Distant Land Status?

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sonicboom12345
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Re: Distant Land Status?

Post by sonicboom12345 »

I've been experimenting for a couple hours now... It's curious to me that upping the distant land settings seems to cause the game performance to suffer without any meaningful draw on my system CPU or memory. Upping to something that's well outside the recommended parameters, exterior cell load distance = 12 and viewing distance = 100000, nukes my frame rate down to 2 fps... but still without noticeably taxing the system. Am I right in assuming the bottleneck must be on the software side then? The client just has a hard cap on how many scripts, statics, land mesh vertices, etc. it can render before it chokes?
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akortunov
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Re: Distant Land Status?

Post by akortunov »

sonicboom12345 wrote: 15 Oct 2017, 06:39 Upping to something that's well outside the recommended parameters, exterior cell load distance = 12 and viewing distance = 100000, nukes my frame rate down to 2 fps...
That's because an engine tries to render (12+1)*(12+1)=169 cells.
Generally, you can use "exterior cell load distance = 2" for high-end GPUs (e.g. GTX1060), and "exterior cell load distance = 1" in other cases.
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jirka642
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Re: Distant Land Status?

Post by jirka642 »

sonicboom12345 wrote: 15 Oct 2017, 04:57 I only hope when OpenMW hits 1.0, all of these settings will be put on a slider accessible through the in-game video menu. It's painstaking to tinker with config files in Notepad, then troubleshoot why they're getting poor performance...
IIRC, this has something to do with strings like "distant terrain" not being defined in vanilla Morrowind files. Creating UI with that option would require hardcoding that string into engine, which is not considered a good idea (not supported localization).
A lot of things can be done only after 1.0 because they will break backwards compatibility vanilla engine, rework of localization support is one of them (I think someone wanted to use *.po files).
sonicboom12345
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Re: Distant Land Status?

Post by sonicboom12345 »

akortunov wrote: 15 Oct 2017, 06:45
sonicboom12345 wrote: 15 Oct 2017, 06:39 Upping to something that's well outside the recommended parameters, exterior cell load distance = 12 and viewing distance = 100000, nukes my frame rate down to 2 fps...
That's because an engine tries to render (12+1)*(12+1)=169 cells.
Generally, you can use "exterior cell load distance = 2" for high-end GPUs (e.g. GTX1060), and "exterior cell load distance = 1" in other cases.
While I understand features like distant land aren't as much a priority as getting the core game to 1.0, with MGE I was able to set the render options such that I could set my agility to 1500, jump high into the sky, and see the *entire* island of Vvardenfell laid out before me. That was with careful pruning of statics based on size, so only the trees, mushrooms, and edifices were perceptible from afar. At endgame, jumping from town to town became my favored method of traversing the game world. I could do that and still get a frame rate of around 20 fps outdoors.

OpenMW doesn't seem to be capable of anywhere near this rendering feat. Even setting the cell load distance to 1 and the viewing distance to something high like 100,000, so that the continent is rendered but none of the statics or scripts are, my frame rate hovers around 10. Therefore, I'm wondering, is the client choking trying to render the land mesh itself? What is the bottleneck, when MGE was able to provide for a better viewing distance with increased performance? "You should be able to see 2 cells away" doesn't provide a lot of encouragement when with MGE I cold stand atop the cantons of Vivec and see all the way to Ghostgate. :/
Chris
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Re: Distant Land Status?

Post by Chris »

sonicboom12345 wrote: 15 Oct 2017, 15:37 While I understand features like distant land aren't as much a priority as getting the core game to 1.0, with MGE I was able to set the render options such that I could set my agility to 1500, jump high into the sky, and see the *entire* island of Vvardenfell laid out before me. That was with careful pruning of statics based on size, so only the trees, mushrooms, and edifices were perceptible from afar. At endgame, jumping from town to town became my favored method of traversing the game world. I could do that and still get a frame rate of around 20 fps outdoors.
OpenMW doesn't currently render static objects with distant terrain enabled, so you'll be able to see the terrain with hills and such, but things like trees, mushrooms, and rocks will still only be visible within the exterior cell load distance (radius). This is something that'll be worked on eventually, but it's not easy to automate (MGE XE requires running a distant land generator separately to prebuild an LOD world, which obviously would cause issues if you add or remove mods that affect the world, not to mention for scripts that change world objects during play).
OpenMW doesn't seem to be capable of anywhere near this rendering feat. Even setting the cell load distance to 1 and the viewing distance to something high like 100,000, so that the continent is rendered but none of the statics or scripts are, my frame rate hovers around 10.
What's your hardware and your settings.cfg? OpenMW's default cell preload/precache settings can be a bit aggressive on system memory, which can be exacerbated by distant terrain. Also forcing shaders on may improve performance a bit depending on your gfx card (modern hardware's fixed-function emulation isn't necessarily as good as tuned shaders can be).
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lysol
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Re: Distant Land Status?

Post by lysol »

The thing is: MGE XE is finished. OpenMW is not.
sonicboom12345
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Re: Distant Land Status?

Post by sonicboom12345 »

Chris wrote: 15 Oct 2017, 17:39What's your hardware and your settings.cfg?

Core i7 7700k, 16 GB RAM, NVIDIA GTX 970 (a little old but I'm trying to make it stretch).

Settling.cfg:
Spoiler: Show


lysol wrote: 15 Oct 2017, 19:05 The thing is: MGE XE is finished. OpenMW is not.

This is A-OK, and that's kind of what I was angling for... We've all got a lot of love for everybody working on this project, and a lot of hope that OpenMW will be the the best darn play experience in every possible respect. I understand everything's a work in progress, and I'm cool with that.
Chris
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Re: Distant Land Status?

Post by Chris »

sonicboom12345 wrote: 15 Oct 2017, 23:38 # Adjacent exterior cells loaded (>0). Caution: this setting can
# dramatically affect performance, see documentation for details.
exterior cell load distance = 3
Set this to 1. A value of 3 means 49 cells are fully loaded and getting processed.
# Preload cells in a background thread. All settings starting with 'preload' have no effect unless this is enabled.
preload enabled = true
# Preload the locations that doors lead to.
preload doors = true
Try setting one of these to false. Preloading can easily saturate memory which can cause slowdown.
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