Alienhead

The scene consists of a 256x256 terrain, no physics, very low poly meshes, characters have less than 20 bones.

No no no... No mass or physics of any kind is being used.. simple waypoint movement.. no navmesh. This simple scene right here is jerky on very decent hardware.

That's just it, I have ZERO physics working in this simulation, I'm building a top down tower-defense game and it requires no collisions. Just waypoint pathfinding. Also testing the simulation out on another PC, I noticed my camerapicks to map objects were way off, do I need to adjust entity picks from camera based on resolutions ?

I may of jumped the gun, while killing the debugger did help, I still have noticed that 10 or more animated models causes a huge jerkiness in the overall performance of the app. The test was ran on a blank map, 433 poly model with only 13 bones, no physics involved and I shut down the lighting. I'm starting to lean toward the idea that the desktop refresh rate the the virtual window aren't syncing.

Publish > Standalone ??

Problem solved, I've been hunting this for days now.. In case anyone else is running this setup - I suggest not. The cause was Tab-Nine intellisense engine combined with Lua debugger ( SubDebug ) running in Sublime 4. The reason it was so hard to find; the debugger stayed running as a service even when I shutdown Sublime, so I didnt look any further with sublime since I had shut it down.

I find myself concerned as of late with some performance issues I've stumbled across. I'm hoping for some information I may not have heard about thus far. OKay, here's the situation - To better test this I created a complete blank project that consists of - 1 terrain 256x256, 32x32 color texture for the terrain. I have NO PHYSICS working whatsoever, I have set the light quality to its lowest setting. In other words pretty much a bare bones scene. The towers in the scene are less than 300 polys each. When I get 2 or more animated models on the screen I start getting some serious jerky camera motion and the overall smoothness flies out the window. The model consists of 1293 Polys, 19 bones and 2 animation sequences with 21 frames per sequence ( very light and minimal for an animated model ), further more I took the animated shadow shader off and I have all my marterials set for Non-Picking. I'm running a AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, and a GTX 1080 geforce. The system runs nearly anything on the market ( so hardware isnt a concern ). In the video below I demo the results. And thats just with a few models on the screen. Is this normal? I'm looking to have many many more of these guys on a map at once, this is the reason I kept all the assets very very low. The funny thing is I can load the scene up with 2million polys and for the most part everything stays smooth. It just when I introduce animation to the scene that problems start to occur. I have also tried different models thinking my animation or bone setup may have had something to do with it, but no such luck.

Okay good to know, now If I wanted to cheat and have two seperate entity of this same kind - what is the engine pulling out of the cache? the surface or the mat ? or would I need to load a different named mat or differently named mesh ? or both ?

I'm looking for verification that this is normal behavior and if so what steps are needed to get around it. In code I'm loading several entitys(mdl) at a give time. Like so : local ef =Model:Load("Materials/Particles/planeeffect/explo1/explo1.mdl") ef:SetScript("Materials/Particles/planeeffect/explo1/explo1.lua", true) ef:SetPosition(self.entity:GetPosition()) I understand theres more efficient way to do this but this is how I've broke it down for this example. So I'm not using Instance or Copy as you can see, why is the same surface shared between 4 distinct entitys loaded separately using no instancing or copying. In the pic I have colored each of the entitys a different color to show my claim. Each call to SetColor would change all 6 objects. Is this the nature of the engine or is there a hidden step I need to take to have separate surfaces on these models since. Does AddRef() count come into play here? or is that just to prevent models from being deleted.

I had a similar ordeal happen to me as well. Trust me, it's not the engine, I fought an answer for weeks, eventually trying EVERYTHING imaginable in hopes I'd come across the cause, now I'm not saying this is your problem, but it's worth checking out. I have a routine that Instances a prefabbed model as well, but I add the script in code based on the situation happening , well one of my logic scripts was placing a 3d sound on the entity that was being detached: but I needed that sound so I was going to be smart and create a pivot in the detach code and place it at the position the original entity was being Detached:: Come to find out even though that pivot was being created on a global scope ( globally defined Table() outside of the Object), it still had ties to the Object that originally created it, this object was destroyed. It would never error on this, it waited until I changed maps then very unpredictable things would happen ( including some of the stuff you mentioned above, well actually all of that stuff ). After pinpointing the cause ( mind you that was a bout a 2 to 3 week debug ) I fixed it very easily, I created a personal Garbage Collector, so instead of immediately deleting and/or detaching the Object, I sent it to a GC table with a 5000 millisecs() timer attach to it. This was enough time for all sounds, particle emitters or whatever to play out and Detach on their own freeing the original Object up. GC caught that it had expired and deleted the Object. So nothing lingered around and no memory leaks. Problem was solved. Hope this helps in some way, I know good and well how frustrating it can get trying to track done stuff like that. I've since better constructed any and every Object I add to my game these days.

