Character performance

[YouGroove]

I just got some answer about animated shader that is done to have animated characters done in GPU , so more characters at screen.

 

Is this tested and sure ?

 

Caus i had a drop of 10-15 FPS when the two crawlers NPC appeared in the game FPS demo after your press elevator button. Does it comes from Lua code management, shadows , navmesh too much called per frame or other stuff ?

 

I'll make some 3.1 demo with more characters and i'll post FPS differences, the goal is make 3.1 better in performance.

[Rick]

I think it has to do with using the navigation commands myself.

[Christian Clavet]

This should be in for 3.1 and is called "Hardware skinning". I don't know yet how it work in 3.1 (have pre-ordered it, but waiting for the release)

 

This is using a shader to calculate the skinning (deformation of the mesh when the bones are manipulated), so it's calculated from the GPU instead of the GPU and should improve performance when we have lots of animated characters on the screen. On what hardware(video card) have you run the demo?

[YouGroove]

My hardware is not the problem : Radeon 6700 series.

I run games like GTA 4, Assassin Creed 3, Borderlands 2 , shader eye candy MMo test, smoothly with many stuff and characters at screen and good effects.

 

This is just the demo when crawlers become active the FPS drops a lot ( i'm aware Leadwerks 3.1 is not multi million engine you have to pay like UDK or Betesheda Skyrim engine) .

I think Pathfinding could be deactivated/or calculate navmesh less frequently by using simple raycast and distance system, and only use navmesh when really needed.

[DudeAwesome]

is there a A* Algorithm solution? (dont like the navmeshes also)

[AggrorJorn]

The pathfinding build in to leadwerks is a combination of recast (navmesh generation) and detour(pathfinding) which already uses A*.

 

The navmesh is not continuesly generated or updated.

[YouGroove]

So how to optimize Crawlers frame rate drop down when they become active ?

Lua script ? Less Navmesh call in Lua script ?

Or is this related to something else ?

How can we have 20 crawlers without so much frame drop ?

For graphics the answers are simple : model LOD , shader LOD , shadow LOD , animation LOD ...

For AI and code i don't know ?

[Rick]

At this time Josh would have to figure out what's going on.

[Admin]

I suspect the character physics are the cause, or it may just be too many shadows being rendered. More testing is required to optimize it.