Late activation units, stay active in the background?

In the process of making some training mission stuff in Open Alpha, and suddenly got really rubbish framerate/performance.

I had Nellis quite crowded with stationary objects, and figured Id had gone overboard, so started removing those objects/units. Helped little to nothing though.

But I do have a lot of late activation units, AI planes. Id say around 200 maybe, that I can Spawn from the radio menu. For example, a pool of 10 hostile SU27 flights, each consisting of 2 planes, from which I can spawn a single group - or more if I so desire. That I have with MIG29's, F-15's etc etc etc.

Active units is really minimal. An AWACS, a Patriot Site, and a couple of planes taking off.

Before I started adding all these late activation units, and I was just checking stationary placements, the framerate was pretty decent. So wondering if the late activation units are active in the background, cause Im seeing a simular performance drop / pattern, as to when Ive made a mistake in the past, and just had like 40 AI planes whizzling about, or went overboard with a CAP script, and had a lot of hostile CAP's in the air.

I will investigate further tonight though - after dinner, by making a copy of the mission file, and then rip out all the late activation units, and see if the framerate bounces back up.

But maybe someone already knows and can answer, before I return to the PC, and start ripping stuff up.

Well nope, nothing found thus far.

Just me alone on the ramp to check fps. Then I added 160 SU-27 (40 groups of 4) with late activation. Same fps. Then I set them to all activate trough radio menu. Same fps, until I activated them, and my fps dropped from 140 to 40 - no surprise there. Then I made it so it would random spawn one of the 40 groups, trough the radio menu. Same fps as before, the 140.

Seems to be a few of the stationary planes. Mig 29S has a whopping 877K trig. Woot?!? And the Viggen gives of 600K. F-15C 300K, and others around 170K. Now, which of these actually have proper LOD's, I couldnt tell. But I have a feeling that some of these dont, cause I can be far up north and look towards Nellis, and the framerate takes a dip.

Hi,

I found in my experience (developping a lua Framework), that late activate groups are created immediatly when mission starts because DCS send a lua DCS event BIRTH. They seem to be invisible (this for grounds units) but present and of course freezed. For example, other ground units turn around a late activation group.

When you desactivate, unit (or group) is destroyed from the mission, DCS send a lua event DEAD.

So it may have an impact even if this might be light.

As sunski34 wrote, do AI ground units set to Late activation have similar performance impact as active ground units (in my experience in 1.5.5). Okay static units have less impact in performance.

I can think of a possible reason. Late activation is still filtered in game. I submitted two bugs on late activation, one for airborne radars and one for the Viggen radar where they are "seen" by radar even if they are not actually there. The Air one was based on all third party radars and since was solved, not checked Viggen recently but that is besides the point. This means that detection by radar and visual and other algorithms need to filter these units from ones that are actually there, they are loaded into db tables. And that's a processing count which albeit starts minimally, in the numbers you are talking about, might actually affect CPU cycles in the game engine.

The better way is to bring these objects into the world via spawning. Of course that opens a different kettle of fish and most folks are against doing it via code since its a requirement of time that they don't want to invest in. It also means if you start wrapping these spawns into an object oriented script to refer to them later via menu, detection and other types of requirement, you need to fully invest into that script method, again, not attractive if you are set on your vanilla path.

Nevertheless, the issue you are seeing by having all these units late activated is a real limitation and this is why people invest in the effort to learn scripting to bypass one of many DCS limitations with large unit counts simulataneously.

There are paths to circumvent your issue, but not easy ones or stock game ones.

There's no real solution I think actually. If you spawn, you can have little DCS freeze sometimes. If you have late activation groups, no freeze when activate.

Sunski

Specific to that "spawn lag" as I call it, the way to soften the blow is by putting the same models you spawn out in the Mission live so there is no texture load jerk. This is more specific (AND DIFFERENT) with the payware modules when a Player activates a module that is payware and you get a spawn lag there. I beleive someone said it was to do with starforce protection kicking in and some disk drive decryption of files which interupts the synchronicity of the server engine whilst it waits. It's different to lag caused on missile shots in busy servers too, in fact theres a lot of engine related lag, but I think what the OP is refereing to is the lag when activating units en masse. Correct me if im wrong, OP.

There's no real solution I think actually. If you spawn, you can have little DCS freeze sometimes. If you have late activation groups, no freeze when activate.

 

 

Sunski

We've found a vanilla ME work-around to eliminate late activate unit spawn in single player and multiplayer, you can have as many units in a group (nothing too crazy like x5 100 ground unit groups) but we've spawned a WHOLE LOT of both air and ground units at once without any issues:

https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?p=3257962#post3257962