Costum model causing lag?

[lord_Turin]

Hi guys,

quick question, so i've been mapping a big 5v5 map for about 10 years now (Battle for middle earth). This is a big map with a lot of units. In proper games there are often battles with 120 vs 120 units with about 20 heroes on each side. Now in the past we've been playing with about 10-20 fps, depending on you PC.

For my most recent version i've added alot of new "custom" models. And i've been getting complains, people are experiencing a drop in FPS, with the people that usually have 20 fps now dropping to 5(!) fps. Could this be caused by the custom models? I'm mostly using models that are fairly low poly etc.

If so is there a way to optimize models further to reduce the drop of FPS?

 

[GhostWolf]

I never looked into how Warcraft 3 handles rendering (which could be interesting, if time consuming), but I am going to assume that the number of vertices and faces is far less important than the amount of render calls.
In other words, models with a lot of materials and/or many layers per material, are going to be expensive.

Then again, it might be running software skinning, in which case the amount of vertices does matter, a lot.
So...who knows.

You can set the map in a way that you can tell the difference in FPS, and switch the unit models, to see which cause drops, but it sounds like a huge pain.

 

[Talavaj]

You haven't touched the triggers since ?
As in, are you sure it is model related ?

In any case, I would follow GhostWolf's suggestion.
You can make doodads with the models of your units, write a bunch of triggers that - play animation for doodads in region animation = hide/show which hides or shows the particular doodad in the region.
Fire up fraps or something and look for which model makes the biggest difference in fps when shown/hidden.

As for the weights, from my experience static meshes don't do much, the biggest offenders are UVW animations and the number of groups/vertices skinned to bones which are the most likely things to flatout break the rendering.

 

[lord_Turin]

Thanks guys, we are looking into it.

we did a test today:
-changing all units to footman gives about 2 more fps.
-You gain about 1 fps per 1000 doodads removed (map currently has 10k doodads)

So we're just going to check everything again. reduce map by a 1000 doodads (lose some charm.. but hell). Check all the models to see if we can reduce "something" there..

triggers are 99.9% sound. We tested with and without triggers and there is no difference.