hi there! i just played "the big escape", the test level and i cannot understand how it was done that i can run this game in highest settings without stuttering, with fast firing weapons and a good fps rate. how was this done? i mean, the level is kinda filled with stuff and lots of enemies. i have no enemies and i can hardly play my maps because everything is very slow, down to 4fps. are there some slider settings that are never used but save some resources or something like that?
what does "terrain size" mean, i mean how do i know that i have the right terrain size when i change the slider? in some maps i could reduce the terain size but i don't know if this has any effect on the performance. i know a erformance update is coming but why waste memory ?
i'm really impressed by the speed of the gameplay in "the big escape" and i wonder why my maps are so slow and obviously wasting memeory at some point. of course, i know! a map with many trees slows down performance but i have more maps that could be made better.
thanks in advance maybe you have ideas on that. just play "the big escape" and tell me what you think. btw. this is an awesome map.

I too would like some suggestions on this. GG team, please chime in. Also, this would make a good Twitch session tutorial.

if you load in the "The Big Escape" you will see that when you TAB/TAB, the camera distance is only 10. This speeds up FPS dramatically. for my graphics card, my FPS went from 36-40 to 55-64. A great effective trick.

Thanks. Will try.

oh yes! reducing the camera distance changed my fps only just a little bit but better than nothing. i will try in another map but thanks for this idea!

also you may already know this but if you want to speed up the level you can also bring down the shader levels and reduce shadows/reflections (should your graphics card be struggling).

Of course you could also just wait for the next update ....
This will hopefully make a big difference to your speeds

Yes definitely, looking forward to the first major performance update

yes, this is a struggle for me. i want to have a woorking gameflow but i also want to have the best possible graphic settings. when i make a testrun thru my ISLAND HOPPER map 1 i have an FPS of 4. when i put all three sliders to lowest i have 9 FPS, when i reduce the camera distance i get it up to 11 FPS in low terrain/entity/grass.


i don't want to put the work of TGC under a bad light but in my personal nature i always expect too much and this is often disappointing. do you think this performance update will be a huge change? honestly i hope it will. but is it even possible to make a map playable that has 4 FPS with ONLY terrain, nature and objects finished but NO enemies, no scripts or triggers, sounds etc.
i dream of an update that makes threads like this (how can i improve performance?) totally unnecessary i'm really excited, because i think this might be a major change. but i'm afraid it might not.

Wonder if that changes will affect my card too (please see my sig).

I don't know if I get this few fps due perfomance or due my card?
I know almost all you using gfx, but Nuncio too, so I don't know what thing about.
I also never get up to 16 doing as Nuncio said above.
Now I'm getting 7 fps with one pos-apocalytic Z level.

Even the zombie does not retain changes made (in soudset) via properties panel. Please see the video to get the point better.

And I've setted to in fpe file (soundset0/1), but as you can see in video bellow, gg does not read fpe file soundset, even deleting dbo+bin files, saving my wav file inside zombie folder, like original zombie does. I've entered only Sounset, due sounset1 was already entered, and gg set the same fpe wav file in sounset1, but does not mine in soundset. (in zombie properties I meant).



Thanks for watch my vid.

3com

If you are getting 4 FPS on maps then I seriously doubt the performance update will vastly improve this. Say it gives us 50% boost in speed (that is being very optimistic) you would then get a huge 6 fps instead of the 4 fps. No, to speed up any level that slow will mean removing entities in large quantities: or at least spreading them out a bit.
I see this update smoothing things out more. GG will struggle less with lots of entities as it's core can churn through them that much faster. Lua scripts should operate faster and so give faster AI performance. The best part of the update is the potential for other improvements now, faster terrain, occlusion, entity batching. These things will make a far bigger difference to overall speed.

As to improving speed here and now there are many options. Reduce the camera distance, the terrain size. Fiddle with the distance transition and range settings. Reduce the grass percentage as low as you can live with. Increase its width to help make up for the lower coverage. Turn off collision and physics for any entities the player will never reach. Keep your dynamic entities down to a minimum if you can.

If you can live with lowering the shaders quality, do so. It will give you more FPS than all the options above generally. Terrain is the killer. Try a test. Do a small scene and see the fps difference between all of them. You should find setting the terrain to medium or lowest will give you the best boost of all the options. Grass makes little difference at all on my machine, so I normally leave that on full. Entity quality makes a fair difference as well but of the options available, is still second to the terrain reduction. Don't forget you can turn off terrain and water etc when you do not need them. Big speed increases from those generally.

My compo entry Subterranean Secret runs fairly well on my machine through all the levels, as I have done my best to keep speed up with some of the above methods. I also broke it into several levels rather than one large one. GG just can't handle huge scenes very well yet.
Here's a video I made. If you want to check the game out it is available on the link from my Youtube page. If you do and like it give it a vote

I agree. We need this performance patch as soon as possible. My games run from 14-24fps for the most part when i set to high. It's been this way for a while already and i think it's time for this patch.

Does goinside.lua turn off the water and the terrain? If it only turns off the terrain, how do I turn off the water also?

goindoors.lua



You can find it in scriptbank folder.
hth

3com

thanks for the answers, DVader: very intersting information! thanks!

last night i had a very good performance boost: i have a map that plays all inside a tunnel system. i reduced the camera distance and got from ~30FPS to 57FPS and then i put in goindoor.lua and the FPS got from 57 to 74 ! now i got between 70 and 80 FPS and i just need the enemies. this is going to be a good map! without a performance update.
in my worst times the map had about 17 FPS and i was going to cancel it. now i have new hope for this one without changing anything of importance. this is already great. so here this thread was a really good help for me! THX!!

my outdoor maps won't be so good with performance.

Same here. I placed the goindoor.lua in my level and it boots from 14-24fps all the way to 50-70fps. The problem is when i have to go outside again and run the gooutdoor.lua and i get the 14-24fps once again. I'm wonder is there is a scripts that hides all the entities in it's radius. That will allow the game not load indoor items. It will basically be the reverse of goindoor and disable everything inside an area.

@Nuncio, glad the suggestions helped. You can see it's possible to have speed in certain situations

@ Timba. You can hide entities with a range or zones. I couldn't say it helps much though. Hiding objects has never made a vast difference in my tests. Remember the game will have loaded the items, it just will be hiding them rather than displaying them: You can't load up items on the fly in GG. You could write a script to hide them outside a certain distance, but remember that this will be running all the time and thus slowing the system down. It really depends on your map I suppose, as to whether this would be effective or not. I'll have a quick play and see how it works these days.: Not really played with it for a year or more.