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Terraform cause HUGE lag spikes

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I have noticed that in my recent games (mostly FFAs) the performance was mostly good except huge 20-40 seconds lag spikes occasionally happening.

They seem to happen in two situations:
1. When I terraform something
2. When I send scout planes across the map.

Upon observing one of my scout planes I discovered that the lag spike happens exactly when the plane starts discovering enemy terraform, which was previously not visible.

It seems there is huge performance bottleneck either in engine-side Unsynced Heightmap or in ZK-side Terraform Texture.

Did any of you guys have similar experiences with terraform causing huge lag spikes even without units trying to path throught it?
Is there any way to disable Terraform Texture client-side or anything else in the settings to improve performance when stuff gets terraformed?
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11 years ago
I know there used to be an option for terraform texture, but it was a game option instead of something an individual client might change. As a general rule I noticed that terraform eats up my CPU ever since I started playing. My FPS drops significantly when discovering any sort of terraform project bigger than the size of a mex.
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@Rafal[0K]
Maybe its NOT terraform-texture(?) because it might related to pathfinding too. For example: if you turn on QTPFS and terraform the ground while there's alot of unit moving then you'll get a consistent lag spike in 94.1

I think Spring 94.1 itself is performance bugged, we must move on to NEXT version soon, we can't stay here!
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11 years ago
No xponen, the terraform gadget is a bit slow when changes to texture are discovered. There shouldn't be a problem when the texture isn't changing. Someone should improve how the gadget handles textures.
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11 years ago
quote:
When I send scout planes across the map.

This is overkill lag for me. Other than that I can play rather smooth.
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11 years ago
Is this related to the massive memory use I'm seeing in large games with this version? I max out at 8GB RAM and 3.2/4GB swap, at which point I'm forced to kill -9 spring to recover. This immediately returns me to normal memory use around 1GB.

I was doing major terraforming in the last game, possibly in the other games I've experienced it in, too, so there could be a connection there. I will avoid any terraforming next large game to attempt to verify if this is the case.
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11 years ago
Zenith and Clogger are now best units to make lag for everyone.
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11 years ago
Agree when i send scout planes and terraf0rm of +50 or anny of it its in that path.It makes me lag for 10-20 seconds.+1 for Rafal
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GoogleFrog:
quote:
No xponen, the terraform gadget is a bit slow when changes to texture are discovered.


That "a bit slow" is 20 seconds of solid freeze every time when you discover any sizable enemy terraform...
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11 years ago
Idk why it become so slow. Someone should go and optimise the texture handling and store changes over a few frames to all occur at once.
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11 years ago
Is it same slow in 94.1.1-95?
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11 years ago
can confirm lag spike in Detriment hide and seek option maps when plane flyover new terraform walls (which this mod encourages and which is an incredible feature of zk)

http://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/165762
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11 years ago
I need someone who has this problem in a really noticable way to test the latest version. I think the texture drawer should be a lot faster because I removed a lot of gl.Texture calls. The problem isn't severe for me so it would be good for other people to do some comparative tests with the latest version.
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I think there is several types of terraform lag:
1) "It just lags" Yes if ZK is lagging for "no" reason, actually reason might be someone terraforming, hardly noticeable with low income, but in bigger games...

2) "discover lag", as described above. Basically play longer team game and it will lag when you will discover terraformed up singus and so on at fast rate(plane scouts etc).

And if you fixed that new texture thing on terraform then 1) is not fixed. Basically terraform lagged as far as I could remember.
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There is also sudden lag spike sometimes while you are building terraform yourself. Frequently you are the only one lagging at that moment.
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11 years ago
AUrankAdminGoogleFrog , contact me and i will test for ya. (tried already all available open hosts with test version od spring 94.1xxxx, no sucess)
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11 years ago
Will the lag-spike still happen if one activate VSYNC? If VSYNC can fix the lag-spike then the fix will be as easy as tweaking the update rate of the gadget.

If this is true then we can fix ASAP.
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11 years ago
VSYNC is gpu optimization.

you sure this is what it takes? i have old cpu(q6600, 4x2,4Ghz), but relatively new gpu (nvidia 560), i play on highest settings. i have no source insight but i guess this is rather an cpu bottleneck...
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The terraform texture gadget appear to update at rate as fast as the game's FPS, but when you activate the VSYNC it will limit the game FPS to 60fps so this should also limit the update rate of the terraform texture gadget to 60 times per second.

I'm just guessing the cause of the lag, but if VSYNC can cure the lag-spike then the solution for Dev is to simply throttle down the update rate of the gadget and you can turn OFF your VSYNC afterward.

If this fail then it only eliminate the update rate as the possible cause of the lag-spike but the search will continue...
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11 years ago
xponen that is completely wrong. Terrain texture updates at most every 16 frames due to the timing of UnsyncedHeightMapUpdate.
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