tain.totalcodex.net

maybe this is a technical question:

with high res units and TONS of units on a map (400) the game lags on open GL and 3D option but not at all in software mode

I played it on a 512mb graphic card 2gig ram fast pc where I never experienced lags before and I even play medieval total war II with no lags...
any ideas why on software mode it doesn't lag?
maybe it's something that could be fixed easily? (I have no clue of technical things so forgive my ignorance if it's impossible)

Perhaps you have 4x Anti-Aliasing enabled in an NVIDIA or ATI control panel?

What video card and what OS are you using?

hi myrd, yeah the graphic card is an NVIDIA 512mb and a pc with windows xp and I had 8x antialising
but then I took out antialising and filterings and it still lags when a mayor 400 unit piched battle occurs with high res units


all the maps i've done so far play good with small amount of units...I guess this 400 units at once with high res sprites is too much for the game engine
in 3d mode

but in software mode it just plays really nice...

The problem with today's cards is they're not optimized to do the kind of stuff Myth asks them to do fast. They're optimized to do the new games' effects fast (ie: executing lots of vertex and pixel shaders, and complex geometry). You can try disabling other effects that may be enabled in the control panel, but I'm not sure if it would help.

I guess on your system, the software renderer is actually faster in doing these things (on the CPU) then the card. It amazing, and sad at the same time. (Software renderer puts minimal load on the card - just uploads the final image for each frame after its been computed on the CPU - rather than sending textures for each thing in the scene).

Other than looking at your control panel settings again and disabling anything that may look like it would make things slower, I don't have much advice for you. Have you tried Direct3D? (Problem with that, is we recommend OpenGL since it will be a requirement for the detailed textures feature of 1.7...)

If you want, you can send a message with a link to your plugin, and I can look at it once I get some free time (in about a week), and see if anything can be optimized (in the Myth engine) to make it faster with this type of map. No promises though, but I have a couple of ideas.

you could improve that for 1.7 ?
kool, let me set up a smaller plugin with this map as the total plugin is about 300mb and could take forever to upload
I'll shoot you a pm once I have it

carlinho wrote:you could improve that for 1.7 ?

Maybe, maybe not. As I said, I'll have to investigate.

take note that Carlinos plug uses larger than 256x256 bit maps... back in the 1.3 day we tried that and it crashed the heck out of pc's even if they were just a bit larger.... it doesnt seem to hold true on 1.6 build though really it hasnt been tested... Carlinos greek tagset is probably the highest quality rendered myth plugin yet...pixel for pixel... so if you can get it not to lag then old school small renders should simply fly and never ever lag no matter how many units were in a fight...

I used to have 400+ normal myth 2 units fighting each other at the same time on old versions of maps, that me and ooga made in around 2003.
i had a 1.8 gig single core CPU and 64 megs video card with 1 gig of system ram with windows XP. It didnt slow me down too much at all....Unless you started making bodies and parts of bodies all over during the battle from HUNDREDS of units.

How many angles for each unit and what are the sprite sizes that you are using carlinho?

Any chance in hell of getting rid of this 400+ units limit at one time on the map? (i think the exact number is 435 or so)

Its a pretty lame limitation if you are trying to make large scale armies fighting each other.

I know myth 3's engine had NO SUCH LIMIT of how many monsters could be on the map at one time.
But this might be too hard to change.
The around 400 units on the map at one time and the 1024 projectile limits are some of the most creation limiting things ive found when producing myth stuff with ooga over the years.

Would be GREAT to get rid of these limits

-Ren

Actually, Myth 3 has the exact same limit on # of monsters, which is exactly 400 (not some 435 or anything like that... just 400).

We are aware of the limitations of 1024 projectiles and 400 monsters on mapmaking. Unfortunately, changing these would be a significant effort (especially, in terms of backwards compatibility for playing with people on older versions and for watching films), and that's even after assuming that the game won't OOS or slow down significantly if these limits were raised (which it might).

well the limits have been raised so much of 1.3 I think mazz proves that 400 at a time doesnt seem like a problem when scripting is used.

that said 200 vs 200 doesnt seem like many units in a civil war game... the challenge is creating good reinforcement scripting that doesnt go over the limit though keeps things ballanced.

went from a max of about 16 diferent kinds of units on a map to 64 I just want to cheer and say limits have come a long way... and with graphics improving with 1.7 this will feel like a new myth... not m4 but still a great set of improvements that I hope will keep people playing the game..

yeah I guess 400 if you use a good script could be ok for single player
as to manage so many units you just go nuts in singleplayer

I don't think it could be the same for a coop, where each player could handle maybe 50 each....

but we'll have to live with it I guess if it can't be raised

the units I use have some sprites of 350 x 150
they have also 16 views (some) and animations of 8 frames each some even more.

so that could be the lag, the 16 views of each.....using those resolutions

the problem is the more I want to make myth a high res incredible looking game to make it more modern, the more I hit restrictions in lags or different things.
personally I prefer to hit this limits than to lower the resolutions or looks
as it would mean going backwards in terms of how modern it looks