general rules for editing and game performance

[twistking]

Hello,

i'm interested, if there are some general tips, you can give me on how to save performance when building missions.

Obviously the more things happen, the worse the performance, but most game engines i know have certain thresholds until performance drops or there are other little things that help to minimize performance drops.

 

some questions as an example of what i mean:

- is it better to group units in groups then to have more groups with less units each? (same amount of units total)

- does it make a significant difference to use vehicles from the "structure" categorie for decoration instead of using the actual vehicles (f.e. planes on a ramp with "uncontrolled" checked)

- is there anything to know about triggers, which constantly check for certain aspects...

- is there a very rough number of how many AI aircrafts / ground units and other object the engine can handle reasonably well? (on my current system dcs runs reasonably well but not super good, so it's hard to judge if small performance problems are caused by too many objects, or just the terrain itself)

 

feel free to post everything you noticed about editing induced performance reduction! (and how to avoid it) :)

 

thanks!

[ENO]

There are a lot of variables so I'm not sure anyone can give you even a rough estimate for your system (given that you never gave us any system specs.

 

Start small- which you're going to do anyway. Say- 25 units... then 50. Make sure they're not just sitting there. Place 12 red tanks and place 12 blue tanks... make sure some of them have anti tank missile compliments. Place them close enough that they fight. Find the free view of the area (keep the action close to an airport so you can get to it easily and the AP will add to the graphic load. Kutaisi is a good one since there is a city close by.

 

Add aircraft... just place them close enough together that they will fight... start with 4 per side... gradually increase those numbers. As you free view around just monitor your performance.

 

Turn your resource monitor on in windows and watch that for performance.

 

Once you start getting an impact on graphics performance then pare it back by about 20% or so. Make sure none of your computer resources are over about 85% or so. Again, this is a from the hip number.

 

It's what I would do if I were curious. Make sure to include a variety of different vehicles fighting one another... using a variety of weapon systems.

 

As for the scripting and whathaveyou- I wouldn't worry about that. I have never heard anyone say that the scripts have any tangible impact on anything other than system crashes. Efficiency that scripts add is important for the sake of creating the mission or inability of the ME system to do what you want it to... that efficiency isn't to make the game run more smoothly (other than how it's applied to limit the number of AI vehicles / aircraft engaged at any one time.

Edited January 16, 2017 by ENO

[twistking]

ok. thanks. yes, i'll do that.

 

yes, i know, that's difficult to say sth. without knowing system specs, but i mainly wanted to be sure, not to miss any heavy performance culprits, that perhaps aren't too obvious.

f.e. i'm quite familiar with editing missions for the ARMA series of games and with the arma engine, there are many little things you can do to improve performance, or - if you don't know them - to make performance worse without changing the actual gameplay of the mission...

[ENO]

I've been out of the game for awhile in terms of mission building so I'm having to learn a bunch of stuff all over again. With that said, I recall wide varieties of different vehicles would have more of an impact on performance than the same number of the same type of vehicle. That may not be the case anymore- but it's stuck in my mind as notable.

 

When building missions you may want to keep the actual combat portion of the experience to a dull roar... allowing relatively small numbers of vehicles to duke it out before introducing more to the fray. That way you can constantly have... say... 30 vehicles and some aircraft fighting and as they die off, respawning groups. There are a few scripts that do this very well but I caution you that the aircraft respawning doesn't sound like it's working. Ground spawning sounds like it's okay.

 

There are a variety of tools available- I'm not sure if ARMA uses the same scripting language as DCS but if you have a background in .lua at all then you're already WAY ahead of me.

[twistking]

ok. thanks. I'll keep that in mind!

 

arma uses another script language, but i guess these script languages are all somewhat similar. i however always try to avoid scripting as much as possible, (i'm very slow with scripting and just not good enough to make things work reliably), while trying to use the built-in features to it's fullest potential.

[Ignition]

In this new engine you can place more units than before but its dependant on how much memory/bandwidth you have.

 

You can place 50-60 ground units without problem. I think the most cpu intensive is when the AI is finding a very large path in the ground, and when you spawn a big group of units.

 

I did a 100+ ground units in NTTR with a few Helicopters and Airplanes and I can play it without any problem on normal speed, if I put x2+ on the time speed it freezes anytime a new group spawns.

 

But you can make denser missions than before. If you have 16gb you shouldn't have major problems.

