Lightweight placeholders

[macelena 1,070]

I got a fairly decent laptop recently, able to play modern stuff, but still i get issues with FPS in the game when i have mods in, specially those which take more space. Looks like it is due to using Win 10 with the Win 7 generation. So either i run very few mods, and have parts of the game contrast heavily with one another in the game, or i keep close to none.

So what i do on my install is to make certain "mods" that are mostly nothing but ini edits and reused stock stuff to get some slight improvements in the game while keeping the mod folder as light as possible. Examples of this include an expanded campaing in Iceland or Mirage cockpits adapted to make DLC 28 Mirages flyable, but i have several others in use in my install.

So what i was wondering is if anybody was interested in "fixes" like that in order to get them more or less polished and shared here

[macelena 1,070]

One like is all it took, got some

[+gerwin 451]

You are saying FPS issues with mods - Probably because of too high poly count in the scene, in other words, too much detail to be drawn at once. Look at the mods you use, look at the .Lod files of the objects. Then ask yourself:  1) How big is the main lod file? IIRC stock ones are around 1 to 2MB, giving a rough indication of the poly count there. 2) Does the object come with low poly distance lods to use at a distance?

Scenes with parked planes are the most heavy to render, so optionally decrease parking spots for airfields and carriers.

 

[macelena 1,070]

6 minutes ago, gerwin said:

You are saying FPS issues with mods - Probably because of too high poly count in the scene, in other words, too much detail to be drawn at once. Look at the mods you use, look at the .Lod files of the objects. Then ask yourself:  1) How big is the main lod file? IIRC stock ones are around 1 to 2MB, giving a rough indication of the poly count there. 2) Does the object come with low poly distance lods to use at a distance?

Scenes with parked planes are the most heavy to render, so optionally decrease parking spots for airfields and carriers.

 

 

Thanks a lot, the issue is not only with mods, but also with vanilla when the sky is way too crowded or weather is heavy, but it seems to have significantly more issues with anything like bmp or lod 3d party files being read from the mod folder. Normally i have all settings at max and it goes smoothly, even with crowded carriers on Iceland original terrain.

[+gerwin 451]

Now you are throwing in loading hickups or something, or are you describing an effect of hitting texture/GPU memory limits? I don't know. But downsizing textures is easy.

My previous reply was purely about framerate issues caused by poly-count. 

 

[macelena 1,070]

I'm not sure about what could be the issue exactly, the only pattern i've been able to see is the FPS drop with the amount of mods i have installed. Loading might be taking longer, but if so it is not by a noticeable amount. It seems the issue is with the graphics card and the game not being able to be as efficient as one might expect, but then again i'm just a caveman with a laptop. 

[+gerwin 451]

The labels "not efficient" or "not well optimized" are easy to put on any game when it does not do what you want. But consider that any game engine can be brought to a crawl, by just adding one single resource sucking object to it, with unmanageable poly count. Particularly when multiple instances of that object are in view.

 

PS. I assume the laptop has an SSD. Because these 2,5" mechanical drives, with spin-down power saving, are another story.

[Wrench 9,876]

there are many terrains that do that as well ( suck up resources). I should know -- I'm the cause of it!!, object wise) They also increase loading times, usually around the, what it is ... 60-80% mark??

it still sounds like lack of video memory. Unless the laptop is specifically designed for gaming, this has been an issue for the last 17 years that I've been involved with this game.

 

[macelena 1,070]

My laptop is an i7, with SSD and an Nvidia RTX card, i mentioned the issue before because i read that SF2, Win 10 and Nvidia cards had issues, so i guess it might be, but my knowledge on computers is, to put it mildly, way below the average to diagnose the root of the problem.

The thing is, even without mods, terrains and aircraft vanilla it runs around 18 FPS wether i have graphics maxxed or not, but when i add stuff it goes way worse. The placeholders are the way i get around it