Breldur, my new age

[Jonnee]

Thanks alot.

This is important now:
Old Wolle started a discussion with me.
After creating the last room Breldur started to get very laggy again. To avoid these heavy lags I'm thinking of creating the center of Breldur once again and to change the positions of some rooms too. That should not become a problem.
Wolle told me that "Ahra Pahts", "Kadish" and "Ercana" are written in a way that not the whole age gets loaded at the beginning - only the part where the player is gets loaded into the memory.

Anyone has informations about this? How can I use this skill in Breldur?

Thanks, Jonnee

[D'Lanor]

I do not recommend the method used by Ahra Pahts. If your age gets slow it has an error which you need to fix. Period. A crappy workaround won't fix the actual cause.

Edit: If you cannot find the bug and still need a workaround the preferred method is using vis regions. There is in fact a discussion in the Ahra Pahts section about converting the current paging system to that.

[diafero]

I sent you a rather long descriptions of the techniques I know of that can improve an age's performance, which are VisRegions, SoftRegions and Occluders (besides the simple "less vertices, less textures, smaller textures"). However, I have no clue how it can be done in PyPRP, or if it can be done at all.

Besides, Cyan does not use page (un)loading anywhere. Ahra Pahts is the only age doing it, causing not only lag while wandering around and a broken environment when using flymode, but possibly also various multiplayer problems (as different players might have different objects available).

[dendwaler]

I sent you a rather long descriptions of the techniques I know of that can improve an age's performance

Please , can you place this info in the WIKI?
Jonnee is not the only one, wrestling with this problem.

I have been busy for weeks to split my age into several visregions and gave up, it was horrible to do.
Visregions are good, if you start with it from the beginning.

[D'Lanor]

Besides, Cyan does not use page (un)loading anywhere.

Except in Minkata where it has a specific puzzle related purpose. For Prad I took a guess at this system (there were no tools to hack MOUL files at the time) and actually came quite close to the code Cyan used for Minkata without having ever seen it.
The problems with the Ahra Pahts paging system are the use of trigger regions which can easily be circumvented and the multiplayer issues diafero mentioned. In Minkata (and Prad) the same pages are always loaded for every player at the same time.

[Jonnee]

I don't think that there is an object causing an error. All of my objects are done in the same way and I did test them alot of times.

The reason of lagging is very simple: I'm using right now 371.000 vertices in Breldur.
The last room has 80.000 for example. And there are some transparent textures used within. They cause the heavy lagging I think.
Additionally I'm working alot with many texture layers. But I recycle my textures and I really try to repeat them alot.

If I stand outside, in the middle of Breldur, there are textures with transparency too. (The leaves of the trees).
So if the camera views from one end of the age to the other end there are alot of objects with transparency straight ahead. My computer has to work alot, even if some of these transparent objects are somewhere behind of a wall and not visible at this moment.

So... I really don't know if I should add Visregions now. I think this will become alot of work for the next weeks.

[Yali]

Just saw the video. Wow! This is like a whole new Myst game! I'm having dreams about this place, just like I dreamed about Exile before its release!

[GPNMilano]

The reason of lagging is very simple: I'm using right now 371.000 vertices in Breldur.

My advice would be to cut that down. ALOT. Your age has over 140,000 more vertices than Cyan's Tahgira had. Adding more on top of what you've already made will grind Uru to a halt. Not to mention that there's a limit of I think 32,000-33,000 vertices per material. Meaning one material can only use that many vertices at one time in an age. This is a limitation of Plasma not Blender either.

[Paradox]

Definitely try to cut down the number of vertices.

Also, for any Age that's bigger than Relto, VisRegions are almost essential. Learn to use them, and they will greatly cut down the amount of work for your graphics card.

Another big cause of lag is the physicals. Build custom collider meshes for as much of the Age as possible, and use convex hulls rather than triangle meshes.

The Age looks great Jonnee, just need to make sure it will work for people with lower-end machines

[Chacal]

Another big cause of lag is the physicals. Build custom collider meshes for as much of the Age as possible, and use convex hulls rather than triangle meshes.

THIS. Do not use your visible meshes as colliders. Make your custom collider meshes as simple as possible.