SOO-LINEV4.5

[eyein12]

Hey guys,

Ive figured out what I did wrong with the performance hit in davenport. way too many texture draws. So i actually finally learned how to bake textures. now I can get all textures onto one map in a single bake, keeping the detail intact:) instead of using 10-100(yeah i know) textures on some building now they use 1 texture map lol. which already has improved performance on my cpu from what ive done so far. once I get all the major buildings that utilize more than 10 textures davenport area will be seemless and load way faster. itl be a while with other things going on but this is something i've been doing in between.

[eyein12]

WOW, so i replaced about 10 buildings with this technique and davenport loads up almost instantly on approach. i'll replace another 10 and it should be super manageable for most computers now. mine is a QC AMD FX 4100 and 550ti gpu with 8gb of DDR3. so that should be a good gauge for your cpus.

[PapaXpress]

Is this technique something we can use in 3DC? Can you describe how it works?

[chrisreb]

Brilliant news if you can do this Ian as Davenport is unplayable in TS2012 except on the lowest settings.

I will keep my fingers crossed.

[eyein12]

Chris uncross your fingers as you wont need it. I have confirmed that FPS have jumped up 10-15 from what i have done so far. before each building i replaced had 50-90 textures as seperate tgpdx files to call on. now theres only 1 texture file instead. I have knocked out some 300 texture calls already just from 10 buildings alone. This was the major mistake I made back then. I will be replacing the rest of the high texture count buildings and that should do it!

[PapaXpress]

Another technical question for you. Do you happen to know if you share a texture between different models, it will only get loaded once?

Say for example you have a texture called 'MySignals.TgPcDx' which has everything you need to texture five different styles of signal models. Will it get loaded once, or five times (one per style of model).

[eyein12]

yeah I already knew that and have done that since day one.

[eyein12]

still a fair bit of stuttering in davenport looking at the city, but seamless looking in the rest of the 240 degrees of rotation. there are still many buildings left with alot of textures attached to them that i will continue to phase out. but I just ran through and the city loads in a flash now, and performance is definetly upgraded to playable. so that has helped. I think there still needs a bit of work.

[eyein12]

Just another update on davenport, as i replaced a few more buildings last night I finally started to see the "stuttering" relieved now. So the buildings load their textures super quick, and the stuttering has been improved by 5-10 fps in some spots. some of the buildings have a medium poly count, so that adds up. Nothing I can do about that since I dont feel like going back and re-doing models. but I am workign on getting the draw calls down to a minimum for the area. Its 100x better than before so you'll just have to see for yourselves.

I'll have the update ready tomorrow.