Impressions of 0.18

[Greendogo]

I'd do it if I knew how to. Is it something that can be explained easily?

Also, I didnt know you guys were getting faster load times than that. I just thought the load times were normal and the shaking was terrible. I'm glad to know it can be faster.

[Zini]

I'd do it if I knew how to. Is it something that can be explained easily?

Click on Bugs in the bar above (on the main site and with the new skin also on the forum). That takes you to the tracker. You need to register there separately. Then click on "New issue" and fill out the form. Leave fields that you don't understand blank.

Also, I didnt know you guys were getting faster load times than that. I just thought the load times were normal and the shaking was terrible. I'm glad to know it can be faster.

Two important facts about bug reporting:

- We can't read your mind. Sorry, but I don't think we ever managed to recruit a telepath. Shoddy work of our recruitment team, I know.

- We can't see what is on your screen. And, unless it is a known issue or a rarely used feature, it is most likely not what is on our screens.

Unfortunately quite a few bug reports here on the forum suffer from people ignoring these facts, which makes these reports essential useless.

[jhooks1]

Zini, not sure if this is the right place to discuss this (Dev topic), but I think this could give us a minor improvement on cell loads:
Currently, when a cell loads npcs are loaded with no clothing or equipment (skin body parts). After the cell loads the npc parts are changed to using equipment. Simply loading the cell and initially having autoequip bind equipment would save time (less resouces loaded, less parts being binded). updateParts() should already be able to handle this. Don't know if this is something that can be done yet (Morrowind already does this I am sure).

[Zini]

No guessing please. Well, you can guess as much as you want, but we should not try to improve things based on guesses. I could probably list half a dozen more potential bottlenecks and that would be about as useless as yours. We need profiling data.

[jhooks1]

Not really a guess. As of our current method, the npc gets initialized twice. Doing this would definitely be more efficient.

EDIT: I am not saying this is going to solve all of our problems, just that this would help efficiency.

[Zini]

Okay. Let me explain it differently:

Let's say a task consists of 3 parts: A, B and C. As it turns out A takes up 50% of the total time, B takes 45% and C takes 5%.

Now we may find out that C is implemented very inefficiently. And we can come up with a method to speed it up by a factor of 2.

Unfortunately that will save us only 2.5% overall. We would be better of even, if we could speed up A by mere 10%.

I am not saying that the autoequip part is an example of C. But it could be. And in this case any work on improving it would be totally wasted. We need data before we can start to optimize. Any other approach falls into the area of premature optimization and that is one of the biggest evil in software development.

[jhooks1]

I understand what you are saying. I am not sure how hard it would be to get autoequip to be performed before NpcAnimation objects are initialized, but I am sure that it is something that will need to be done before 1.0 anyways. It would look cleaner (as it stands we can actually see the npcs start undressed then magically become clothed).

[Chris]

No guessing please. Well, you can guess as much as you want, but we should not try to improve things based on guesses. I could probably list half a dozen more potential bottlenecks and that would be about as useless as yours. We need profiling data.

It's something that should be fixed anyway, I think. NPCs shouldn't show up naked and decide to put on some clothes a moment later.

[Chris]

Chris explained this one already. There are still several rarely used aspects of the NIF format that are not supported yet by OpenMW.

FWIW, I can try implementing the proper alpha modes again. I remember you mentioned problems with it in your mod, and couldn't show/describe the problem, but that was before the rewrite to avoid using submeshes. If it had something to do with alpha sorting, it may have been fixed.

[Greendogo]

I'd do it if I knew how to. Is it something that can be explained easily?

Click on Bugs in the bar above (on the main site and with the new skin also on the forum). That takes you to the tracker. You need to register there separately. Then click on "New issue" and fill out the form. Leave fields that you don't understand blank.

I wasn't referring to the bug report part, I've done that once before.

I meant the profiling bit you were talking about before, in post 10577. My question was basically: "Is the profiling, you meantioned, something only one of the devs can do?" I think "Yes" is the feeling I'm getting from more recent posts