Optimize Interiors for Performance Not Visual Quality

[kwairt 0]

The new screens of the building interiors look amazing no doubt about it. However from a performance perspective they don't really look very optimized. Sometimes instead of making it look realistic you just need to reduce windows and or use vis blockers on the door ways etc. Looking at the latest screens I see performance issues everywhere. This is one of the reasons the larger cities lag so much. It's not how many buildings but how many windows and doorways the renderer has to draw. Adding vis blockers and placing windows for performance instead of visual quality will help aleviate the stress on the systems in larger cities. This in turn will make the game more playable and enjoyable overall. It would also provide a more consistent performance across different areas of the game.

For example when I'm out in the wilderness away from the larger cities my framerate rockets however when you are near the big cities with all these buildings and their windows it just dies a horrible performance hit. I would imagine almost 50% of the performance hit could be eliminated by designing the buildings for performance instead of visual quality. Again placing of said buildings is also important but with the current implementation and stand alone screen shots I can tell there will be a great deal of overhead wasted when it could be reduced and or eliminated.

I'm no expert on the subject and there are many people who could explain this better than I have. Perhaps someone with some serious experience in performance optimization when it comes to terrain rendering with building interiors can shed some light on the issue better.

Edited January 8, 2013 by Malicar

[Dancing.Russian.Man 1631]

FYI, the engine has been mostly remade with things added from other sources (Weather and flight mechanics from Take On Helicopters, ragdoll physics should be coming from ARMA 3 whenever BIS finishes them, etc.), and the engine is now VERY much optimized. Lag should not be a problem anymore, even with the added detail to interiors. The lag you experience in the DayZ mod is entirely at fault because of the ARMA 2 engine and how unoptimized it is.

[kwairt 0]

FYI, the engine has been mostly remade with things added from other sources (Weather and flight mechanics from Take On Helicopters, ragdoll physics should be coming from ARMA 3 whenever BIS finishes them, etc.), and the engine is now VERY much optimized. Lag should not be a problem anymore, even with the added detail to interiors. The lag you experience in the DayZ mod is entirely at fault because of the ARMA 2 engine and how unoptimized it is.

I beg to differ. I find the performance in Arma 2 to be quite good under normal circumstances. Again it's just a few areas of the mod that have this lag due to the amount of buildings and their design. For example you don't see any windows in Skyrim at all. Other games will have windows but only some are actual windows. Limiting the amount of transition or LOS between the exterior and interior is critical in keeping performance up. For example a simple doorway with a wall behind it can completely eliminate the performance hit without sacraficing detail. If you look at the buildings in Day Z they all have multiple doorways with no vis blockers and a tonne of windows. This is a serious problem moving forward and it's not really that hard to fix. We don't really need 40 windows on a barn. We don't really need to render entire staircases of multiple floors with props either. Some simple performance optimizations on the geometry would solve these issues and still manage to look good IMO. Focus on the gameplay first and consistent performance.

[Dancing.Russian.Man 1631]

I beg to differ. I find the performance in Arma 2 to be quite good under normal circumstances. Again it's just a few areas of the mod that have this lag due to the amount of buildings and their design. For example you don't see any windows in Skyrim at all. Other games will have windows but only some are actual windows. Limiting the amount of transition or LOS between the exterior and interior is critical in keeping performance up. For example a simple doorway with a wall behind it can completely eliminate the performance hit without sacraficing detail. If you look at the buildings in Day Z they all have multiple doorways with no vis blockers and a tonne of windows. This is a serious problem moving forward and it's not really that hard to fix. We don't really need 40 windows on a barn. We don't really need to render entire staircases of multiple floors with props either. Some simple performance optimizations on the geometry would solve these issues and still manage to look good IMO. Focus on the gameplay first and consistent performance.

I really doubt having more detail indoors is going to be an issue.

And if you're trying to say that getting 15-30 FPS on an i7 processor(and a decent graphics card) is "normal," you need to talk a lot into my head for me to actually believe that the ARMA 2 engine is optimized.

