Any tips on improving performance?

UDM

Watchdog
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January 9, 2011
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The game's starting to chug along on the second island. I'm sure it can't be that I don't meet the requirements, since I can run most recent games at mid-high range. In fact, lowering the graphical settings has no effect on performance, or sometimes even makes the game more skippy.

Does anyone know of any possible tweaks for the game? I tried the one posted in the Deep Shadows forums, where you edit about 4 lines in one of the ini files, but that had no effect too.

The game especially stutters when in the suburban areas. The surrounding scattering of islands are alright.
 
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Better late than never! :)
The game started to get choppy on the second island on my system too. The following tweak improved things a lot for me. Open ENGINESETTINGS.INI in [systemdrive]\Users\Public\Documents\White Gold\INI and find the following lines:

OBJECTS_LOD=*.*
LODMESH_LOD=*.*

Set them both to:

OBJECTS_LOD=0.200000
LODMESH_LOD=0.200000

Objects will have less detail when they are a certain distance away from you, but it's not game-breaking. Let me know if it helped you or maybe you already found another way for yourself.
 
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Better late than never! :)
The game started to get choppy on the second island on my system too. The following tweak improved things a lot for me. Open ENGINESETTINGS.INI in [systemdrive]\Users\Public\Documents\White Gold\INI and find the following lines:

OBJECTS_LOD=*.*
LODMESH_LOD=*.*

Set them both to:

OBJECTS_LOD=0.200000
LODMESH_LOD=0.200000

Objects will have less detail when they are a certain distance away from you, but it's not game-breaking. Let me know if it helped you or maybe you already found another way for yourself.
I'm sorry but theese values are terribly game breaking, they doesn't control the quality of the objects but more the view distance of them, I noticed that even a value of 0.5 (the one suggested by the developers) instead of 1.0 make lot of objects and npc invisible after around 50mt. So I suggest to play with theese numbers and find your preferred ones, for me below 0.6 is almost unplayable becouse I had enemies and huts that sudddendly appears and disappears during a firefight or a little walk travel…

However before setting theese values lower than 0.6 I suggest to do some other tweaks, for example:
Set PRECACHE=1 (this will precache lot of resources during the loading making it slightly longer but reducing the ingame stuttering a lot)
Lower MAXDYNAMICLIGHTSCOUNT and MAXDYNAMICSHADOWSCOUNT (this will affect the amount of dynamic shadows and lights, the visible difference is almost unnoticeable untill 0 and the performance could improve a lot)


And in the VIDEOOPTIONS.INI try theese tweaks:

Set PRECACHETEXTURES=1 (this will precache the textures if PRECACHE=1 reducing the stuttering even more)
Set SMOOTHFPS=0 (the developers says that "for now does not produce good results, should be 0 for release")
Set RENDERLAG=1
Set LIMITFPS=30 (reduces the odd game speed feeling caused by fps variations)
Set SHADOWMAP_SIZE=2048 (this will slightly reduce the shadows definition while increasing the performance)
Set SCREENCAPTURETYPE=0 (the developers says that it "comsumes memory, should be 0 for release")
Set DISABLEAVIPLAYER=0 (the developers writes "Should be 0 for release")
 
Last edited:
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Jul 21, 2011
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I noticed that even a value of 0.5 (the one suggested by the developers) instead of 1.0 make lot of objects and npc invisible after around 50mt.

Yeah, the objects become of lower quality at a distance but they don't disappear. Especially the drawing distance of NPC's seems to be fixed at something like 72m. There are some discussions about that on the forums, because it makes the sniper almost useless which is a shame in a big, open world like this.

Set LIMITFPS=30
Obviously not recommended, since we're trying to improve performance. 30 FPS is horrible. 60 FPS is ideal.

The other tweaks look good though, I'm gonna try them right now!

[EDIT]
Set DISABLEAVIPLAYER=0
This one is confusing. The developers say it can cause crashes - when enabled? 0 enables and 1 disables it. Any clues?
 
