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Author Topic: Undesirable performance on certain sprites/particle effects,  (Read 676 times)

SardineTheAncestor

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Undesirable performance on certain sprites/particle effects,
« on: January 01, 2020, 04:53:25 AM »
No idea how feasible this would be to change, but walking through Vallaki's Residential District and noticing how it tanks FPS in a very noticeable way, now that the new patch has significantly optimised the game's performance, I immediately knew that the cause was a bunch of smoke-stack effects up on the roofs of buildings which are barely seen from most angles, yet they impact framerate heavily and by that I mean a smooth 100+ FPS experience goes down to sub-30.

Is there any way we can get some particles and/or sprites which don't chew up performance so badly or is this just a truth of the way the game renders such effects?
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BraveSirRobin

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Re: Undesirable performance on certain sprites/particle effects,
« Reply #1 on: January 01, 2020, 05:05:07 AM »
I'm pretty sure mist/smoke particle effects just render that way. Which is unfortunate, because Mists/Smoke effects are the key atmospheric effect for this server. Furthermore, those smoke stacks on top of the buildings in the city are part of the tileset, Vallaki uses the base tileset from NWN. You can't actually select the smoke stacks, they're just part of the terrain per-se.. The only way to get around it would be to rebuild Vallaki on either a different tileset (vastly changing its appearance) or somehow developing a modified version of the base nwn tileset that is exactly the same, minus smoke stacks, which is like creating a new 3D Model for it.

SardineTheAncestor

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Re: Undesirable performance on certain sprites/particle effects,
« Reply #2 on: January 01, 2020, 05:17:15 AM »
Ouch. That's a real shame. Is it possible that an override could replace them with effects that don't tank performance as much?
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BraveSirRobin

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Re: Undesirable performance on certain sprites/particle effects,
« Reply #3 on: January 01, 2020, 02:29:06 PM »
I'm not certain. Maybe. I don't know how overrides interact with tilesets, but I think the biggest problem is that this requires someone to have made a parallel tileset to the default NWN tileset for Cities (City 1? City 2? I'm not sure) that would be approx. the same, but without those smoke stacks at the top of the buildings. A very niche thing.