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*massive* Frame Rate drop - Possible shader bug?

Posted: Fri Jul 12, 2013 12:21 am
by Azereiah
Not entirely sure what in the engine causes this bug, but it's making the combat aspect of the game impossible.

Whenever fighting capital ships and Plowshares, I'm fine up until the point at which I start doing hull damage.
After that point, the ship begins emitting red flames of some sort - which, I suspect, are the cause of this issue, in that my frame rate drops to 1FPS or lower while looking anywhere in the direction of the ship.

I've tried disabling shaders, lowering geometry levels, lowering texture size, increasing everything to maximum - the problem persists.
Either the game is ramming entirely too many particles out into space at once, or these "flame" particles aren't being rendered correctly due to either a design issue or a code bug.

Interestingly enough, this problem only exists in the SVN version that I downloaded, and not in the installer version on the main page (incidentally, the installer version didn't play music and the prices,etc. are a little less balanced).

My system stats are as follows:
Intel Core2 Quad Q6600 @ 2.40GHz*4
nVidia GeForce GT520 GPU
4GB of DDR2 RAM
300GB SATA HD
Windows XP SP3

I'm quite certain that I should be able to play this with zero problems of any sort, since most modern professionally-made games don't cause any trouble at all.

Re: *massive* Frame Rate drop - Possible shader bug?

Posted: Fri Jul 12, 2013 1:21 am
by klauss
Which version of VS? I guess you're not using SVN are you?

Re: *massive* Frame Rate drop - Possible shader bug?

Posted: Fri Jul 12, 2013 2:19 am
by loki1950
Interestingly enough, this problem only exists in the SVN version that I downloaded, and not in the installer version on the main page (incidentally, the installer version didn't play music and the prices,etc. are a little less balanced).
He is using the svn version klauss :shock: reminds me of when damaged ships drop particles all the time need a change in the config file IIRC .

Enjoy the Choice :)

Re: *massive* Frame Rate drop - Possible shader bug?

Posted: Fri Jul 12, 2013 2:27 am
by klauss
Oops. Kinda missed that.

Weird thing, is that I had aggressively limited those particles on SVN.

I'll have to re-check I guess.

Or maybe the binary in SVN is a tad outdated?

Re: *massive* Frame Rate drop - Possible shader bug?

Posted: Fri Jul 12, 2013 2:34 am
by Azereiah
Update:

It's a bit lesser, but it's noticeable when killing Redeemers too.
At roughly 300 meters, a burning Redeemer will lag me out as well.

It's definitely the 3D particle spam. Three times more textures are being put out than necessary, I think that a flat image rotated towards the camera would do well enough - though in the meantime, is there a setting I can use to reduce the number of these particles?

I'm not finding anything in vegastrike.config.


Edit: The version I'm using is 0.5.1, Build 13218

Re: *massive* Frame Rate drop - Possible shader bug?

Posted: Fri Jul 12, 2013 4:25 am
by klauss
Try adding "sparklegrowrate" with value "5" to the "graphics" section. That should moderate them considerably.

Re: *massive* Frame Rate drop - Possible shader bug?

Posted: Fri Jul 12, 2013 6:20 am
by Azereiah
It worked, thankee very much.

Re: *massive* Frame Rate drop - Possible shader bug?

Posted: Sun Jul 14, 2013 7:10 pm
by TBeholder
Lesser grow rate merely prevents it from spamming over the whole screen. "sparkles" remain HUGE. Often bigger than a ship itself.

Re: *massive* Frame Rate drop - Possible shader bug?

Posted: Mon Jul 15, 2013 6:46 pm
by klauss
TBeholder wrote:Lesser grow rate merely prevents it from spamming over the whole screen. "sparkles" remain HUGE. Often bigger than a ship itself.
Well, they should, as leaking gasses expand in space, but there's something wrong about particle rate control that spams a bit too much, and results in too much overdraw.

I'll eventually have time to look into it. My plan is to get rid of the current way of launching particles (just a call to launch), and instead have emitters that keep some state (ie: last position they dropped a particle, so not too many particles get spawned close to each other, etc).

But that's a chore I didn't get around to yet.