[feefifofum]

Quantities of units is often a question of a dedicated server vs. own-host situation, as well. If something else is crunching the numbers for all that stuff fighting your own performance suffer less (to a point...overload your server and obviously you have a lag-fest :) )

 

As a general rule, the larger a unit's detection radius the more resource intensive it will be, Artillery and SA-10 batteries are a good example.

 

Things which generate a lot of particle/explosion effects should be used sparingly (GRADs for example.) It looks awesome but can bring the framerate to a crawl.

 

I think, generally speaking, more units in less groups is better. The other side of that coin is that particularly large groups of vehicles have difficulty with AI pathing. You also have to consider how you want them to react; a large group of vehicles will all scatter when a single member of the group comes under fire (assuming the "disperse under fire" option is on) If you have 3 4-vehicle groups, the other two will keep moving.

 

Static objects make sense to use if you don't want the vehicle to ever move or react to anything (also there will not be a driver in the model) As they aren't using AI at that point, I'm sure you're saving a little bit of processing power, though I don't know if it's any more than you would with GROUP AI OFF.

 

Every trigger in your list will be checked every second until its conditions are met (if ONCE) or forever (if CONTINUOUS ACTION or SWITCHED CONDITION)...that said, I've built missions with literally hundreds of triggers and haven't noticed any significant performance impact.

 

Currently, things seem to bog down a bit when LARGE numbers of vehicles are moving at once. I did a total-war scenario with a few dozen convoys moving, helos landing and simulating troop deployment etc, and things were pretty rough if I tried to run it on my own PC as well as play it. Again, though, on a dedicated server, things were fine aside from the expected slight framerate hit with dozens of units visible and moving at once.

 

 

As a disclaimer, I am by no means an expert in the infrastructure of DCS, but I've been playing with the ME quite a lot over the past couple years and exploring the boundaries. :)

 

Good luck!

[ENO]

Hey speaking of performance I do recall that larger numbers of dead vehicles would collapse performance as well. Did that ever get resolved? It's an issue since we can't clean up the hulks no matter how many accumulate during battle.

[Ignition]

You can deactivate the group when its dead, but yeah thats another thing to take into account and more work.

 

I don't know in the current version if thats still true but I remember with the older version the more things on the horizon the less performance you had.

If you (staying in the airport before even start up) looked to the action no matter how far it was the FPS would drop dramatically.

I don't have this issues anymore.

[feefifofum]

Deactivating a dead group will no longer clean up dead objects, only remove the live ones...

 

That said, I haven't had any major issues with large volumes of dead units unless they were all killed within a short time frame and are generating a lot of smoke.

[FlightControl]

Deactivating a dead group will no longer clean up dead objects, only remove the live ones...

 

That said, I haven't had any major issues with large volumes of dead units unless they were all killed within a short time frame and are generating a lot of smoke.

 

The only thing is, they block airbases. All stops moving...

[Pikey]

Single player the cost of units is based on numbers. Spawning in new objects, vehicles firing and moving generally go in a linear fashion. If you host you have a multiplication factor that gets worse and amplifies different factors. This is more about detection cpu and movement of vehicles and planes. Things can be costly in cpu like route calculations, but only be apparent when you have lots to do at once. Same with a lot of wepons firing. Some scripting can begin to hurt too at large scale.

[twistking]

hey, just wanted to say thanks to you all for the tips. will keep them in mind when editing next time:)

[SoW Reddog]

This is a good thread for noob's like me. Thanks.

 

I'm coming from IL2 Cliffs of Dover where our MP server had around 8000 static objects (Inc probably 1k AA guns) and dynamic AI raids of around 20 aircraft at a time which was pretty stable even with 80 players. I take it that level is way out of scope for DCS.

[feefifofum]

With a nice beefy dedicated server you're probably within the realm of possibility, but I'm sure as hell not hand placing 8000 units... :lol:

[ENO]

Even on the more recent iteration of 476th NTTR range .miz file they say they run "north" and "south" versions separately for their events- and while they have a lot of "stuff" in the main module I'm pretty sure it's not even close to 8000 items.

 

By "north" and "south" they are probably well under 1000 items for both together... so yeah. 8000 items at once is probably out of scope for DCS.

[SoW Reddog]

Cheers guys. I figured as much, although many of those items were target objects which were needed, while with DCS the base map buildings and such can be used as targets as I understand and are visable via script, so less of a need for sure. We also allowed airfields to be customized in layout and "window dressing" which added to the load, but again the stock DCS environment is more consistently populated than the CLOD map.

 

@feefifofum - no, me either. Although in fairness I wrote an app which took template files and imported them into the database which held all the data for the campaign so the work was spread around and it wasn't all done in one hit by one person .