chromium Posted December 15, 2011 Posted December 15, 2011 Hi, I'm building a scenery to be run on a multiplayer server with more than 400 units on the ground. Every time I got some of these groups to move, and the most of the time are on hold. I need to know: Is there much performance hit difference beetween: -ACTIVE and Hold units; -UNACTIVATED units (but visible before start); -UNACTIVATED units (not visible before start); -ACTIVE and AI OFF units; PS: do not consider the amout of "units on fire"... it's only a "units hold" evaluation. Author of DSMC, mod to enable scenario persistency and save updated miz file Stable version & site: https://dsmcfordcs.wordpress.com/ Openbeta: https://github.com/Chromium18/DSMC The thing is, helicopters are different from planes. An airplane by it's nature wants to fly, and if not interfered with too strongly by unusual events or by a deliberately incompetent pilot, it will fly. A helicopter does not want to fly. It is maintained in the air by a variety of forces in opposition to each other, and if there is any disturbance in this delicate balance the helicopter stops flying; immediately and disastrously.
SmokeyTheLung Posted December 15, 2011 Posted December 15, 2011 Group activate triggers generally lead to stutters, especially if you're activating more than one group. I tend to use the AI on/off triggers to avoid this. I think the general consensus is the more groups (as opposed to individual units) that are present on the map, the more noticeable stuttering/frame rate loss. System specifications: Computer, joystick, DCS world, Beer
LostOblivion Posted December 15, 2011 Posted December 15, 2011 I cannot answer your questions, but in terms of performance, I have a feeling that making few big groups is better than making many small groups. So for units that are fairly close together that does not move, I put them all in one group. For example. In my Taking Krymsk mission, the entirety of the FOB at Point Impact was one big group containing all the units, infantry, tanks, BMPs, artillery, everything. Nice plane on that gun... OS764 P930@4 MBUD3R M6GB G5870 SSDX25 CAntec1200 HTMHW
chromium Posted December 15, 2011 Author Posted December 15, 2011 @SmokeyTheLung: Thanks! @LostOblivion: I had the same feelings when "n" units are active and moving. But I split group exactly to move only the necessary ones, having few units activated at the same time. But what I need is to undestand the difference in performance hit related to "non active" groups... Author of DSMC, mod to enable scenario persistency and save updated miz file Stable version & site: https://dsmcfordcs.wordpress.com/ Openbeta: https://github.com/Chromium18/DSMC The thing is, helicopters are different from planes. An airplane by it's nature wants to fly, and if not interfered with too strongly by unusual events or by a deliberately incompetent pilot, it will fly. A helicopter does not want to fly. It is maintained in the air by a variety of forces in opposition to each other, and if there is any disturbance in this delicate balance the helicopter stops flying; immediately and disastrously.
Speed Posted December 15, 2011 Posted December 15, 2011 (edited) Not quite sure about the game. I can tell you that the more AI there is, the slower the game gets. Additionally, I would caution against using unactivated but visible before start enemies- there used to be a bug where only the host would see them. I don't know if this bug still exists or not. The reason I don't know is because I haven't tested it because there is a better way- instead of using unactivated but visible before start enemies, use AI ON/OFF trigger actions. I do know that if you are using Slmod, it might be possible to notice a slight performance decrease on the host machine that is due to Slmod if you have A LOT of moving units, but to notice it, there needs to be hundreds of units moving simultaneously, and in my testing, the performance drop due to Slmod was significantly less than the performance drop due to game AI calculations. You would need to have a pretty extreme mission and then carefully measure frame rates to notice the effect. Edited December 15, 2011 by Speed Intelligent discourse can only begin with the honest admission of your own fallibility. Member of the Virtual Tactical Air Group: http://vtacticalairgroup.com/ Lua scripts and mods: MIssion Scripting Tools (Mist): http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=98616 Slmod version 7.0 for DCS: World: http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=80979 Now includes remote server administration tools for kicking, banning, loading missions, etc.
chromium Posted December 15, 2011 Author Posted December 15, 2011 Hi Speed, always useful to get a feedback from you. There will be at most 50 units "AI active" together (hold or moving / firing...), all the other will be AI inactive. So I do not concern about it. PS: It's offtopic, I know... the POS works great. Author of DSMC, mod to enable scenario persistency and save updated miz file Stable version & site: https://dsmcfordcs.wordpress.com/ Openbeta: https://github.com/Chromium18/DSMC The thing is, helicopters are different from planes. An airplane by it's nature wants to fly, and if not interfered with too strongly by unusual events or by a deliberately incompetent pilot, it will fly. A helicopter does not want to fly. It is maintained in the air by a variety of forces in opposition to each other, and if there is any disturbance in this delicate balance the helicopter stops flying; immediately and disastrously.
