A question for the devs and other computer gurus here

As some of you know I am currently working on a fairly massive mod of the Belfort aerodrome and surrounding area and despite the amount of objects I currently have placed I am still seeing no noticeable hit in performance. FPS is hanging right around 65 with WOFF settings on full, even in a 7v7 furball directly above the citadel. Loading of everything in the landscape at the beginning of a mission is precisely the same, about seven seconds of scanning 360 sweeps until it all smooths out and runs beautifully from then on. My current system specs are as follows:

CPU: Intel Core i7-2600K Sandy Bridge 3.4GHz LGA 1155 95W Quad-Core, OC’d to 3.8GHz
CPU Fan: Arctic Super Cooler
Memory: Corsair Vengeance 16gb (4 x 4gb) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
Mobo: ASUS Sabertooth P67
Hard Drives: 2 Western Digital 640 GB Caviar Black SATA
Opti Drive: LG 22X DVD+/RW Dual Layer SATA Rewrite
Video Cards: Two EVGA GeForce GTX 970 04G-P4-3975-KR 4gb cards with HB SLI bridge
PS: Corsair HX 850 Watt
OS: Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
LG 27" flat screen LCD monitor, 1920 x 1080 native resolution
Four large case fans, plus the PS, CPU, mobo, and card fans
Saitek AV8R joystick
Saitek Pro Flight rudder pedals
Track IR4 camera with latest IR5 software

Hardly cutting edge by any means but still a good solid system.

As reference here is a screenshot of the Belfort mod in its current state with a full flight of Nieups in the sky above it:

(right-click on image and open in new window to view it full size)


So what has changed in the most recent version of our beloved sim that allows us to have all this density and still be able to fly about smoothly - or am I just getting lucky here? Inquiring minds want to know.

Cheers!

Lou

.

That's pretty interesting. Personally, the limited of my technical skills in these matters is when, faced with an inexplicable glitch, I sacrifice the odd chicken to the computer god.

Can't wait to fly over Alsace again to see Belfort. I started a career in 3 Wing at Luxeuil last year and thoroughly enjoyed it. This mod would have really made it, though.

Steve;

I have not verified this yet but personally I am inclined to believe that trees are more of a culprit on FPS than buildings in general. I seem to hit FPS problems when I propagate a fair number of trees. What I don't understand is how OBD can produce dense forests in WOFF without FPS impact.

Just my two cents worth and I am willing to listen to anybody!

.

Raine, it is quite awesome to fly above the city and be able to look down into actual streets with shops and such, even if I do say so myself, (and I do). But a chicken? I usually go directly to a llama in such situations.
I am hoping to have a beta of the mod available in the next couple of weeks for folks to try on their own systems. It will be for spring/summer of 1915 for testing purposes.

Robert, I agree with you about the trees, they seem to have more of on impact on performance than buildings do. I should add though that at this point I already have a couple of hundred trees in the mod.

.

The big difference in FPS is quick combat vs Campaign mission. But Alsace region is less demanding on FPS because of less aircraft in air during combat mission overall. The Flanders region is more sensitive.
Just my 2 cents.

Lou;

Your several hundred trees is nothing in comparison to the trees that exist in the Izel village/Izel airfield/Filescamp&Filescamp extension airfields/Filescamp Farm. All of these facilities combined contain 650 trees. Each airfield holds approx 100 trees each and the Farm contains 300. Even at 300, the Farm looks rather sparse. I wish there was a way to provide the necessary historical look without the FPS impact.
LIke you, my facilities take about 7 10 10 seconds to load after which things become smooth. However, even though they are smooth on my system, I drop about 20 fps periodically as the views change and things get loaded. I will probably be cutting back on the trees at some point unfortunately. I hate to do it as it impacts the look and feel of the facility.

As I said in my earlier post, I wish the facilities would load as efficiently as the native forests in WOFF. I don't know how they are achieving it.

Best Regards;

.

Thanks Robert, I know your most recent completed mod is quite tree rich and it looks it, very nice and full, not sparse by any means IMHO. I wonder if the native trees in the landscape aren't a simpler version of the ones available in the "buildings" folder and that is why they load more efficiently.

Jara, I have been running campaign missions as I've gone along and the results are the same as in QC, no discernible difference in performance between the very plain stock Belfort and my mod. I do agree that the region is less demanding in terms of planes in the air, but it is much more demanding in terms of trees so I wonder how much overall difference there is.

This is my thinking also.
The campaign, especially in a busy sector and/or active time period is a huge factor.

Yes, facility trees are pretty bad. Unfortunately I don't know why. Generally anything that uses alpha transparency (DXT3 or DXT5 texture) is much worse for FPS than solid objects (DXT1 texture), but trees seems to have unnecessarily big impact.

Generic forests are drawn with a very different approach and that's why they can be much more dense. CFS3 is still pretty bad at it though, I tried finding and remaking that code with a more modern approach, but without much success -- it is too time consuming to justify this work.

