How to Fix Lag

[DylanCheetah]

It has come to my attention that some of you have trouble with lag. Especially on maps with lots of meshes. Therefore, I decided to investigate this issue and present my findings to help people resolve this issue.

First, let's start by understanding the root issues which cause this problem. The game engine which this game was built on is Ogre 1.7.2 This particular game engine was released on Nov 3, 2010 (see here). During this time period, the average screen size was 1024x768 (see here), game engines of the day would've been optimized for 2010 era hardware, and furthermore FeralHeart was designed to use mostly pre-defined shaders rather than custom ones. Also, any bugs present in that version of Ogre will remain present without upgrading to a newer version.

Next, let's take a look at some technical facts. For starters, rendering at a higher resolution requires drawing more pixels. Drawing more pixels requires more runs of the fragment/pixel shader. And the efficiency of the fragment/pixel shader has exponential impact on performance since it is run once per fragment/pixel. Drawing more meshes requires drawing more pixels and therefore increases the impact noticeably. Furthermore, certain features such as reflection and anti-aliasing tend to sacrifice performance for improved quality. True reflection requires the entire scene to be rendered multiple times per frame.

Knowing the root of the problem, I can definitely fix it. However, it will take time to do so and our players really need a fix now. Therefore, I have found a temporary fix to relieve some of these issues in order to reduce lag until I am able to provide a permanent fix:

1. Reduce Resolution
By reducing the resolution to 1024x768 you can likely eliminate a lot of the lag since Ogre 1.7.2 was designed at a time when that was the most common screen resolution and it results in less pixels being drawn each frame.

2. Disable Reflections
By disabling water reflections you reduce the number of pixels that need to be drawn to off-screen buffers. Which improves performance.

3. Reduce/Disable Anti-Aliasing
By reducing or disabling anti-aliasing you can improved performance.

This post will be updated as more solutions are confirmed to work.

[Pebbles]

Thank you

[DylanCheetah]

You're welcome.

[D-ead7Dog]

Thank you for this! It will for sure come in handy!