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[SoundGuy]

Hey,

I hope you all know we released Pizza Morgana about a month ago.
today one of the reviewers from Adventure-treff complained about bad performance once there is more than one actor on screen, and i'm trying to figure out how to help him get the game performing correctly.
some details,
each of our characters has 3000-5000 polys, with the contour model and we have another closeup model for closeup, but its the same model for now.
when all 3 actors are in the scene it's 20,000 polys to render. on my poor laptop, with geforce 7400 i get 16FPS in debug mode,  a little more in release.
i know we have some batching problems with the watcher (he is made up from 4 object and 4 textures, we'll correct that on the next version) which might cause slowness, BUT this guy is complaining about performance issues to the extent that the game is unplayable even with only jackie and abbie (about 12,000 polys when both are on screen in Jackie's house)

his hardware is :
Athlon XP 3000+, Geforce 7600 with 256 MB, 2 GB RAM.
desktop, decdicated graphics card, latest nvidia drivers, DXdiag says everything is ok. he ran "mental repairs inc" and it worked ok for him.


any ideas?

[Mnemonic]

I don't remember, are you using D3D9 with T&L enabled in your game?
What windows version are they using?

[SoundGuy]

the setting in the project manager are:
use direct3d9 : no
hardware t&l : use when available.

[Mnemonic]

You may want to consider using DX9. I noticed in Vista, DX8 with hardware T&L enabled runs actually slower than without it. Kind of unexpected. It worked okay in WinXP.

[SoundGuy]

i'll try that. thanks

[SoundGuy]

he actually has  windows xp with service pack 3 installed.
any other ideas?

maybe he got some incompatible dx8 version? is there a way to check?

[Mnemonic]

Well I tested the game on my computer, with debug mode enabled. It runs at 70 FPS (the remote scene in the forest), and if I press escape and display the main menu, the framerate jumps to 250. From that I'd assume your bottleneck aren't models, but scripts.

[SoundGuy]

I think the reason it jumps to 250 in the menu is because it doesn't render the models, because the menu is system exclusive, or am i wrong?
if its the scripts, do i have any way to performance profile it ?

[Mnemonic]

You are wrong. The models are still rendered (the scene is still being drawn under the menu), but the game scripts are frozen.
There's no script profiler as of now.

[SoundGuy]

i just ran Episode 2 in debug with several watchers on the screen
when the game is running i get 14FPS
when paused its 42FPS.
i got:
Running Scripts 113: (R:2 w:0 p:111)

can you think of ANY way for me to figure out which is (are) the problematic script (s?)

i don't have any "busy waiting" loops and all those that have for...sleep ones have relatively high number (part for the game deamon that i think has Sleep (20);

[SoundGuy]

Episode 1:
Running scripts: 96 (R:5 w:1 p:86)

when paused
Running scripts: 102 (R:9 w:1 p:92)

[Mnemonic]

can you think of ANY way for me to figure out which is (are) the problematic script (s?)

That would be those few always running scripts (R:(unning) and W:(aiting)). The P:(persistent) scripts don't affect performance. Not significantly at least.

[SoundGuy]

any idea how to find out which ones are the R: ones ?
maybe i can use my compiled version of WME in debug mode and place some breakpoint ?

[SoundGuy]

i vaguely remember there was some "dump" variable or something that would also dump running scripts, will that help?
i forgot the commands name

[Mnemonic]

The R: ones are typically the ones similar to game_loop.script. Those containing an endless loop and doing stuff all the time. If you want to dig into the code, that would be CScEngine::Tick(). Also in the debug console the running scripts are the ones with green icon.