Engine Performance Options

[martyj]

So I am working on having the ability to adjust performance options in my game.

 

There are a few undocumented functions and I was wondering what all can we adjust to improve rendering performance or create better detailed renderings?

 

I have found a list of functions.

 

Context::SetAntialias // True/False, but what about AA values such as 4x, 8x ect?

World::SetLightQuality

World::SetTessellationQuality

World::SetTerrainQuality

World::SetPhysicsDetail

Terrain::SetTextureStageDistance // What does this even do?

 

What are the values that we can pass in, and what is the default?

 

Right now my game runs terrible on my laptop, but it runs decent on my desktop. So having this ability to adjust settings is very important.

[reepblue]

I was looking into these options while developing LEX, and I just used the first 3 options, really. I never saw a difference in setting the anti-alias in the context, so I adjust the msaa setting to the camera. You'll have to have the camera get the msaa value from where ever you're controlling the settings. You can also try custom settings like changing all the lights shadows to static, or making the View Modes of entities based off of their aabb. Although this will result in slower load times, it will be better then a slow game.

 

I recently revisited the settings and I find it best to make a singleton class just for the options, and expose it to lua like:

 

std::string Settings::GetScreenWidthValue()

{

xmlSettings.load_file(FILE_SETTINGS);

xml_node displaynode = xmlSettings.child(NODE_SETTINGS_ROOT).child(NODE_SETTINGS_DISPLAY);

std::string value = displaynode.attribute(PROPERTY_SCREENWIDTH).value();

return System::GetProperty(PROPERTY_SCREENWIDTH, value);

 

}

 

std::string Settings::GetScreenHeightValue()

{

xmlSettings.load_file(FILE_SETTINGS);

xml_node displaynode = xmlSettings.child(NODE_SETTINGS_ROOT).child(NODE_SETTINGS_DISPLAY);

std::string value = displaynode.attribute(PROPERTY_SCREENHEIGHT).value();

return System::GetProperty(PROPERTY_SCREENHEIGHT, value);

}

 

--Create a window
local windowstyle = window.Titlebar
local resx = Settings:GetScreenWidthValue()
local resy = Settings:GetScreenHeightValue()
window=Window:Create(title,0,0,resx,resy,windowstyle)

[Josh]

It's not a good idea to use undocumented functions. For example, context anti-aliasing is an outdated method that doesn't apply to our deferred renderer. The function is only left in place for backwards compatibility.

 

Light quality, terrain quality, and camera MSAA are the major settings you should adjust.

[martyj]

What are the options to terrain quality and what is the default?

 

Light quality if I remembered was a 0, 1, 2 for low, med, high with a default of 1?

 

What is the default of SetMultisampleMode?

 

Or should I not rely on LE defaults and hardcode my own defaults as my game loads with the ability to change them?

[Josh]

The terrain quality options are 0, 1, 2 and 3, from lowest to highest quality. The default varies based on the user's hardware, and is 0 (low) or 1 (medium). 3 generally should not be used. It may crash some cards. I'd actually recommend just leaving it alone, in most cases.

 

http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/page/api-reference/_/world/worldsetlightquality-r825

http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/page/api-reference/_/camera/camerasetmultisamplemode-r802

[reepblue]

If you need to code in a default value like in my application, I recommend having everything at 0 or 1 when no user settings have been defined yet