Hello, recently I came up with an idea about car optimisation which I believe, may increase performance. First of all, let's take care about detail of cars. I think that there should be a rule, where Ai controlled cars are having much, much less polygons than player ones, lower res interior with less polygons (still players wouldn't sometimes even notice that) and no steering wheel animation. Also LOD (Level of Detail) feature for Ai controlled cars (or any object in distance). That would save performance too (maps already have that, no idea about vehicles and objects though). Second: To make game appealing for wider audience with low-end PC's there could be a solution of removing unnecessary parts from Ai cars permamently (like fuel tank, some parts of suspension, shocks), maybe even low res engine or no engine at all for example. It might de-balance the crashes of same vehicles, but could be salvagable by making fake collision boxes imitating that there is engine. That would improve overall performance, and could be toggleable in options. That might add more work for modders, but hey, optimisation is necessary. Game is perfect now with optimisation, but could be even better. I would love to have more than 7 cars at once with nice FPS. What do you think? More importantly: what devs think about this?
Good news, cars do not have to be as complicated as the ones in the demo. Also, polygons are not an issue, most graphics cards should handle them just fine. What causes slowdown is the beam count. Official content will probably remain complex as they have set high standards, but modders can work at whatever detail level they choose to. My work on Rigs of Rods was probably less than a third of the beam count of these demo vehicles, and they were still really fun and had good damage effects, in my opinion. Other people enjoyed them as well so it isn't just me. I'll do my best to explain the difference that a high or low beam count makes, assuming it's a well designed structure. For optimization, a vehicle might have one body structure instead of separate panels. So the fenders won't detach, but the body will still bend up and in my opinion it doesn't detract from playability at all, especially since it allows for more vehicles on screen at a time. The hood might bend in two sections instead of four, mirrors might not detach, just little things like that. Personally I find the extra details gimmicky and I don't care for them much. Fortunately with good mod support the community (perhaps including myself) can offer some lower detail options for those of us that aren't as obsessive about it.
I wanted to start an optimization thread, but gladly i found this, so i will bump, and add my ideas and observations about certain "stuff" Remember though, these are just my personal ideas, and/about my personal "issues" while playing, so feel free to disagree The first thing would be map optimization. Yup. For example the small island map. There are certain points on the map that will make the whole game lag, and slow down to even 4-5fps. I dont know if its a Torque3D bug, or is it some hidden geometry/lightning, or just the insane ammount of vegetation, but it lags horribly. The fun thing in that lag that it only appears at certain points in the map (4-5 places), in a radius of only a few meters. If you move along, the lag simply goes away, and stays away until you return to the spot. Strange, but definitely an issue, and i think some optimization/tweaking/sorting would solve these kind of things. I tried of course on every detail level, even all on lowest, so its definitely not a "weak pc" issue. The second thing would be to put some more options in the graphics settings tab. Really, that is mandatory if anyone is playing on anything lower than a very decent midrange gpu, not to mention laptop gpus. For example, i would like to turn off the car shadows separately from the shadow of vegetation and vice-versa. That way people (including me) could find the "sweet-spot" of the settings more easily, and fine tuning of performance could be done more "efficiently". We NEED those 2pages of nerdy settings, because we like to get the most out of whatever we have (ok, at least me) And my final idea would be some sort of processor optimization, what sounds pretty complicated... and i bet it is. But anyway, i drop it here as an idea. Its about processor load. I have a quad-core intel for example, and i barely see it going over 45-50% utilization while playing, while my graphics card is trying to take a grip on the situation by itself. There should be some kind of "better" balance between the two, or even fast-check at the start of the game, so the game could determine how much "weight" can the cpu and gpu handle. There could be even a separate benchmark app, that could set up the game for the optimal use of the given hardware (let it be a single core, dual core, or a quad core). Of course, its merely an idea (and i have no clues about the programming side of it), and its getting further complicated by some other technologies like the "nVidia Optimus", or "Intel Turbo", and stuff like these.. but it would worth a lot in the long run, because the game will be more and more demanding as features are getting added, and as it grows bigger, and more complex. Of course im aware that there are systems what simply cant handle the game, but that is another story
Can you specify where on Small Island you experience lag spikes? I've driven over just about every square metre of the map at a solid 60fps. I can almost guarantee you that more graphics options will be added to the menu at some point in the future. Right now, it doesn't hold priority. About your processor usage, you'll find that a lot of games don't really demand 100% for more than a few seconds. Your GPU might be taxed more, since it seems to be quite weak (assuming you're using your 630m). For example, this is my processor usage just after running a triple A title on ultra at 1280x1024. (imported from here) And by comparison, BeamNG on highest settings, one vehicle, also at 1280x1024. (imported from here) Also note that BeamNG is more CPU intensive than many games[SUP][citation needed][/SUP], so there might not be a meaningful relationship between CPU/GPU usage with BeamNG and other games. tl;dr we're doing quite well.
I think it was mentioned somewhere that we would be getting OpenCL support at some point, that would help the lag significantly on systems with a dedicated GPU (and tbh, this isnt a game for integrated GPU's)
None of the things you mentioned in the first post have even a 1% impact on CPU performance. The #1 thing is simulating the nodes and beams, and the collisions (with the world and other vehicles). The only way to optimize that (beyond optimizing the code/vehicles) is to remove parts of the car or simplify them. Graphics lag is easily 90% environment; vehicle polygon counts and texture resolutions are nothing compared to the shadows from lots of complex vegetation. Also, animated steering wheels and other parts, like I said, do not contribute measurably to performance impact.
