Bad lag from logic implementation

[Topgun505]

Me and a fellow squadron member have been developing our first real (non-training) mission for A-10. Things are going along ok except for one nagging issue. When the first aircraft from the blue coalition gets within the trigger zone surrounding the SA-6 battery the trigger turns on a flag. Now ... that flag, in turn, after about 3-5 minutes kicks off 3 other pieces of logic (which are also simple). But ... bear in mind, that is ALL that trigger does initially is just activate the flag. Yet the person in the lead A-10 who enters the zone and kicks off that trigger suffers around a 6-8 second lag spike where you get about 1 FPS. There really isn't any reason I can see why it would be causing such a huge lag spike. I'm at wits end on this so I'm posting this mission up to the community to take a look at. Jump in to one of the test aircraft, follow the waypoints to WP6 (SA6) and when you get around 3mi from it see what happens. If anyone can post a suggestion on how to get rid of this lag I'm all ears.

First Strike ver 1_6 with lua.miz

[Druid_]

If you are ACTIVATING units/groups at any time during the mission then be prepared for big lag spikes. Known issue.

[Topgun505]

The trigger associated with the lag spike does not, in fact, activate units. It does turn on a flag to be used for activation of units several minutes later ... but that's all it does.

[Druid_]

TG505, I had a look at your .miz and ran it in single player and MP as testplayer and had NO lag when triggering flag 1. The only caveat is that I tested it on my own and therfore there were no other clients apart from myself. Do you get the same result when testing with 1 client?

[AKA_Clutter]

Druid,

 

Topgun and I fly together most of the time. I have this with him throughout the development stages and the lag, pauses/screen freezes seem to occur at slightly different times. I did just run the mission as a SP and as a MP with me on solo. I did get pauses in both cases. In the MP case it was 5 - 6 seconds after I had dropped a CBU-105 on the SA-6s IN the SP it was just as I dropped CUB-97 on the SA-6. In testing we did get the lag when he was hosting and as well as when I was hosting.

 

I believe both of our installs are initial releases patched to 1.1.0.6 patched to 1.1.0.7. I have been thinking of doing an un-install and then reinstalling a clean 1.1.0.7. What install do you have? Clean or patched?

 

TIA for the help.

[Druid_]

Mine is same patched 06 to 07 but I didn't release any munitions.

 

Post your problem up with a .trk file in the tech support/performance section, lets the Devs take a look at it as I know they are looking at lag/stutter probs.

 

Do you get the lag when either of you host this mission? Just a thought but maybe it just your PC if you are the only one hosting this miz.

 

Cheers, sorry I couldnt be more helpful.

[Speed]

When I looked at this earlier, like a week ago, I couldn't see anything that would cause a lag pause either. Logic takes very little time to implement. Usually the cause of a pause is activating units.

[Steel Jaw]

If you are ACTIVATING units/groups at any time during the mission then be prepared for big lag spikes. Known issue.

 

So when's it gonna fixed then?

[Speed]

So when's it gonna fixed then?

 

When you get a solid state hard drive.

[Frederf]

But seriously what is it that causes the huge freeze on activating units? Is it a logic AI pathfinding thing? Is it loading the model and textures?

 

If it's the model and textures then... errr, why aren't those loaded into memory on mission start?

[Druid_]

When you get a solid state hard drive.

 

:lol:

But seriously what is it that causes the huge freeze on activating units? Is it a logic AI pathfinding thing? Is it loading the model and textures?

 

If it's the model and textures then... errr, why aren't those loaded into memory on mission start?

I really wish I knew. Given the length of the lag I'm guessing its all of the model data and the textures being loaded. In my experience ACTIVATING heli's are the worst culprits. I hammered this one out in a thread before and got no satisfactory answer from Ed in that particular thread. However, IIRC in another thread it was mentioned that they were working on a solution to Activate units without the ensuing lag, but also added 'no promises'.

 

Currently, to avoid lag, MizBuilders are using group AI off/on but you can't use it on airborne units. Planes you can orbit for hrs (if you put a tanker in there) but Heli's you cannot. So there are some limitations as what you can do with heli's in a long mission. Its pretty frustrating as it limits an otherwise excellent Sim.

[Topgun505]

I think it is safe to disregard this thread. When we tried to view previous tracks of this mission they would always crap out. On a hunch, my squadron-mate rebuilt the first portion of the mission and we do not get any major lag spikes and we can view tracks so it looks like maybe the previous build of the mission was somehow corrupted. So let this be a lesson to everyone ... if you are building missions, make a change and then save it as a new file instead of overwriting. Would really suck to spend countless hours on building a mission only to have a corruption late in the build force you to redo it entirely from scratch.

[Druid_]

^^ agree. I sometimes have 15+ versions of a final build, each time I add major content I save it as a diff version. Glad you found the problem though.

[Speed]

^^ agree. I sometimes have 15+ versions of a final build, each time I add major content I save it as a diff version. Glad you found the problem though.

 

 

That's it? I'm an OCD saver, and I have over 160 versions of "Kashuri Defense" (working title). And I'm not quite done. Hopefully will be done this weekend though. But I never lose much work due to a mission editor crash!

 

Two other mission makers in the 16th don't back up their missions during the creation process very often, and they end up losing their work a lot. What's so hard about saving under a new name repeatedly? (Other than not having the game remember where you saved the last version anymore, so you have to navigate to the proper folder EVERY TIME now, :( )

Edited May 9, 2011 by Speed