Ship explosions

posted on April 21st, 2009, 1:48 am

I dont know about anyone else, but alot of the ship modles break up into many MANY parts upon destruction.
I get frame rate drops on majority of them, i usualy play with the borg and i thought it was them, but as it turns out some of the other ships (Tavara, Norexian, D'Derix, Most Dominion ships, Execlsior MkII).
I have a powerful PC, i can run Crysis on DX10 with as much as a Hickup, i c have Mass Effect PC no frame drops under 40.

But i find it hard to play FO long or start playing online while this happens...

posted on April 21st, 2009, 1:51 am

This is because of the High quality of the ships.  You can see in more detail if you use Storm 3D.  Sadly I don't think it can be helped.

posted on April 21st, 2009, 2:03 am

This is because of the High quality of the ships.  You can see in more detail if you use Storm 3D.  Sadly I don't think it can be helped.

actualy some of the dev team said it was the complexity of the model breakups, if they forced say the ships to break into 3 or 4 mabye 5 or 6 rather that 50 of 60 fragments then that would probably solve the issue.

posted on April 21st, 2009, 2:09 am

thats what I mean.  I wonder if it could have be changed by the lines which are nolonger in the game.

// Storm3D chunk manager parameters.
int  ST3D_CHUNK_MANAGER_MAX_CHUNKS = 1500;
float ST3D_CHUNK_SIZE_FACTOR = 0.5;
float ST3D_CHUNK_LIFETIME_AVG = 4.0;
float ST3D_CHUNK_LIFETIME_DEVIATION = 2.0;
float ST3D_CHUNK_MAX_ANGULAR_VELOCITY = 4.0;
float ST3D_CHUNK_MAX_VELOCITY = 90.0;

posted on April 21st, 2009, 2:09 am

the more detail u try to put into these explosions and other "particile" related graphics the more your PC is going to slow down.

the choppiness and many of the lags are caused by explosions and other effects. so we may need ot be careful with additional detail to explosions and borg node completions etc...

posted on April 21st, 2009, 2:11 am

This thread is the third triplicate duplicate redundant whatever. As the Devs have said, its the way the explosions are rendered (different than normal).

posted on April 21st, 2009, 2:26 am

actualy its not the explosion itself.

The explosion is just a sprite, its the ship breaking up in 3D that causes it.

Plus im sure a 9800 GTX+ Gigabyte can handle the particle effects of the A2 engine.

I think its due to the A2 engine and how it renders breakups. remember the origional graphics in A2... thats what the engine was designed for.

The FO dev team have pushed it to the absolute limit with its breakup abilities, i dont think its the PC more the engine that thought it could trying to keep up.

posted on April 21st, 2009, 5:32 am

The FO team stated somewhere it is an issue with A2's breakup render system. The system changes to a different render engine to display breakups. There is no easy fix for this, even if the polly count was lowered on ships, the breakup could still slow systems down.

posted on April 21st, 2009, 5:37 am

What if you changed it so that you saw the ship break into a few big chunks and then some small debris (by fooling around with the settings above), as opposed seeing the ship "shatter"? would that help? Also, is it possible to force the ship in question down to the lowest LOD when exploding?

posted on April 21st, 2009, 6:08 am

The other alternative would be to get rid of shattereing ships alltogether and have a hires sprite and lots and lots of 2D debris kinda like heagemonia, mabye the 3D model breaking in two.

That would fix the issue.

posted on April 21st, 2009, 8:31 am

We are aware of that problem and are working on a fix along with better damage and explosion visualization. Its a problem of armada, not related to the modeldetial directly (you could make a model with 100 polygons that causes much more slow-down then what we have at the moment). We are on it, but it will take a while

posted on April 21st, 2009, 8:36 am

here is a recent discussion about ship breaking over at the patch project subforum
Star Trek Armada II: Fleet Operations - Ship Break Up

posted on April 21st, 2009, 10:09 am

out of wonder could you not stick your engine that runs over amrada on a second thread on another core, or atleast the explosion part of it? That way Armada has its own dedictated core and yours anotehr, sure that what somewhat reduce the time a bit? and obviously if you have only 1 core and no HT support then your have to just shove it all on one, but most of us have dual cores these days...

posted on April 21st, 2009, 10:16 am

that is not possible, armada is not programmed thread safe. don't forget we do not have armada's source code, everything is done through 'hacks'. even if we had it, that couldn't be accomplished without an complete engine overhaul.