Quote: "Sorry but for me it is, trying it out in a test level with a variety of weapons and targets has no effect, but when I use the weapons in my game, (EAI's G22 and MP5N), repeated firing cripples the framerate down to about 5-9 fps from 34-45...
As you can understand, this is pretty bad and I'm unsure why it's doing it. I've ran the DBO/BIN cleaner at least five times, and removed the weapons from the game before re loading them in. The lag on firing still persists however..."
Hi GC, et. al...
One things I've noticed which lags FPSC (vanilla or PBUM) is that whatever method used to calculate alpha channel z-sorting seems overly resource intensive(I'm hoping this will be something which Ply or S4 can look into).
When you are repeatedly firing, the weapons are generating smoke decals which need to sort through each other. This, for whatever reason, can create lag. It is not an issue in a small test level because there isn't much to see on the other side of the smoke. I'm guessing in your full game there is more detailed level environment, entities, etc which need to be calculated and it makes the issue readily apparent.
The same issue can be observed with blood and bullet decals stacked on walls. The added geometry from the decals, FPSC can handle; it's the alpha z-sorting where it chokes. In the course of media testing, I can have a room with half a dozen 3000+ triangle dead guys in it and 60FPS but if I walk up to a wall covered in bloodsplatters, the FPSC drops to 20-24FPS!
If you look back to earlier versions of the mod, the decal stacking wasn't nearly as resource intensive because the decals were "bugged" and clamping alpha to 1bit. It rendered faster but looked beyond horrible. I'm hoping a nice compromise can be found or the alpha z-sort problem sorted out because I think it can be resolved it would be another great boon to PBUM overall performance. In rare cases, PBUM exaggerates this problem because of the raised cap on number of decals. Especially if you are using the AirMod bloodspurt commands (great to test wat I'm talking about, BTW).
CG, as an interim solution, you might try editing the gunsmoke decal, or better yet to make a new decal, make it tiny like 16x16pixel and to be 100% alpha (be sure you redefine the new decal in gunspec) in an attempt to remove it from the equation.
As feature creep, I'd like to see a user defined cap on number of bullet decals (scorch marks) before they start removing themselves (like Nbt mentioned). There is a cap but it is in the thousands. Personally, I don't need/want more than a couple hundred before they start removing themselves.
The next logical suggestion would be a gunspec command to disable smoke.
P.S. I am LOVING the new version and am now really getting into all the new scripting commands and such. I look foreward to showing and sharing what I've come up with.
