Testing Update: Lighting still causing performance issues

[Neovirtus]

Hey @MoonWizard, I see the patch notes released today. I don't see any generic "performance improvement" note, which I assume this would be under. Safe to say a fix for this issue is still outstanding? Just curious! Thanks.

[Moon Wizard]

Yes, I was able to recreate with @cpinder on his local machine yesterday with your data; but we didn't want to hold up getting the other changes tested.

He believes it has to do with the number of occluders; and how they are laid out. Because there are a lot of circles, it's more complex to cull occluders, especially when sharing big open spaces like tower sections. So, it has a lot to do with that specific map. I've asked him to look at this to see if there is anything he can think of to change or help with the performance.

Regards,
JPG

[Neovirtus]

Glad to hear it was a useful test case. I may just need a new processor, the Ryzen 1600 single thread performance isn't what it used to be! But at the same time I'm sure many people are playing on much less performant systems.

[kevininrussia]

Just want to chime in on the Circle occluder. I used the circle tool to make terrain occluder for trees. Those circles had a bunch of vertices and our test game slowed down to unplayable. Last game I deleted them all and manually added occluders with much less vertices. Performance was way better. So maybe the Circle tool should add less verticies? I dont think it needs to be a smooth circle.

[Moon Wizard]

I thought we did a pass to reduce points in the circle occluder before, but I'll have to ask Carl and review again. The problem is that depending on the size of the circle, you don't want to make it too blocky. Also, the map @lavoiejh provided has circle in circle, which is doubling up.

Another wrinkle is that we can't assume how people design occluders; and there's no magic algorithm to tell us when occluders will cause performance issues (since they are just lists of points). So, @cpinder is doing a look to see what he can do performance-wise first; then we'll probably revisit circle occluder tools too.

Regards,
JPG

[Zacchaeus]

The number of points created by the ellipse tool was indeed reduced somewhat; but that was back in Alpha if I remember correctly - which is a while ago now.

[Neovirtus]

I don't think I defined the LoS occluders for these, so I'll have to double check how many points there are.

[Griogre]

For what it's worth, when I was playing around with terrain for brushes and occluders for trees I found small circles had a ton of points I didn't need and seemed needlessly complex. So instead of using a circle, I ended up using hexes with just 6 points for large bushes and I went down to squares/diamonds for small trees. Changing the number of points based on size might be helpful.

[Neovirtus]

I updated to the new patch and tested briefly and it seemed that the issue was much improved. I didn't have any players though, and will update again next week after more testing.

[Neovirtus]

Glad to report that we just had another session (our FINAL session of Curse of Strahd!) and lighting worked great, without any game breaking performance issues. We never went back to the map that started this thread, but overall wanted to share that it is performing much better a across the board.

Thanks for your work on this, dynamic lighting was a real treat in Castle Ravenloft!