Distant Statics Placeholder

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Ravenwing
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Distant Statics Placeholder

Post by Ravenwing »

Didn't want to sidetrack the Shadows topic, but I was thinking about this post by wareya
wareya wrote: 12 Sep 2018, 13:16 Even without LODs, we could display statics an extra cell or two away just so that it's not so jarring when nearby cells unload. The gameplay impact would be smaller than actually loading extra cells, which is what we have to do right now for the same effect.
I know I am not alone in boosting cell load distance to get a slightly more reasonable view distance, but boy does it take a toll (obviously). I also don't think distant statics is going to be worked on anytime soon. Even once shadows are done, the focus will be on 1.0 and immediately important post-1.0 stuff (as it should be). In the meantime, it would be nice to have something that cuts down on the performance impact of getting some extra view distance. I get reasonable performance with cell load = 2, but think it looks best with 3, which I think would be achievable without all the other things that get loaded.

I am obviously no expert, but simply loading the statics a few cells out seems like a relatively simple task, so don't think it would take too much dev time away from the rest of what should be worked on. Absent of a real technical reason, such as needing to completely restructure the way cell information is loaded, I see no reason to not do this and a lot of people would be VERY happy.
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akortunov
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Re: Distant Statics Placeholder

Post by akortunov »

Restest latest nightly build. In 0.44 we update physcis and animations for all flying actors in scene, what caused a huge performance drop, now we just do not render distant actors, so "cell load" basically loads only game world and runs scripts for all loaded objects.

So basically it is already a "distant statics placeholder".
Other possible improvements - do not render items and containers and do not run scripts outside 1 cell range, but it will not provide a good performance gain.
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Ravenwing
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Re: Distant Statics Placeholder

Post by Ravenwing »

This is great! Saw that had been merged but guess I didn’t understand the repercussions.

So it’s animations and physics that has been the bottleneck for extended cell loading?

I imagine taking out containers and items won’t do much more than culling already does, but may be worth an experiment. I can see why scripts wouldn’t increase performance, but might they cause problems? I digress though, this sounds like exactly what I was hoping for.

Very excited to try out the nightly!
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akortunov
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Re: Distant Statics Placeholder

Post by akortunov »

Ravenwing wrote: 29 Oct 2018, 17:23 So it’s animations and physics that has been the bottleneck for extended cell loading?
Yes, and now the bottleneck is usually rendering and culling.
Ravenwing wrote: 29 Oct 2018, 17:23 I imagine taking out containers and items won’t do much more than culling already does, but may be worth an experiment.
I tried to cull all containers and misc items from scene, and it almost did not affect perfromance at all.
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Ravenwing
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Re: Distant Statics Placeholder

Post by Ravenwing »

You think of everything! Thanks so much akortunov!

Just out of interest, does culling being part of the bottleneck mean that trying to remove more objects is actually a larger drain than rendering them?
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ArashiAganawa
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Re: Distant Statics Placeholder

Post by ArashiAganawa »

Out of additional curiosity, how much of an fps hit are we talking per cell? I already have distant land maxed out with no performance issues, so I'd be interested to see what I could handle with a few cells or more loaded in!

This is very exciting! I don't post often, but this is one of the things I've been following!
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AnyOldName3
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Re: Distant Statics Placeholder

Post by AnyOldName3 »

Ravenwing wrote: 30 Oct 2018, 01:34 You think of everything! Thanks so much akortunov!

Just out of interest, does culling being part of the bottleneck mean that trying to remove more objects is actually a larger drain than rendering them?
The cull traversal involves more than just discarding objects - more of the work is done collecting objects to render, so it's a bit of a misnomer. It's also when we do things like skinning, terrain paging and shadow space calculation, with skinning being the most demanding.
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Ravenwing
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Re: Distant Statics Placeholder

Post by Ravenwing »

Got to try this out last night. Seems to work fairly well! I was able to play with 2 cells much more smoothly, and 3 was about what 2 was apart from the usual problem places like Sadrith Mora. Also wanted to add that the fade in and out looks very good, so props on that.

I see what you mean AnyOldName3, I tried 5 cells just to go a little crazy, and the cull segment was through the roof. This is the extra work to go through and load the exponentially more objects? It actually didn’t play as terribly as I thought it would but below 20 for the most part so obviously not even slightly playable.
Dyskos
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Re: Distant Statics Placeholder

Post by Dyskos »

I tried last night, but there didn't seem to be much a difference on mine... performance-wise nor visually speaking. In fact, nightly seems to run a few frames per second slower when idling on the same saves.
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Ravenwing
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Re: Distant Statics Placeholder

Post by Ravenwing »

My guess is if physics and rendering of those actors wasn't your bottleneck to begin with, it's unlikely to do anything. What did the F3 overlay show before vs now?
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