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What's the problem with the Windmills ?

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20 months ago
I often hear about the windmills causing lags. But a lot of things are resource hungry, like machine-guns or shields.

What's causing lag in the windmills ? The changing speed ? The rotation in the wind direction ?
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20 months ago
A non-insignificant factor here is that they are used for overdrive farms as an alternative to singu.

And to match a Singu's output you need about two hundred windgens.
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20 months ago
There is a command to stop windmill animation. It is synced and I recall it requiring /cheat, so anyone testing this would have to run a likely replay and do the command to make a comparison.
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****************EDIT!!! windmills are less fps than solar, I wrote the results wrong, i am sorry


I just made a custom server game with inactiveAI. (nullai?)

I set metal multiplier high, and spammed windmills then i compared fps and then i spammed solars and i compared fps.

this is a very slow computer so i used lowest compatible settings.


19 fps total for solar vs 15 fps total for windmill. approximately.


****************EDIT!!! windmills are less fps than solar, I wrote the results wrong, i am sorry
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20 months ago
But is it animation that makes windmills slow things down or is it some code?


USrankBatman: Wait... So... solars are even worse than windmills?
+2 / -0
20 months ago
quote:
There is a command to stop windmill animation. It is synced and I recall it requiring /cheat, so anyone testing this would have to run a likely replay and do the command to make a comparison.

I had tried to activate this command in the past but hadn't figured out what I was doing wrong until this mention of the command being synced.

The command is /luarules windanim for anyone who wants to test it out.
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20 months ago
OR simple replace the model with a non-animated one

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20 months ago
****************EDIT!!! windmills are less fps than solar, I wrote the results wrong, i am sorry


Can someone else do a test? spam solars and then spam windmills and compare.
+1 / -0
Yeah I'll see if I can experiment with that sometime today.

Edit:
Okay I did some experimenting. I wasn't sure if/how to look at my FPS through the game, so all of the FPS recordings are according to AMD Radeon Software. Also, all of the measurements were taken with my settings on "Medium", and were taken in this battle:
Wait nevermind, I'm not sure how to access singleplayer battles.
Also keep in mind that I was never able to fit 100% of the solars/windmills on my screen. Not sure if that greatly effects the FPS.

1,171 Solars:
19 FPS

1,243 Windmills (took up the same amount of space as the above Solars):
19 FPS

1,243 Windmills without wind animation:
20-21 FPS

2,901 Windmills (about 1,496 on screen):
11-12 FPS

2,901 Windmills (about 1,496 on screen) without wind animation:
13 FPS


I don't think my results are super accurate, so someone else should probably also test it.
The without wind animation does seem to help though.
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20 months ago
A possibility is scaling up the unit size, cost, production (etc.) so that you need half as many to get the same output.
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20 months ago
I don't notice much difference (about 1 fps) with the wind animations. What does make a difference:

  • /fps to show in-game FPS at top-right
  • /cheat
  • /give 800 energywind(energysolar) and zoom in
  • Press F4 to hide the economy overlay

Placing either unit, I notice about a 20fps change when toggling the overlay. So maybe the answer about lag is in many circles being drawn to display grid connectivity. If it's not animation, wind may just be the biggest offender because it's the cheapest way to add an extra node to the energy grid.

Something to consider could be auto-hiding the display of the energy grid when the player has fallen behind and needs to catch up to the server (unless a constructor is selected, I suppose)
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