Besides, currently, simply by approaching a city can severely tank someone's FPS, even if all they can see are the solid buildings with no interior at all, even less seeing any windows. It's not about seeing through a transparent texture, it's about how the whole thing is wrapped together in code. You can easily just make it so that you don't render interiors from afar. (Like in the case of GTA, for example. There's a 2D environment until you get close enough and the game loads the interior of a building in the background, and changes it.)

Edited January 8, 2013 by Dancing.Russian.Man

[jaytmuk (DayZ) 621]

Get rid of all graphics, all sounds and make it a text based zombie survival game.

That optimized enough for ya :P

[m.w. vindicator 880]

The new screens of the building interiors look amazing no doubt about it. However from a performance perspective they don't really look very optimized. Sometimes instead of making it look realistic you just need to reduce windows and or use vis blockers on the door ways etc. Looking at the latest screens I see performance issues everywhere. This is one of the reasons the larger cities lag so much. It's not how many buildings but how many windows and doorways the renderer has to draw. Adding vis blockers and placing windows for performance instead of visual quality will help aleviate the stress on the systems in larger cities. This in turn will make the game more playable and enjoyable overall. It would also provide a more consistent performance across different areas of the game.

For example when I'm out in the wilderness away from the larger cities my framerate rockets however when you are near the big cities with all these buildings and their windows it just dies a horrible performance hit. I would imagine almost 50% of the performance hit could be eliminated by designing the buildings for performance instead of visual quality. Again placing of said buildings is also important but with the current implementation and stand alone screen shots I can tell there will be a great deal of overhead wasted when it could be reduced and or eliminated.

I'm no expert on the subject and there are many people who could explain this better than I have. Perhaps someone with some serious experience in performance optimization when it comes to terrain rendering with building interiors can shed some light on the issue better.

I bet your problems are from the large amount of zeds in the cities. In the wilderness, where there are no Zeds, you get high FPS. In the cities you get low FPS because of the large amounts of Zeds.

This problem is already being addressed. To test this out, try running through electro or chernogorsk in vanilla arma 2

[kwairt 0]

Get rid of all graphics, all sounds and make it a text based zombie survival game.

That optimized enough for ya :P

LOL n n e wield axe attack zombie :)

[Michno 33]

Rocket did say that the game was going to be optimized alot.

[kwairt 0]

I really doubt having more detail indoors is going to be an issue.

And if you're trying to say that getting 15-30 FPS on an i7 processor(and a decent graphics card) is "normal," you need to talk a lot into my head for me to actually believe that the ARMA 2 engine is optimized.

Besides, currently, simply by approaching a city can severely tank someone's FPS, even if all they can see are the solid buildings with no interior at all, even less seeing any windows. It's not about seeing through a transparent texture, it's about how the whole thing is wrapped together in code. You can easily just make it so that you don't render interiors from afar. (Like in the case of GTA, for example. There's a 2D environment until you get close enough and the game loads the interior of a building in the background, and changes it.)

I'm getting really good performance on the i7 2600k and a GTX 570 with the right settings. I haven't actually checked to see what it is but it definantly maintains 60fps in 1920x1080 in most areas even with Zeds. However the larger cities drop it to 15-30 like you said. Again though this seems to be directly related to "sceneComplexity" which I have set at "100000." Increasing the sceneComplexity has the most impact on framerate from what I can tell. I beleive it is related to the buildings themselves however Zeds further complicate the issue no doubt. For Day Z we don't want to use the GTA IV LOD because that would allow someone to shoot out but not been seen at max range. For Day Z you need a balance so that you don't need to use a trick LOD to get the desired effect. Simply limiting the explosed LOS from exterior to interior fixes this issue while keeping balance between someone inside and someone outside.

I have no doubt that the newer engine will be more optimized and perhaps feature some advanced background culling or LOS performance optimizations in general. However these are still faily expensive buildings to render from what I can tell. Stand alone looks much more detailed geometry wise and texture wise with a few more objects also visible.