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The DISABLEAVIPLAYER should be 0, the developers writes "Should be 0 for release" so I suggested it. ;)
The LIMITFPS can be whatever you want, but remember that what makes a game look good is constant fps number, so you should set this limit to a little higher than your average fps, and if you need theese tweaks to improve performance means that you don't have a super pc, and so this means that your average fps will be lower than 30 (that is an acceptable number), so you should set the limit to 30 so you will not see speed differences from when the fps are usually around 25 and when they would go to 60 and more becouse you are in a non-stressing situation like watching the sea or a non-dense forest etc. Try reading some tech info about fps limiters and their purpose. ;)
 
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I understand the need for FPS-limiters, but personally I've played the whole first island at a constant 60 FPS and on the second island it suddenly starts to chop. I guess I'm spoiled, but anything below 60 FPS is unacceptable to me, so for me 30 is an absolute no-go and I don't understand why someone would want to play a three year old game at that FPS. You should probably look into some new components for your system. Tweaking only goes so far.

But I think I know why the game has a trouble with rendering the second island. It's probably because of the interior locations on there (the shop and the building with the arms dealer in it). Those are the only areas where the game suddenly drops around 10 FPS. Outside of those areas everything's ok.
So I was wondering - are there even more interiors on the third island? :eek:
 
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I understand the need for FPS-limiters, but personally I've played the whole first island at a constant 60 FPS and on the second island it suddenly starts to chop. I guess I'm spoiled, but anything below 60 FPS is unacceptable to me, so for me 30 is an absolute no-go and I don't understand why someone would want to play a three year old game at that FPS. You should probably look into some new components for your system. Tweaking only goes so far.

But I think I know why the game has a trouble with rendering the second island. It's probably because of the interior locations on there (the shop and the building with the arms dealer in it). Those are the only areas where the game suddenly drops around 10 FPS. Outside of those areas everything's ok.
So I was wondering - are there even more interiors on the third island? :eek:

Well as I said the 30 fps limits is only for the ones that usually have fps around this value, the number to put there should be indipendently chosen by everyone using the method that I explained in my previous post. If you have usually 60 fps it's obiously stupid to choose a 30 fps limit. :p
I think that noone would like to play a three year old game at 30 fps, but I'm almost sure that there are lot of people that are FORCED to do this due to their lack of money for upgrading their pc (and due to the very poor optimization skill of the devs...). ;)
 
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Ah I forgot to say: Burning Fish as soon as you tested theese tweaks can you report if you had some advantages/disadvantages? It's always useful to have more than one feedback. :)
 
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Ah I forgot to say: Burning Fish as soon as you tested theese tweaks can you report if you had some advantages/disadvantages? It's always useful to have more than one feedback. :)

Well, I had most of them already applied. The dynamic light tweak didn't really help if it was set above 0 and if you set it to 0, the flashlight no longer works.
The AVI player and screen capture tweaks were new to me and I have applied them, but they don't improve much.
Believe me, it's just the engine struggling with rendering larger interiors in an open world. The first island has almost no interiors, that's the whole issue.
 
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Well, I had most of them already applied. The dynamic light tweak didn't really help if it was set above 0 and if you set it to 0, the flashlight no longer works.
The AVI player and screen capture tweaks were new to me and I have applied them, but they don't improve much.
Believe me, it's just the engine struggling with rendering larger interiors in an open world. The first island has almost no interiors, that's the whole issue.

Yes that's what I expected, the usual poor engine/optimization... :-/

Well let's hope that they will use a better engine and became more experienced with optimizing for their new game. :biggrin:
 
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I bring you bad news. The company "Deep Shadows" now is practically closed. I had been in Kyiv three month ago, and they sad that they will not develop Xenus 3 and Precursors 2... I also have an e-mail massage witch prove this. It's very pity, because many gamers are still waiting for this games...
 
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I also have an e-mail massage witch prove this.

Could you post the email here? I don't think I would have need a Xenus 3, but The Precursors practically stops right in the middle...
 
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Here's the massage, unfortunately in russian, but i think u could translate it:
1e14ec218a03.png



Unfortunately I haven't the same massage about Precursors, but the situation is equal . Many of the developers were fired, "Russobit" don't wont to finance the new game, because of "…this company is in the past…" - a little quote. But, you could hope)) There is a good russian proverb: "Надежда умирает последней" and the english analog is "While there is life there is hope".
 
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