Speed Posted December 16, 2011 Posted December 16, 2011 Hi Speed, always useful to get a feedback from you. There will be at most 50 units "AI active" together (hold or moving / firing...), all the other will be AI inactive. So I do not concern about it. PS: It's offtopic, I know... the POS works great. Good... I'm glad to hear that the Piece Of $&%! is working for you :D Intelligent discourse can only begin with the honest admission of your own fallibility. Member of the Virtual Tactical Air Group: http://vtacticalairgroup.com/ Lua scripts and mods: MIssion Scripting Tools (Mist): http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=98616 Slmod version 7.0 for DCS: World: http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=80979 Now includes remote server administration tools for kicking, banning, loading missions, etc.
chromium Posted December 16, 2011 Author Posted December 16, 2011 look at the link in the Speed sign and have a look ;) POS is Parallel Option System Author of DSMC, mod to enable scenario persistency and save updated miz file Stable version & site: https://dsmcfordcs.wordpress.com/ Openbeta: https://github.com/Chromium18/DSMC The thing is, helicopters are different from planes. An airplane by it's nature wants to fly, and if not interfered with too strongly by unusual events or by a deliberately incompetent pilot, it will fly. A helicopter does not want to fly. It is maintained in the air by a variety of forces in opposition to each other, and if there is any disturbance in this delicate balance the helicopter stops flying; immediately and disastrously.
213 Posted December 16, 2011 Posted December 16, 2011 it's possible to add more lods to the vehicles and there should be no more issue.
Inseckt Posted December 19, 2011 Posted December 19, 2011 (edited) How do you reckon/do that? edit: nevermind, just learned about slmod... Edited December 19, 2011 by Inseckt Help Beczl with his DCS MiG-21Bis project by Pre-Ordering DCS MiG-21Bis module NOW! CLICK HERE TO GO TO PRE-ORDER PAGE AT INDIEGOGO
chromium Posted January 17, 2012 Author Posted January 17, 2012 A bit update: I made a mix of this two solution: -AI OFF -GROUP NOT ACTIVE (and not visible) cause it seems that AI-OFF have a slightly performance hit (maybe 3D and map rendering?), so I need to keep ACTIVE units less than 500 and active and AI ON units less than 100. Maybe it's a strictly harware related limits... I will test soon on a low-end server computer with 3D render set to OFF to see if AI OFF units impact or not with 3D world not working. But... in the end, I'm already done with this solution, so thanks to all for the suggestions :) Author of DSMC, mod to enable scenario persistency and save updated miz file Stable version & site: https://dsmcfordcs.wordpress.com/ Openbeta: https://github.com/Chromium18/DSMC The thing is, helicopters are different from planes. An airplane by it's nature wants to fly, and if not interfered with too strongly by unusual events or by a deliberately incompetent pilot, it will fly. A helicopter does not want to fly. It is maintained in the air by a variety of forces in opposition to each other, and if there is any disturbance in this delicate balance the helicopter stops flying; immediately and disastrously.
Wrecking Crew Posted February 29, 2012 Posted February 29, 2012 I have a feeling that making few big groups is better than making many small groups. I was playing with this idea yesterday. I had a string of individual ZU-23 units down a canyon and decided to make all 20 of them in the same group. I've had to re-position some of them because they were sideways on hills or overlapping other structures or too close to power lines... So I made this big group and then screwed up all the unit placements because I inadvertently moved Unit #1. I ended up making about 7 smaller groups - much easier to deal with in the long run, IMO. WC Visit the Hollo Pointe DCS World server -- an open server with a variety of COOP & H2H missions including Combined Arms. All released missions are available for free download, modification and public hosting, from my Wrecking Crew Projects site.
WildFire Posted March 3, 2012 Posted March 3, 2012 Also it makes a difference how your groups are set up. To explain further... 150 units = 1 group = slight performance hit 50 units per group and 3 groups = more performance hit. We have done major testing with this in the 25th and its verified on 2 very large missions. One has a bit over 700 units total the other has close to a thousand. AI on and off shouldnt cause any major performance hits as far as I know however group activate causes major lag spikes depending on how many units are in the group activated and whether or not its a moving convoy. 8 units = 1 convoy = 30 waypoints = slight hit 2 convoys = 30 waypoints = large hit 3 convoys = 30 waypoints = huge hit 1 convoy = 60 waypoints = huge hit and will cause your mission file size to explode which also leads to problems. DannyV may come along and give a little more insight on this cause he pays far more attention to it than I do, as far as mission creation.
WildFire Posted March 3, 2012 Posted March 3, 2012 Also on a side note there are a lot of other things that you can do to optimize a very large mission. However if were talking 500 units or less you shouldnt need to do most of them. If you have problems with sound or getting more than a few people to be able to join, contact me and I'll give you some more in-depth info.
Recommended Posts