Ankor, thanks very much for your insight, it is appreciated.
By the way, what have you been up to recently. I haven't seen you around here for awhile?

AnKor, I had a hunch things were different with the trees in the forests, thanks for confirming that. Too bad you couldn't come up with a code work-around.

The trees around airfields use their own individual textures for each tree. The Forest trees textures are provided on a texture "sheet" that also includes the majority of the standard buildings/roofs/bushes etc all on one texture.

There are 4 of these texture sheets used in game, one for each season.

There are separate tree textures for the airfields/facilities trees, again 4 different textures, per tree, 1 for each season. These individual tree textures are larger in size than the stock forest tree textures are.

Could you guys not speckle your airfield mods with the forest tree types as opposed to the other ones? Performance would be a lot better, and the visual impact of the trees would be negligible. I haven't looked into if this is feasible or not. There has to be a way that the game engine knows where to place a forest tree in a specific place or not.

Regards!

4L0M,
I don't think there is a way to make forest trees appear at specific location in facilities.
As I understand forest trees are randomly placed and controlled by mask textures which are tied to terrain textures.
However I don't know much.


I work for something new for WOTR, but it is a secret for now

Lets hope not only for WW2 but also ported to WoFF

.

AnKor, whatever you're working on for WOTR will be spectacular, of that I've no doubt. And as Dutch pointed out, perhaps you will bring it over into WOFF, yes?

4L0M, thanks for the info. Wish there was a way to use the landscape trees rather than the building trees.

.

I've been getting along fine with it but newer guys who don't know how to tweak their system settings might struggle. The FPS hit is there but I'm only dropping to 25-30 at worst with some stutter approaching concentrations of airfields with 200 or so planes on the mission.

Ace, I'm not newer but definitely dumber. Any tweaking advice would be gratefully accepted.

I hope it will
And yes, will likely be in WOFF as well.

You folks were making my head hurt with the technical talk but knowing AnKor is involved with a super secret, need to know only addition is better than 2 BC powders!

I'm just using the recommended settings posted here (In a thread somewhere, I just googled "WoFF performance tweaks") for WoFF and nVidia control panel.

I've just got an idea, but I'm really busy and don't have time to test it.

As I mentioned the performance hit most likely comes from DXT3/5 textures which support semi-transparency.
However my shaders use dithering instead of transparency to render trees. This dithering is still based on alpha values from textures, so without alpha trees will look ugly, but I can probably do something about it.
Now, what I'd like to test.
What if DXT3/5 textures for trees are changed to DXT1 with on/off alpha or even solid ones?
Would it improve the performance?

I don't have time to test it, but it is not too difficult if you know what you are doing

You need to find **your WOFF folder**\WOFFScenery\Textures\Sum Spring Tex\ sub-folder. There are 10 textures like Deciduous*.dds and 4 textures like Coniferous*.dds. These are DXT3.
Make a backup copy of them and store it somewhere outside WOFF folder.

Then use your favorite image editor which supports DDS and resave them as DXT1 (preferably with mipmaps). Or, you can just take any solid DXT1 texture 256x256 (or any size) and use it instead of these existing textures. It can be just solid black, we are not testing image quality

Then test it on a tree-heavy airfield. Obviously you must select spring or summer season for these updated textures to show up.

If it indeed improves the performance I can probably update my shaders to keep using the alpha for these textures, while CFS3 engine will be tricked to believe that they are solid and thus will use faster rendering.

Thanks for that Ankor. I may just have a look into that and report back.

Ankor;

I did as you suggested but used an existing mod.

I copied the WOFFScenery\Textures\Sum Spring Tex\ sub-folder into my mod and then used DXTBmp to save it as a DXT1 with alpha.
I then tested it on two of my modded airfields. Roucourt and Izel/Filescamp. Both have heavy tree coverage. The Filescamp Farm is by far the most populated with trees.

The test was with QC in Summer.

My findings were that there was no improvement.

Should I try anything else?

Thanks. Maybe there is indeed no effect. It was just a guess.

However I'm not sure I understood this part:

Are you sure your modified textures were actually picked up by WOFF?
Maybe you can paint some markings on them to be sure.

CFS3 will load textures from any sub-folder, but if there are two textures with the same name I don't know which one will be loaded.
When WOFF starts simulation it copies tree textures specific for current season from WOFFScenery\Textures into OBDWW1 Over Flanders Fields\assets\WW1Texture. The latter is what actually used by cfs3.

But maybe performance drop is not related to textures, maybe it is just the number of facility objects which is too big for cfs3, or maybe it is something else.

Ankor;

I can confirm that the .dds textures in "OBDWW1 Over Flanders Fields\assets\WW1Texture" are the correctly modified ones (DXT1 with alpha).

Let me explain the part you are not sure you understand.:
I created a mod that contains the "WOFFScenery\Textures\Sum Spring Tex\" and when implemented, it overrides/replaces the stock trees .dds files with my modified ones. When I swap the JSGME mod out, I am back to stock .dds textures.

