CA: Game freezing in certain cirumstances when driving ground units so much that i'm forced to close it down

[Worrazen]

Hello

 

I was trying to play a relaxed set of CA missions, but it didn't go so well. I think this issue happened to me a year ago, last time I was trying to play CA.

 

I just had to forcefully shut DCS down because the freezing was getting to long.

 

In certain conditions of very high amounts of objects being viewed at high zoom levels in various ground vehicles, DCS will grind to a halt due to either the sheer amount of rendering or also the draw call amounts bogging things down for up to 30-60 seconds depending on the situation.

 

A fraction of those objects are actually visible, this is because DCS does not support occlusion culling, it's rendering everything in that line of sight. If a tree line is blocking the city, it doesn't matter, if a big building is blocking the view of 1000 units behind it, it won't matter, it's going to render and keep rendering the everything in that field of view. Hopefully this feature is supported along with Vulkan API otherwise Vulkan API's benefits may be muffled exactly where it should shine and the results would be mixed, FPS minimums may persist in certain cases like this. Multi-threading really needs to give inputs all the priority and their own thread, and I think there is a thread-priority and an input thread too already, but it doesn't work in this, already but that's I guess not enough, it needs to be able to interrupt the main thread in any possible condition.

 

The mission was the official CA mission "Advance on Kutaisi" and I think looking in the direction of Kutaisi triggers this huge lag and in worst cases long freezes lasting up to 5-10 minutes, or more.

 

This looks like game breaking scenario to me, althought how much are my graphics settings to blame I'm not too sure about because low performance is one thing, but no performance at all is another, I don't even have Visibility Range maxed out, it's on High setting which is the middle choice.

 

I guess I'll have to lower it and see or just avoid such missions with dense populated areas.

 

The reasons why the zoomed views are necessary is because it's the only way to shoot accurately, and visually is the only way to do that.

You cannot accurately shoot without being in the most zoomed in view.

 

So this isn't something I would put myself into intentionally, because you normally don't see thousands of objects in front of you, only a few that you're driving throgh, so you inadvertently get into a freezy or laggy position that sometimes is hard to abort once it freezes over.

The turret or driver view is the default view, so by chance, when you can take control of a vehicle you may coincidentially fall into a laggy scenario as well.

 

I don't think I would want to wait until Vulkan API, Occlussion Culling and multi-threading to get this sorted ... IMO, a workaround may be justified in this case, there should be some kind of a way to interrupt the engine trying to render so much stuff, perhaps there could be some kind of a special draw-call or FPS detector that would, if it detects draw calls exceeding XYZ number, switch your view into F10, F7 or isometric view immediately, and it would work in a way that has a priority over rendering if possible, it may still lag but it would freeze only for a couple of seconds I suppose.

 

This kind of workaround may be useful in other cases with a ton of units, objects, effects, particularly in beta-testing. At least if this workaround is simple to make and doesn't take too much time.

 

Infact, suspending the rendering thread in DCS also freezes the main thread as per normal so I had no luck with anything I tried on my end.

Edited April 17, 2021 by Worrazen

[Worrazen]

Hmm, I can't recreate it in a new fresh mission right now ... I also changed my graphics settings for View Range from High to Extreme to give it even more chance of showing this but weirldy enoguh now I can't do it in the same exact location,

 

First is the fact that the CA mission was an old one made with an very old ME.

Second is some other factor I'm not taking into account, that mission lasted for 3 hours real time and probably more than half a day in-game as I used a hefty amount of fast-speed for some other tests I was doing.

Third, less likely, some kind of unique units on the battlefield (or in view) with some kind of unique positions to them, perhaps.

Edited April 17, 2021 by Worrazen

[Worrazen]

Sorry for a bit of a rush to conclusion there, it kinda didn't made any sense if I could see all of those cities and structures from a higher vantage point and certainly from air flying over all of that doesn't make any sort of freezing

 

 

Unless you let artillery pound one place for hours and hours at an end creating thousands of impact craters

 

 

High zoom (FOV?) levels would bring the impact craters into rendering, from very far distances away where they're not seen at all, hidden behind other objects or even terrain, so the craters don't need to be actually seen like shown in the picture above, same way they're bringing in distant structures objects, but thousands of these impact craters and the associated effects have a bigger impact than all of the structures around.

 

Basically some missions have artillery programed or bugged to pund a specific place all the time, or that's a bug because they never shoot at my units.

Edited April 21, 2021 by Worrazen