My Settings:

-cpuCount=4 -exThreads=7 -nosplash -skipIntro -nopause

FSAA=1;

postFX=3;

GPU_MaxFramesAhead=1;

GPU_DetectedFramesAhead=1;

HDRPrecision=8;

lastDeviceId="";

localVRAM=2147483647;

nonlocalVRAM=1610776576;

vsync=1;

AToC=7;

PPAA=1;

PPAA_Level=1;

Windowed=0;

sceneComplexity=100000;

Edited January 8, 2013 by Malicar

[Botelho31 10]

I beg to differ. I find the performance in Arma 2 to be quite good under normal circumstances. Again it's just a few areas of the mod that have this lag due to the amount of buildings and their design. For example you don't see any windows in Skyrim at all. Other games will have windows but only some are actual windows. Limiting the amount of transition or LOS between the exterior and interior is critical in keeping performance up. For example a simple doorway with a wall behind it can completely eliminate the performance hit without sacraficing detail. If you look at the buildings in Day Z they all have multiple doorways with no vis blockers and a tonne of windows. This is a serious problem moving forward and it's not really that hard to fix. We don't really need 40 windows on a barn. We don't really need to render entire staircases of multiple floors with props either. Some simple performance optimizations on the geometry would solve these issues and still manage to look good IMO. Focus on the gameplay first and consistent performance.

if you see the euroexpo video with rocket talking about the standalone you will notice the real problem as he sad is zombies and how great amount of them make you lag that why cities are laggy and that he greatly improved them by making them more simple in the code.

[Dancing.Russian.Man 1631]

I'm getting really good performance on the i7 2600k and a GTX 570 with the right settings. I haven't actually checked to see what it is but it definantly maintains 60fps in 1920x1080 in most areas even with Zeds. However the larger cities drop it to 15-30 like you said. Again though this seems to be directly related to "sceneComplexity" which I have set at "100000." Increasing the sceneComplexity has the most impact on framerate from what I can tell. I beleive it is related to the buildings themselves however Zeds further complicate the issue no doubt. For Day Z we don't want to use the GTA IV LOD because that would allow someone to shoot out but not been seen at max range. For Day Z you need a balance so that you don't need to use a trick LOD to get the desired effect. Simply limiting the explosed LOS from exterior to interior fixes this issue while keeping balance between someone inside and someone outside.

I have no doubt that the newer engine will be more optimized and perhaps feature some advanced background culling or LOS performance optimizations in general. However these are still faily expensive buildings to render from what I can tell. Stand alone looks much more detailed geometry wise and texture wise with a few more objects also visible.

Me, however, am getting a smooth 50 FPS everywhere, and around 40 in cities.(With every setting maxed out, no less.) And I only have an i5-3570k, 8Gb RAM and GTX 670. This is what I mean with the optimization issue. It doesn't work on specific builds, even if they were more powerful than others. The developers are working on the new engine all the time, I'm pretty sure that they would have noticed if there was some major performance issues around cities or otherwise. Yet they have claimed it to be 'heavily optimized' now. I guess we both have to wait and see to actually try it for ourselves, but I have a lot of faith in the developers.

As for the GTA IV LOD example, I only used that as an example, I would by no means use that for DayZ. My point was simply that the performance can be kept high even where there's supposed to be a lot of extra detail. And what if it tanks the performance for more people? They optimize the engine even further(as DayZ has its own independent engine now), and release an update through Steam. If optimization doesn't work or takes too long, they can temporarily reduce the detail used for interiors.

[kwairt 0]

Was playing earlier tonight and noticed the problem again in some smaller cities where the frames will drop depending on how much interior your rendering. For example I was inside a building standing in the doorway looking out and across the street into another building that had two doorways that let me see through the building down the road and into ANOTHER building with an interior. This is the problem I'm talking about. There needs to be vis blockers to keep the performance consistent. It doesn't mean you need to throw up walls everywhere just redesign the entrance ways and limit LOS via windows into complex scenes.

This also goes hand in hand with general engine optimization. I'm sure some of the builders at Bohemia have experience with this and it's probably one of the reasons they never bothered to do interiors on ALL the buildings. Like I said some simple geometry fixes and tweaks could go a long ways in making the game play much better in urban envronments small and large.