I see. Somehow I didn't figure out you can simply use JSGME to mod WOFFScenery files. I thought you were speaking about something more elaborate

Well, it is something else then.

Thanks for testing!

Ankor, I spent a little more time on the mod and reduced the texture size from 256 x 256 to 128 x 128 and there was no performance difference in FPS. It was identical. It was a surprise to me, as I thought I might see some improvement.

Just thought you might like to know, and thanks for your contribution here.

Best Regards;

I believe that the big difference between the normal trees and the ones used as objects around the airfields is the number of polys that are used to make them. It's like having a small forest of trees standing all in one place with a lot of intersecting surfaces needing z sorting and transparency anti-aliasing.

The problem lies with the game engine being incredibly old, inefficient and bursting at the seams. You could make the textures 2048x2048 and I doubt you would see any difference in fps on any graphics card made in the last 10 years as long as the card has more than 2GB of Vram.

The textures in this game compared to anything modern are absolutely miniscule in comparison. The problem you are facing with your trees etc around airfields are the way the the game engine calls the objects, this is where the bottleneck arises.

Modern game engines use things like Speedtree for vegetation or use Tesselation for better efficiency at rendering of the environment, but the CFS3 engine is just too old and long in the tooth I'm afraid.

You may very well be spot on with your assessment 4L, unfortunately I don't have enough knowledge to comment.

JFYI, it seems I've found a solution for facility trees performance.
I'm still testing it, but hundreds of trees for a single facility should no longer be a problem.

Whoopee!! You are the man Ankor. You always seem to work the magic for us!

Ankor, don't know how you do it and wouldn't understand if you told me, but thank you!!!!

AnKor, out of curiosity, do you know if the terrain textures are able to read the specular maps? I’m thinking of the river tiles being able to reflect sun, like the ocean does. I know it’s not the same, but if one could apply a specular map ... who knows? I’ve tried to do that with making the river portion white and the ground black and adding the “_s” suffix at the end of the .dds, but I couldn’t see any effect taking place. Is there a specific directory where these textures would have to be placed to work?

Fullofit, no, currently it is impossible to add specular map for the terrain.
However some time ago I did a bit of research in this direction and may get back to it, but no promises.

Thanks AnKor, no worries. Just needed to know if it was me or CFS3.

Ankor that sounds terrific!

.

AnKor, this will be outstanding if you can make the magic happen! Can't wait to see your results and try them out in my latest mod project.

.

RAF_Louvert,
The idea is simple - you just place as many trees on facility xml as you need, then you run this xml through a special tool I'm making now. The tool reads tree positions and original tree models and creates several large m3d files which contain all those trees exactly where they should be in your facility. It also generates a new facility xml to use these new models.
So besides facility xml and textures, the mod will include a set of new m3d files specific for your facility.

The idea is that instead of having hundreds of units - one for each single tree in a facility, you will end up with say 10 units for each tree "type" containing hundreds of trees.
An additional feature is that each tree can be rendered with random size variation, so instead of having 100 copies of the same tree, each one can be slightly different.

I will provide more details once it is ready.

This sounds great! More magic from Andrey! Thanks a lot!

Ankor, if it works for trees, in principle, could it also work for buildings and other model types where there are a significant number of same type models in a facility?

Yes, but the building has to be indestructible.
The problem is that building's damage state is applied for the whole m3d file, so if you have two hangars combined in a single m3d they are both going to be destroyed at the same time.

I see, kind of like an atom bomb attack effect in WW1. Not good.
That eliminates my thoughts. I was just thinking that in building intense facilities like the one Lou is working on, your approach might have been useful.

.

AnKor, your approach to the trees sounds like a very elegant work-around of the old CFS3 limitations. Too bad it can't also be applied to multiple buildings, but I'll take whatever I can get when it comes to your improvements.

.

Since an aircraft m3d can suffer progressive system/component damage perhaps a mos file and damage boxes could be used to subdivide the combined facility and produce damage to one building at a time?

Major, I understand the use of the most file for terrain but I can't get my head around how that could be applied to multiple buildings of multiple types in a facility. Can you explain?

MajorMagee,
Perhaps it can work, but it is beyond my understanding of cfs3 modelling, I'm not sure I want to make a tool that complex.
I think it will also be a problem if one has to count destroyed buildings after a bombing raid.

After all are there so many destructible buildings that they have noticeable performance impact? I can understand hundreds of trees, but a hundred of hangars?

If something has to have an effect on gameplay you have to pay its "cost" in terms of performance.

I can't dispute your logic on those points Ankor. Capability is one thing, practicality is something else. Still, it's always nice to know the limitations of capability. Thanks for all you do for us, it is appreciated.

The "Destructible" buildings aren't new models, they are exactly the same model, but with various states of a "damage" texture applied, so performance shouldn't take a hit i think. The damage textures use Alpha channels to simulate the effect of missing masonry etc, The model is there fully intact, but the texture gives you the illusion of damage. Cheers!