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Recently, I\'ve noticed that with every update in FPSC, it seems to get slower and more demanding on any level. If I backdate my FPSC to 1.15 even, I can have a map double the size my laptop can handle now. But of course, all the features in 1.18 are needed for my game too.
Because of this, I\'ve decided to halt development on my game, and have a crack at solving the issue.
My main problem is that I\'m not exactly the best coder in the world (MASSIVE understatement...) and I need pointers on where to actually look. I don\'t really see any reason that the engine couldn\'t be modded to work faster and more efficiently, and any help toward this would be much appreciated. Thanks, Ikey.

As far as performance difference between 1.15 and 1.17+ goes.

Open Setup.ini and change "PostProcessing" to "0". This is the full-screen shader that causes the performance drop. Personally, I don't like the PostProcessing (Bloom, DOP) anyway. Performance should be roughly the same as previous versions with this disabled, and you will still get to use all the PS 2.0 and PS 3.0 texture shaders.


Just to give you an idea on how bad the performance is affected by full-screen shaders in FPSC. I used one of the most basic full-screen shader that's available to this engine. (Sharpening) - This shader requires very little image processing.

With it enabled, the maximum amount of entities and map size drops by over half. Again, that's just a "Sharpening" shader. The Bloom shaders are even worse.

It's not the shaders fault, it's something to do with FPSC. Disable them and you should be able to make something similar in size to what you were doing in 1.15 all while keeping the other enhancements brought forth in 1.17+ Your results may vary, of course.


Further increase vast outdoor performance by using smaller textures and then increasing their quality with normal shaders. A 256 x 256 texture with bump and specular will look superior to a 1024 x 1024 texture with only a color texture. While too many of the 1024k textures will start eating your VRAM, the GPU will just laugh at the processing required for the vertex shaders and have plenty of VRAM for many 256k textures, increasing the potential for making vaster landscapes.


I would use the highest quality outdoor sky box you can find. In outdoor levels, the sky box can make or break the image quality of your map.

If you're wanting to make something really vast. Drop the Light Mapping Texture size in the Setup.ini to 256. The apperance difference between a 256 and 512 lightmap texture is actually not all the noticeable, especially if you were making a 'brighter' outdoor level.However, there is a noticeable performance improvement.

D3D even though the FPS engine code isn't quite optimal for processing shaders and memory handling a lot of it still has to do with what graphics card you have.

I, for example have tested with PP=0,1,2 and noticed absolutely no FPS difference, however lower spec machines may see this.

From the large outdoor maps I have created that run quite well, I turned off FS Shaders and used fog. Make sure all your geometry and scenery is static (tree's being dynamic you could get away with just).

Fog doesn't necessarily have to look like 'fog', if you mess around with the fog settings and ambience settings you can get it to look more like 'distance culling' or 'view from the eye' cut-off so your user's don't sit there wondering why you have fog on a sunny day. These effects can be achieved with a little tinkering.