Iceworld issues on DI + General advice for Age writers

[Ainia]

Shorah diafero,

I'm wondering if this is why Elsewhere and Lonirvan are so laggy on DI (basically, I cannot move at all)? With Elsewhere, I can work around the lag by turning off shadows, but with Lonirvan this doesn't help at all (and so the Age is unplayable for me).

[diafero]

I think this only affects the initial log-in. Once you are arrive and can move, this issue should be overcome. The ages are probably just large and thus Uru is slow at drawing them. The wiki has some pointers for that, too, but they require lots of work of the age writer to tell Uru what it can safely "not draw": https://guildofwriters.org/wiki/Perform ... timization

The patch I applied to the server actually helper for Iceworld! More people should be able to log in now. The total count of initial SDL messages is 642, more than 100 more than Noloben oO.
I'll now apply Sirius patch, which should drop this count significantly.

EDIT: The new count of messages is 165. Much better

[Tsar Hoikas]

PyPRP does a lousy job of optimizing geometry data and physical data. There is a notable speed increase just by ramming it through libHSPlasma... more so if it's converted to the MOUL format because PhysX at least optimizes the convex hulls. PyPRP just dumps out a list of every vertex in the collision mesh.

[Sirius]

De-syncing animations may also improve performances in the Age a bit, actually - there was a similar issue when I fixed the horse animations in the Great Marsh, and D'Lanor noticed some random lag spikes offline because the flag wasn't set. Not sure if it will have any effect, though, as it may have been caused by starting/stopping animations using Python.

PyPRP does a lousy job of optimizing geometry data and physical data. There is a notable speed increase just by ramming it through libHSPlasma... more so if it's converted to the MOUL format because PhysX at least optimizes the convex hulls. PyPRP just dumps out a list of every vertex in the collision mesh.

Interesting. LibHSPlasma really does speed up some Ages ? Is this because of the vertex compression or something ?
About collisions: most of the time, the lag I notice in Ages are due to the visible geometry, rather than collisions :shrug: but it's true Fan-Ages could do with more convex hull collisions (especially if they are faster on MOUL).

Decreasing lag is a tricky process. I'm working on a tool that can optimize Ages in only a few button clicks, mostly by correcting the default values generated either by PyPRP or Blender. Some of its features are a bit more "destructive" than what libHSPlasma does, I guess, but most of the time it results in better performances at no cost. Hopefully this will be useful once I release it
I think I'll add an option to automatically setup that "Exclude" flag...