Production Anim Slowdown Bug Options

[Bittah Commander]

For many players the production animation (gclock2.shp) causes the game to slow down when you build something cheap (apparently for some people this even slows the game down to an unbearable frame rate). I just ran a quick test and gave the clock animation fewer frames (17 instead of 55); as I expected it now doesn't slow the game at all anymore while playing on the 'Faster' gamespeed (gamespeed 5) and when playing with the fastest gamespeed, it only slowed the game down to about the rate of gamespeed 5 for a very short time (meaning this wouldn't be noticeable online).

While this could be a "sort-of fix", it'll obvoiusly look a bit odd when building more expensive things... So I was wondering whether it'd either be possible to find a way to keep the normal gclock2.shp anim from lagging the game or make it somehow drop frames when building cheaper buildings.

[Bittah Commander]

Seems VK is right... Darken.shp really is the main cause for the slowdown, although there is still a slight slowdown even when darken.shp has been made completely transparant (filled up with color#0)...
Apparnetly the gclock2.shp anim has a fixed number of frames and removing some frames just make it play shorter, but whatever is being produced will still be building a little while after the gclock2.shp anim has stopped playing (so that obviously isn't much of a fix after all).
I just tried modifying the darken.shp anim however and found that the fewer visible pixels it has, the less/shorter the slowdown will be.

For me the slowdown is only noticable when playing on gamespeed 6 offline however, so I personally don't require a fix for this. I attached an Eache02.mix file with a darken.shp file inside for whoever does experience the problem more severely (darken.shp now just looks like a small X in the middle and a a border against the edge of the cameos). If this still doesn't get the game to run normally when building stuff on gamespeed 5 (although it should at least improve it), you can try making the anim entirely black instead.

Attached File(s)

 Ecache02.zip ( 327bytes ) Number of downloads: 59

 

[Rampastring]

Thanks Bittah.. fixed the problem entirely for me

Earlier the game always dropped from 60 FPS (gamespeed 5, I tested with -MPDEBUG) to 20 FPS when building cheap buildings like pavement.. Now it doesn't affect at all, stays at 60 all the time (with 1280x1024).

Also, logically, if I run at a resolution lower than 1024x768, the slowdown is unnoticable (I quess that darken.shp doesn't get drawn on so many cameos - less slowdown).

This post has been edited by ^Rampastein: Aug 11 2009, 07:40 AM

[Lin Kuei Ominae]

My assumption is, that for every tick the gclock2.shp is drawn on the built building, the darken.shp is drawn on every other building. Since TS has by default no hardware acceleration and transparent anims (like gasclouds) can cause lags ingame too, i assume that drawing in a short time 55 times a transparent layer on all cameos is too much for the engine.

And your tests have shown, that minimizing the transparent drawing work for the engine, reduces the lag what supports this assumption.

That's why i think the only way to fix this would be a code optimization, but i'm not sure if Hyper can go that deep in the code.
e.g.
-draw darken.shp only once on all visible cameos in the sidemenu when the construction has started
-update cameos with the darken.shp which appear in the sidemenu after scrolling upwards/downwards (and only those new cameos)
-when construction is finished, update all cameos to show the non-darked cameo again.
-adjust the number of shown frames from gclock2.shp concerning the cost and buildspeed of the current building
(100 Credits building shows only 4 frames
1000 Credits building shows half the frames
2000 Credits building shows all frames)

This post has been edited by Lin Kuei Ominae: Aug 11 2009, 09:30 AM