Shimmering blue light killed the framerate

Spacey Spandex · Post by **Spacey Spandex** » Sat Apr 21, 2007 9:59 pm

That fancy new shimmering blue light animation in svn used for a damaged mining base looks very nice and all that, but for me it makes the fps drop to about 3. Can I turn it off somehow?

rigelan · Post by **rigelan** » Sun Apr 22, 2007 7:01 pm

You know I was wondering the same thing, except I usually see it If I'm destrying one of those Thades Pirate ships. I get a good number of shots in, 3/4 damaged, and there is a (purple) gas escaping, and the framerate just plummets. And i can hardly keep the ship in the center of the screen anymore, so my shots are almost worthless.

Spacey Spandex · Post by **Spacey Spandex** » Sun Apr 22, 2007 10:07 pm

Yes it happened again a while later with a pirate corvette ("Thalus"?).

But!
Changing (vegastrike.config)

Code: Select all

<var name="max_cubemap_size" value="65536"/>

(default for Geforce3 cards)
to:

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<var name="max_cubemap_size" value="512"/>

(default for Geforce2 cards)
..seemed to do the trick. (Unless it was something else and it was rather me restarting VS that cleaned up a temporary problem, a memory leak or something.)

rigelan · Post by **rigelan** » Mon Apr 23, 2007 4:47 am

Well, Let my try. I don't have a high end card by any means. Geforce 6200.

rigelan · Post by **rigelan** » Mon Apr 23, 2007 5:49 am

I brought mine down to 4096, just to try a different amount, unfortunately it didn't seem to make a difference. But you may be on the right track. If I change the reflectivity of some of the ships, or even drop that number lower, it might make a difference. But as of testing this night, I don't see it.

Spacey Spandex · Post by **Spacey Spandex** » Mon Apr 23, 2007 1:37 pm

rigelan wrote:Well, Let my try. I don't have a high end card by any means. Geforce 6200.

Same card here: Nvidia 6200 with 128M. (Linux) But I may very well have other settings non-optimal or plain wrong. Have to check it up closer.

(6200 is a GF3 btw.)

rigelan · Post by **rigelan** » Tue Apr 24, 2007 4:34 am

Tonight I took the time to try the cubemap size of 512. Didn't look like it made much difference on my end. Hmm. Have to look for something else. But the problem is definitely the blue fog/sparks that fly from damaged ships. Too much calculation and power going into making the blue. You know, maybe i should just try the entire Geforce2 settings and see if it really is less intensive on my system.

rigelan · Post by **rigelan** » Wed Apr 25, 2007 5:11 am

Well, I tried using the Geforce2 settings, no beans.
Then I turned off Per Pixel Lighting, leaving only the other two, separate specular color and reflective lighting. Performance improved slightly, but not enough to make it smooth.

I don't know what it is about that escaping gas or whatever it is, but it seems pretty difficult to get good performance when I find it, even when I lower the intensity of my settings.

I wonder if this issue exists at all with higher performing graphics cards. But its probably because many small objects are being calculated, and each object is interacting with the light coming from around it, from the stars and the discharging weapons. I am almost betting that if the special effects were removed for just that blue gas, that it wouldn't hurt the image quality at all.

But since I ran out of ideas to research, I think that my system will just lag and this might be my last post to the thread.

rigelan · Post by **rigelan** » Fri May 11, 2007 4:17 am

Is there an easy way to disable the blue fog in the code?

Post by **jackS** » Thu May 17, 2007 2:01 am

rigelan wrote:Is there an easy way to disable the blue fog in the code?

Should be - in the graphics section of the vegastrike.config, set sparklerate to 0. (right next to sparklescale, sparkle* if you're unsure of where to put it).

<var name="sparklerate" value="0"/>

rigelan · Post by **rigelan** » Thu May 17, 2007 3:46 am

Yes, I tried it and thank you. It works marvelously better on my system. I do like the look of the sparkles, but it was too many for my particular system. Do you happen to know what the default rate of sparkles is, so I can give it a lower number and experiment a little bit?

Shissui · Post by **Shissui** » Thu May 17, 2007 4:18 am

From a freshly unpacked version of 043 --

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			<var name="sparkleabsolutespeed" value="42"/>
			<var name="sparklefixedsize" value="false"/>
			<var name="sparklescale" value="8"/>

No default is provided (in the config file) for "sparklerate"

rigelan · Post by **rigelan** » Thu May 17, 2007 4:32 am

Yeah, I noticed that. I thought perhaps there was a default rate hardcoded in. I found a reference to sparklerate in the file src/cmd/units.cpp at the very end. ~line number 550. But I can't really read the code all that well. I was wondering if 5 was the hardcoded default, or If I am completly reading it wrong.

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static float sparklerate = XMLSupport::parse_float ( vs_config->getVariable("graphics","sparklerate","5") );
        sparkle_accum += GetElapsedTime()*sparklerate;
        int spawn=(int)(sparkle_accum);
        sparkle_accum -= spawn;
        while (spawn-- > 0) {

Shissui · Post by **Shissui** » Thu May 17, 2007 4:36 am

Try it & see if it looks familiar.

The "5" in that code is whatever the 3rd variable is supposed to be in the next function. It is not obvious to me if that 3rd variable will be the default sparklerate.

rigelan · Post by **rigelan** » Thu May 17, 2007 4:46 am

OK. I had just planned to play around with the variable anyway and see how my performance changed.

Post by **ace123** » Thu May 17, 2007 5:03 am

You are reading it correctly... The function is
getVariable("section", "variable", "default")

So I guess 5 is the default for that.

That should be included in the graphics settings, so that switching to low or medium detail turns that off.