Breldur, my new age

[Jonnee]

I know that you are right, my friends.

Yesterday I started to think about this and I have an idea, how I could reduce alot of the ages vertices:

1.) Once again I could shrink the size of the age by deleting the huge garden and the ocean and changing them into a slim canyon like Ercana. Ercana is a good example, because it's easily to see that Cyan did not use alot of vertices for the canyon's walls there. But it looks good too.

2.) After that I can reduce the amount of the trees. That saves alot of memory capacity for transparent textures too. By the way I could save alot of palm trees. Anyway... I haven't been very lucky about the look of their leaves.

3.) Once again I could change the positions of some rooms. Right now most of them are placed at the right side of the age. The left side is almost empty. So I should place them in a circle, that should reduce the work for the camera.

4.) I have to cut down the vertices of the bota (the botanical room).

5.) The last point: I will add the Visregions.
So please give me all of the important facts about Visregions (links and step by step tutorials). I don't have the time to search for them and to translate all of the english conversations, that are not important.

Anyone raises a plea?

[GPNMilano]

2.) After that I can reduce the amount of the trees. That saves alot of memory capacity for transparent textures too. By the way I could save alot of palm trees. Anyway... I haven't been very lucky about the look of their leaves.

There's a great tutorial here - Low Poly Trees on how to make low poly trees for a 3d game that look amazing. I tried this in a garden age I'm working on and it looked fantastic once applied with the right textures. It also takes you on a step by step tutorial on how to make the leaf textures, which would be helpful in getting the right look of the palm leaves for you trees. Finally when in doubt about the leafs, if you think you need more and don't want to apply to many vertices you can go with an old trick that Cyan did for their trees. The ones you see in Relto (the maple trees from MOUL) not only have leaves like the tutorial above teaches about, but also one plane for each of the larger trees. The plane cuts down the middle of the tree and is applied with a texture of a side view of the tree top. The plane then has a viewfacemodifier applied to it (a sprite/billboard) that swivels so it's always facing the camera. This makes it so the tree looks fuller with lots of branches, when really it's only a few branched planes and one really large plane to fill in the gaps.

[tachzusamm]

Unfortunately I don't know how to implement visRegions, but the tutorial GPNMilano mentioned is a really good one. You should definetely spend a hour to watch the video. (Yes, it goes that long). Maybe you could skip some parts, because I'm sure you will understand immediately what this guy is doing.

To save you some time, you could download and import the example tree trunk I made following this tutorial. I have uploaded it to the TextURU server: http://www.texturu.org .
In addition to that, there's a ready-to-use leaves branch GPNMilano uploaded on the same server.
This way, you could get a quick impression how this kind of tree would look like in your age.

For testing, I've setup a bunch of this type of trees (including leaf branches) in a small area (about 20 of them directly sid-by-side) and got not really noticeable lag. And my computer is a medium one, not the slowest, but way not the fasted available today. But just to mention (I'm sure you already know): It's absolutely necessary to switch shadbuf to OFF, or the lag will be extreme.

Oh, an Chloe: Thank you very much for mentioning these secrets about the inner parts of trees - seems a really good idea; I was already wondering how this type of trees can be enhanced without adding too much additional branches.

Finally, Jonnee, to be honest, I feed a bit sad when you say you are going to reduce parts of your beautiful age.

This raises a general question to everybody: Is it really true that the total vertex count in an age matters, in areas where most of this bunch of mesh cannot even be seen?
I mean, when you're in a room, especially without windows (e.g. subterraneous), how can aboveground meshes cause lag at all? Or does it, really?
Or when you're in front of a mountain, does the amount of tree/flower meshes *behind* the mountain matter?

[diafero]

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.

It does not really have the quality for a wiki article... not only did I write German, I also just mentioned what techniques exist in Plasma. I never used PyPRP, so I can't tell how to use them. It would require someone who actually already used VisRegions in his age to write a useful tutorial on this (and there already is an article on SoftVolumes).
Plus, I forgot the physics - Jonnee, this is really important. Make all your visible meshes non-colliders, and add some *very simple* collider meshes, setting them to convex hulls. This of course does not reduce the actual graphics lag, but it takes a lot of load off the processor. Cyan did this for each and every age.

This raises a general question to everybody: Is it really true that the total vertex count in an age matters, in areas where most of this bunch of mesh cannot even be seen?
I mean, when you're in a room, especially without windows (e.g. subterraneous), how can aboveground meshes cause lag at all? Or does it, really?
Or when you're in front of a mountain, does the amount of tree/flower meshes *behind* the mountain matter?

Yes, it does matter, because the engine has to check for each object (or for each vertex) whether it is actually behind that mountain or besides it, from where you currently stand. Besides, the mountain could have an alpha layer (I think this is where occluders would chime in, making these automatic cutoffs much more efficient). Using VisRegions, you can tell the engine that you know these objects don't need to be drawn, unless the avatar is in a certain region. Using SoftVolumes, you can make them fade in/out to hide far way objects, and prevent the "popping in" when you get closer (like the grass in Er'cana, or the lamps in the city).

[kaelisebonrai]

Personally, visregions would probably bring it back down to acceptable levels, in theory.

Try visregions /first/, before changing vast swathes of your age, perhaps permanently. If visregions cut it down to a manageable level, awesome. if not, then you could start cutting everything else.

EDIT: and, and definitely simpler colliders. I'm also /very/ guilty of not doing this, and intend to get off my rear and do it, next age I do. =P

[Aloys]

It really sounds like we need to make a thorough wiki article about the various ways to enhance performance in an Age.. (I'd love to do it, but I don't know enough about Alcscript and Python to do an in-depth writing.)

[D'Lanor]

High vertex count and large textures are not the only age killers. In my post I did mention bugs and here is one example which I cannot stress enough: If you have animated objects with collision always make sure that they do not move through other colliders. This will cause avatar lag which builds up the longer you stay in the age.

In an ideal age animated objects should not have collision. If they do need collision you can parent an (invisible) collider to them with a simple geometry.

[Jonnee]

Ok.

diafero told me that all objects have to set the "convex hull" as bounds. This should avoind lags too.
Unfortunately I'm sure that somewhere in a beginner tutorial was written that the bounds have to be set to "static triangle mesh".
So now all of my objects in Breldur have the static bounds. I need a script that automatically changes all used bounds from "static triangle mesh" to "convex hull" for me.

Anyone can help? It will take hours and hours to change all used bounds by hand.

And I appreciate a performance improvement tutorial too.

[Trylon]

Yeah, that's probably said in order to avoid beginners the trouble of not being able to get into their hut. As a convex hull, just surrounds the entire object as if wrapped in shrinking foil.
When doing more advanced writing, then it becomes important to mind the colliders.

[D'Lanor]

Ok.

diafero told me that all objects have to set the "convex hull" as bounds. This should avoind lags too.
Unfortunately I'm sure that somewhere in a beginner tutorial was written that the bounds have to be set to "static triangle mesh".
So now all of my objects in Breldur have the static bounds. I need a script that automatically changes all used bounds from "static triangle mesh" to "convex hull" for me.

Anyone can help? It will take hours and hours to change all used bounds by hand.

And I appreciate a performance improvement tutorial too.

Sure, here you go:

ConvexHullConvert.zip

Triangle Mesh to Convex Hull script

(434 Bytes) Downloaded 222 times

Although you probably want to change back any floors which are not flat in order to avoid "avatar floating".