Oddly enough, I was just randomly trying different things to see what might happen, and by scaling the decal to .99 the smudge vanished. Problem diverted .... I guess.. ,

Okay I just tossed a normal map on the test room terrain and ran through it, it seems that's what's causing the problem, any normal maps on a terrain layer, be it single layered or multi - causes this smudge. The white layer in the picture below has no normal on it and the decals paste fine.

I have a simple decal of footprints, left and a right. Everything works as expected in my test room ( as show in the first image below ). When I move the player over to a regular map I get smudging on the decal prints. Not just my footprint decals but any I try ( as show in second image below ). Is this normal behavior with a multi-layered texture terrain ? or have I muffed something up. Is decal even a proper way to handle footprints or should I assume to create some planes and just lay them down.?

fixed ! ( special thanks to havenphillip )

I was setting up the vegitation system yesterday and ran into a snag, No matter what settings I adjust the texture,material or shader lineup too - I get a horrible light shift when rotating the camera. I've included a video of whats happening. I have a feeling it could be the normals on my grass mesh, but I've edited them to nearly all angles, still got the light banding. Was hoping I may just be overlooking something but if I am, it's eluded me the past 48 hours.

Im porting a previous game I created ( from a different engine ) over to leadwerks 4.6, it's a 3rd person / hack n slash(cast) / tower defense hybird. :0 ( say that 3 times real fast lol ). ** Special thanks to havenphillp for his help on the water shader and thirsty panther and everyone else who helped me get started with the LE engine ** Toon/Stylized enviroment, which has proven to be harder than regular gfx.. Very very early screenshot, I'm really still just working on gfx conversions and the character controller, which is at 31 actions registered so far. I've yet to work on the vegitation/grass and debris system so that's going to be a major boost to the look and feel once in. Here's some shots of the older game I'm upgrading from, as you can tell theres been a massive gfx improvement thanks to LE 4.6.

This is a gorgeous set of shaders, with the right mesh setup i think that grass shader is game useable.

Greets! back for my nightly question lol.. After a day of coding and art working I always have something to ask. This time its regarding alpha blending. I'll post the pic to better explain - You may notice the brick of hay, the ends are jaggey due to the Alpha Masking shader.. Normally, as I'm sure you know , most would prefer to alpha blend this instead of masking. I guess this is a long shot but I'll ask anyways, are there alpha blending capabilities in LE ? Going by the demos and the trees that come with the engine they all seem to be masked, so im guessing no? Oh to save posting another thread - i setup my vegi trees identitcal to the pine tree default in the engine, and still no shader sway movement on the limbs/tree leaves. Do i need a special uv map layer or something to get it working ? Oh, one last thing - today I created a plane in max, Im using it for distant particle effects so my routine is loading / copying new instances of the plane and script through run time. I noticved today that each of these are sharing the same variables and what not. Even though I have them loaded up in entirely different scenes. Im wondering if that is nature behavior or have I overlooked something.

When turning on physics, if I rotate the camera to a certain degree I get cam shakes pretty bad. The camera does not have physics on it, its parent tonothing, just follows a physics player controller. I've been toggeling stuff on and off and check physics shapes and everything else imaginable but havent been able to resolve the cam shakes. I'm close to fulling understanding the vegitation system and the masking/shadow setup with my custom models.. Im stumped on one thing though, which shader goes into which slot to give the trees a the leaf animation? I can't seem to figure that one out. Thanks.

Okay, silly overlook, it was the texture compression, dx5 did the trick . This is the first time I've actually played with the vegitation system in LE, I have to say I'm more than impressed with it's power, I tested out with about 4000 trees and everythign still ran smooth at very decent framerates.. Nice work Josh, LE 4.6 seems to be a powerhouse. :0) This was just getting a custom tree inside the vegitation system, although it works/looks perfectly fine in the system, dropping it single on the map the shadows mess up again, do i need to have a seperate copy of the trees and remove the vegitatrion shader to have a single standalone of the tree? And one last querry, the tree that ships with thye engine, the pine tree, I noticed it has animation in the leaves. My custom trees do not. What steps are needed to get that segment working on a custom tree.. Thanks,. Now to have some fun dressing up a few of my maps.

Here is my question, I can make a terrain vegitation layer and paint the default tree to it and it comes out fine, the shadows are masked as they should be. I then drop the exact tree onto the terrain ( not using terrain painter ) and it comes out with square shadows where the terrain leaf planes are. This is a completely new project im testing with so no settings are anythign whatsoever has been altered. I've got to get around this.

Ahh yes that got it, I was using Shadow+alphamask.shader , i noticed in the included engine trees that the planes cast shadows as the same in my pic below. Is there no alpha mask shadowing casting for the leaves? or once again, am i overlooking a vital feature. Ty.

To save starting a new thread I'll continue this one. I'm trying to get alpha/masking done on my tree textures for the leaves but I've had little luck thus far. Ifollowed the tree settings that come with the engine, but those setting result in the below image. Any quick study on getting alpha blended/masked or both into LE - m at a stand still until I can resolve this issue.