Optimization Tip

[Josh]

This was mentioned in the last Steam announcement, but it's worth pointing out again.

 

Leadwerks has occlusion culling built in to the octree which hides and shows chunks of the scene, but individual objects can also have an occlusion test performed. This should not be used excessively because it requires a non-instanced render of the object's bounding box every few frames.

 

I discovered that the editor was enabling occlusion culling on some models I did not want to have it. This was because some of the models had a vertex weighting information in the model, even though they did not use the animation shader. This was causing slow performance in the large room of the AI example map, in particular.

 

I disabled occlusion on these prefabs and updated the beta branch with the fixed items. You may want to check in the appearance tab of your maps and make sure you don't have occlusion culling turned on for common objects. (Lights and animated models should have it enabled, as they are relatively expensive to render.)

 

After making this change, my framerate in the AI example map jumped up into the hundreds. In the future, a "check for errors" dialog would be a good way to automatically detect wrong settings like this.

[YouGroove]

Strange i disabled on lot of prefabs occlusion culling, it didn't changed a lot the frame rate.

So occlusion have a cost indeed, and we just need to keep it on animated models, lights and complex stuff ?

[Josh]

Well, let's see how this develops. If I see people making a lot of mistakes I will just have the engine choose. Really the only reason you would need manual control is if you have a very high-poly non-animated object, or a very expensive shader, for example tessellation.