DogACTUAL wrote:He is right. Devs should certainly look into the connection the player models or players in one place have in this.
Fallujah also runs at much higher FPS looking at the city centre if there are no players on it.
It's also weird how other maps won't have the same problem with a lot of concentrated players though.
Oh ye, that should take what, 10mins to do and fix? Sure no problem, why didn't you ask before?
I'm sorry DogACTUAL, but you act like we do nothing nor have any interest in fixing this game, which simply isn't true, but even to make the tiniest improvement takes a huge amount of work and is normally totally unnoticeable. Even when I fixed up the Lynx with some vast optimizations and improvements, that one helicopter took a huge amount of work to rework all its faults:
https://www.realitymod.com/forum/showth ... p?t=148783
Rhino wrote:PR players should all be very well acquainted with the Lynx AH.7
(Army Helicopter Mark 7) since it has been ingame as the British Army's Light Utility Helicopter since
v0.85 (2009), but since then I have optimized and improved somewhat and they were actually quietly implemented into
v1.5 last year, just other than the changelog it wasn't mentioned as the other versions of the Lynx were not finished enough for me to make this post.
Most of these changes are invisible or hard to notice but most of the changes have either decreased the overall load on the client's system to draw and load, while some have just made the vehicle look better with little or no extra load on the client's system. One of the most notable changes is the main texture resolution which have been increased from 1024x1024 to 2048x2048
(four times the texture size/detail) while only slightly increasing the overall memory usage from before with moving all the transparent parts off the main sheet and onto their own unique small sheet with only transparent parts on it.
New optimized & higher quality "Rotor Blur" textures were also made since the old rotor blurs used the main rotor's rotor blur for the tail rotor, missing the tail rotor's iconic red and white stripes from the blur.
There is a whole range of other small improvements and optimizations made but most of them I can't remember and are too small to be worth noting but the bottom line is that the Lynx does not only have a smaller impact on your hardware but also looks better than it did before v1.5, and all these optimizations have of course been passed on to the other mew versions below!
As for why "lots of players in one location causes FPS drops" (at least on some systems), that's most likely, for most systems, because the client has so many draw calls to process and it's worse on maps like Fallujah that have lots of lots of draw calls already from all the individual statics around the client is having to process on top of all the players and the weapons they are carrying etc.
Fixing this thou isn't like changing one line of code in PR I'm sorry to say, it requires reworking and optimizing all our models.
Back in around 2011/2012, I identified our handheld weapons, mainly their 3rd person models being a huge issue for performance in how many draw calls they have, with every attachment having their own texture, sometimes multiple textures and multiple materials, each classing as a new draw call. This is ok for a 1st person model as you only ever see one of them at any one time and only have to process that for each weapon. But for 3rd person models, anyone in view means that if their weapon has say 10 draw calls, then if 30 players are in your view distance with no other way of them being culled out, you have 300 draw calls to process just from the handheld weapons they are all holding alone.
As such, I tried to introduce a method of creating separate 3rd and 1st person models and textures, with them having as few draw calls as possible, as well as being much lower poly and smaller textures etc, which you can see the unfinished tutorial on it here:
https://www.realitymod.com/forum/showth ... p?t=111845
1st person, 20,135 tris:
https://media.realitymod.com/tutorials/ ... tut_02.jpg
3rd peson LOD0, 5,858 tris:
https://media.realitymod.com/tutorials/ ... ut_222.jpg
You can see there the 3rd person models had almost 1/4 the tris(/detail) as the 1st person models and everything grouped up onto one texture atlas. There were some big things I would do very differently if I was going to do it again, like separating the alpha/transparent textures out onto their own texture sheet to save on wasted texture memory and because they require their own material/draw call that's separate from the others
(something I did for the Lynx series when optimizing it, before it had all it's alpha textures in the main sheet, wasting loads of texture memory), and do common attachments differently as well but my knowledge/skill of optimization and modelling has come quite some way in 8 years so take that tutorial/method with a big pinch of salt.
The biggest problem with this whole concept, however, was mainly the huge amount of work it took to do. It took me a long time to do just the SA80 series. Then on top of that, you had the problems of not many people understanding it or able to do it, and its inflexibility which also lead to Chuc accidentally reverting all of this when he updated the SA80 series models/animations and would have been another huge amount of work to fix which I never got round to.
So the method was pretty much abandoned for the most part, some weapons do have optimized 3rd person models where possible but most still have the same models and textures for their 3rd person weapons as they do their 1st since its simple, easy and looks by far the best.
If DogACTUAL, you really care about this as much as you say, I could update the tutorial/method and you could go about updating all our weapons with proper 3rd person models but we are realistically talking a few years of work to do that and that would be even for just someone like me doing it who already has the skills but I will happily point you in the right direction if you want to do all the work that's required
For me and most of the other Devs/Cons thou, we simply don't have the time or the motivation to go over all the old work other people have made, optimizing them with only the tiniest bit of performance improvement for everything you do. For now, me and the other devs are just focusing on making anything new we make as optimized as possible
(The L4A4 Bren is just one of many new weapons with proper separate 1st and 3rd person models/textures), or optimizing any old models we are updating for any other reason, like what I did with the Lynx series, I optimized it fully before making the new versions, even thou the original Lynx AH.7 won't be seen very much in PR with the new Lynx AH.9A taking its place on most maps.
Cheers!
