My new FPS trick

[Montana]

Sometimes you want alot of stuff in the same cell so that scripts can run concurrently. Its been my experience that the game engine tries to do the math for (draw) everything in the pc's line of sight even if there are walls blocking the pc actualy seeing them. At first i thought this might be related to the "see at a distance settings". I tried moving the other rooms farther away but it didnt really help. If they were in the direction the pc was looking they still affected overall fps even though the pc couldnt actually see them or their contents. So i came up with the idea to stack the rooms verticaly and use load doors to travel between them. Load doors dont cause a reload if the target is in the same cell. The transition is very quick. The only drawback is that the players angle of vision is shifted and then brought back to normal when they arrive. I made a work around for this by having a script on the load door that puts the pc in 1st person mode when they arrive at the destination load door.

This seems to work very well for cells that contain lots of rooms and meshes. The space between the rooms vertically affects hearing adjacent room sounds, so you have to adjust that accordingly. One of my current projects had a room in which the pc's fps would drop into the teens if he looked back across the entire cell. Stacking the rooms vertically increased fps dramatically.

Maybe someone else can use this technique to their advantage.

Live Free

Montana

[HeyYou]

Interesting solution. Rather inventive.

And yep, that is a problem with the game engine itself... It renders EVERYTHING in the players line of sight, whether they can see it or not. Just making this one change to the game engine would dramatically increase performance on all platforms.

[JackTheHedge]

Oh my, thank you for that! That's a really marvelous idea. I had noticed that using load doors to separate things instead of having them all on a horizontal level did increase performance a bit, but I never really understood why.

I can use every little FPS trick I can get my hands on since I have a very poor computer at the moment.