats because the map size was smaller.

Mapsize alone has verry little to do with ingame lag since the area that is rendered (and is the most work) for displaying is defined by the viewdistance and not by the mapsize.
A big maps can lag when the size it needs in memory is bigger than the amount of RAM you have and it needs to be swapped to the HD wich creates some kind of stuttering but not permanent lag.

A much bigger factor for lag is when the engine needs to render many polygons (either too detailed models or just too many normal models), many big textures (textures need to be swapped in and out of the graphics card memory), or if the LODs of the models are unbalanced so that many objects in view need to change the LOD at the same time

Also a whole different sort of lag can be caused by rough terrain. If the terrain is quite rough then the game has problems drawing the map wich gives you this map lag that causes problems placing units in the editor.
While this is mostly associated with big maps, it also doesn't have much to do with the size of the map but how the terrain looks like.
(This is why BIS maps that have such smooth terrain don't lag and maps with real world data wich is often verry rough mostly lag)

[Gielovic]

(This is why BIS maps that have such smooth terrain don't lag and maps with real world data wich is often verry rough mostly lag)

use the terrain erosion tool in visitor, and the terrain will be much smoother;)

[Panther 222]

Well, I knew this is going to lag, but I am building it anyway....

see:
http://www.socsci.kun.nl/~edgard/pics/lag-city.jpg
http://www.socsci.kun.nl/~edgard/pics/lag-city2.jpg

[Gielovic]

looks damn cool man