Setting Request for Devs

posted on August 5th, 2009, 12:56 am

    I don't know if this has been requested before, but I know it would really help me, and Other people with slower computers like me.  In game My game runs perfect, I have no lagg, and nothing like that until one point.  This has always been a problem with FO for me no matter what Computer I am on.  When a ship or station explodes my computer laggs, and it freezes up for a couple of seconds, depending on the size of the explosion.  For a say bug ship, there would be about a 5 second lagg. For a star base, somewhere between 30 and 60 seconds.

    So my request follows. I have my graphics slider all the way down, but it seems to have no effect on the detail of an explosion.  So I would like to request 1 that the slider have the same effect on explosions as it does on fog of battle(or whatever it is called). Or 2, that explosions can be turned off completely.  I am sure that these could be done, but I don't know how easily.  Can this be done soon?  Much sooner than I can buy a new computer I hope.   Any one agree with me or have the same problem? 

posted on August 5th, 2009, 1:00 am

Hehe, check the todo list: I think this (the explosion issue) is going to be fixed for the next patch. However, you are correct, I think an "explosion slider" would be rather nice for people who have lower end computers... (not me!!!  )

posted on August 5th, 2009, 7:37 am

yep, thats an armada issue, actually. Is on todo to fixing, and we are working our way towards it

posted on August 5th, 2009, 8:54 pm

Seems like it would be easy to just disable explosions, like damage and such.  I think I am going to highten the opacity of the textures in my personal mod just to see if that would help.  Maybe that would work for a slider. The higher the slider is, the more vibrant the explosions are.  The lower, the more see through they are.

posted on August 5th, 2009, 10:27 pm

Seems like it would be easy to just disable explosions, like damage and such.   I think I am going to highten the opacity of the textures in my personal mod just to see if that would help.  Maybe that would work for a slider. The higher the slider is, the more vibrant the explosions are.  The lower, the more see through they are.

I'd assume it would be the chunk generation on destruction of more detailed craft that causes the hang, as opposed to the explosion texture. The AII engine should have no problem rendering what is actually just a textured quad, even if it does have alpha. Also it would be more of an overall FPS decrease, instead of a one off pause.

posted on August 5th, 2009, 11:12 pm

I have dissabled the explosions before, and it worked.  I think it has to do with the animation, but I'm not sure.

posted on August 6th, 2009, 8:59 am

yep, the split of vessels with multiple meshes (e.g. borg) is very slow. note that this hat close to nothing to do with the number of polygones, thats actually quite fast. We are working on fixes here, but lets first focus on some other engine related stuff